GreenShipping targets carbon reduction

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A two-year-old Hood River business that's helping neutralize shipping-related carbon emissions is testing a new service with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and two other undisclosed companies. With success, GreenShipping.com’s new Dashboard will launch in February, enabling companies to track hard-to-corral data on carbon emissions in real time.

GreenShipping.com began business as a carbon-neutral shipping program in April 2008. Its founder and CEO Ken Whiteman, whose prior career was spent in software development in the high-tech sector, wanted to develop an automated carbon-tracking tool to help companies track emissions from shipping.

In the past, companies that track carbon emissions have grappled extensively with how to account for emissions from the supply chain. Carbon emissions are traditionally tracked in three scopes: the first calculates emissions from company-owned vehicles, employee travel and in-house production processes; the second tracks emissions from electricity use.

But efforts to track the third emissions scope — emissions related to business but outside a company's direct control, such shipping — have been tough. Companies have relied heavily on consultants to do it, and consultants can offer only one-time data and no ongoing monitoring.

Whiteman developed GreenShipping.com to mitigate the problem. "What we would do is we would take the tracking numbers from the shipments and we would use the tracking number to calculate what their carbon footprint was," he said.

GreenShipping.com now serves more than 100 companies, including North Face, Sokol Blosser Winery and Oregon Growers & Shippers. Most purchase carbon credits to offset emissions from shipping, either through GreenShipping.com, which sells offsets through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, or through off-setters of their own choosing. Customers who buy the offsets are awarded Green Shipper certification and can use the designation to promote their efforts.

Now, the company is expanding.

One week ago, GreenShipping.com began testing a service called the Dashboard that offers real-time analytics to customers who use GreenShipping.com. GreenShipping.com is a cloud-computing based company, hosted by secure Amazon data servers. The Dashboard essentially lays on top of that, and ties into a company's existing communication service to provide real-time analytics of the supply chain, providing a snapshot of carbon emissions at any moment.

"Carbon is proportionate to what fuel is being consumed. And fuel is a big cost in the supply chain," said Whiteman. "The purpose is not just carbon emissions reporting, but they can also use carbon emissions as a lens to help them identify inefficiencies."

Companies using the Dashboard can examine shipping times and locations to look for lost opportunities or redundancies, or even spot holes in the supply chain, such as slow delivery to remote areas.

Looking ahead, Whiteman said the product has potential. Walmart’s Sustainability Index, launched a year and a half ago, requires approximately 100,000 suppliers to report carbon emissions to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Companies like IBM, Target and the Beverage Industry Association followed with similar efforts, he said. Companies that now report carbon emissions say they spend more than $1 trillion annually on products, accounting for a significant portion of the economy.

Whiteman plans to target the approximately 200,000 supply companies now reporting and tracking carbon emissions. Customers of GreenShipping.com already pay a per-shipment fee to track and calculate their carbon emissions. Those who also use the Dashboard would also pay a monthly fee, calculated according to shipping volume and ranging from $50 a month into the thousands of dollars.

"This is going to be a major movement over the next few years and by engaging with Walmart this is going to enable us to really prove this technology," he said.

Investors have already spied opportunity. GreenShipping.com was a finalist in the Bend Venture Conference and in the Gorge Angel Investor Network. The company is supported by one angel investor and by Whiteman's own investments — he declined to say how much has been invested the company to date. It has four employees.

Lee van der Voo, lvdvoo*at*gmail.com, is a freelance writer for Sustainable Business Oregon.