A Berkeley, California printer is taking to the rails with a hybrid plan to cut the carbon and particulate emissions associated with its paper deliveries.
No active spur runs through the part of town that SGPP-certified Greenerprinter calls home. But that hasn’t stopped the Berkeley, California innovator from taking to the rails with a hybrid plan to cut the carbon and particulate emissions associated with its paper deliveries.
The company reports that it takes delivery of 40,000 pounds (one rail car load) of New Leaf Reincarnation every two months. This product ships from Hamilton Ohio, some 2,385 miles away.
Formerly the paper would have been delivered by Over the Highway (OTH) trucks direct to Greenerprinter’s loading dock. Now, the paper makes a two-step journey. It first travels by rail to Hayward, California where it is reloaded onto trucks that take it the last 22 miles to Greenerprinter in Berkeley.
So what are the carbon savings of this "big rail, little truck" approach to shipping?
Using the
carbon calculator that is found on the CSX website, it appears that this strategy reduces the carbon footprint of the transportation of the paper by some 3.3 tons per shipment. Greenerprinter receives six shipments of Reincarnation per year, resulting in an annual savings over OTH truck shipping of 19.8 tons of CO
2. That is roughly the same amount of carbon sequestered in 3.3 acres of mature trees. The hybrid approach also results in reduced NOx and particulate emissions, since OTH shipping produces roughly three times the NOx and particulates (on a ton-mile basis) than does rail shipping, according to the EPA.
Of course, variables such as routing and speed will affect the actual carbon emissions and savings. And not all printers have the physical space to warehouse a railcar load of paper. Still, Greenerprinter’s “big rail, little truck” approach to paper deliveries illustrates that significant carbon emission savings can be achieved by using cleaner means of transportation for the long-haul and relegating higher-emissions forms of shipping to shorter runs.
For the time being, Greenerprinter is using this hybrid approach only for the shipment of New Leaf Reincarnation stock. Some of the other papers that it has used historically have come from overseas, but the company reports that it is phasing-out these offshore papers in favor of domestically produced stock.
