During the past year, Svenska Retursystem has increased the proportion of rail transport in Europe. By using trains instead of trucks, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by about 50 percent on selected routes .
“We see great potential in moving more of our transport to rail,” stated Pontus Björkdahl, sustainability manager at Svenska Retursystem. “By 2030, all of our foreign transports will be fossil-free and moving more transports from truck to train is an important way to reach our goal.”
Currently, up to 12 containers are shipped weekly with empty return boxes from the production facility in Västerås to Duisburg in Germany. From there, they are delivered to customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Ireland who fill the boxes with food for the Swedish market. In 2019, the train solution saved the equivalent of 240 tonnes of CO2e.
The goal for 2020 is to transport 500 containers by rail. With the same distribution between the countries, it gives a saving of 340 tonnes of CO2e. This corresponds to about 20 percent for the countries in question and about 6 percent in total for all the company’s foreign transport.
“The container solution by train is not only climate-smart,” Björkdahl continued, “it also provides increased delivery security as the return boxes are in place in Duisburg closer to our European customers. In the long term, the container solution also gives us the opportunity to offer shorter lead times.”
To be part of and influence the transformation of the transport sector, Svenska Retursystem has adopted Fossil-free Sweden’s transport challenge with the goal of having fossil-free domestic transport in 2025 and fossil-free foreign transport in 2030.
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Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.
