TLME Chairman, Joe Beydoun, continued the Session on Sustainability at the Future of Logistics Conference Part II held recently by our sister publication Transport & Logistics Middle East in Dubai, by asking the panellists if they had come across customers that demanded sustainable shipping? And if they did, are they willing to pay for it?

CEO and Partner at Vespucci Maritime and well-known container-shipping expert, Lars Jensen, replied in the affirmative and said there are customers out there who are willing to pay for “green TEU miles.”

Setting a time frame of up to 2040 Mr Jensen said that currently there were zero genuinely green miles available in the shipping industry, but they will be created and grow over the years.

As for customers, Mr Jensen said: “Are there customers out there who are willing to pay? Yes, there are. They are not in the majority, but they do exist.”

What the industry needed today was a globally standardised accounting mechanism for the number of genuinely green TEU miles produced by each individual shipping line and a transparent system to sell those miles to customers who are willing to pay for them.

So even if a customer’s containers did not actually go on a green ship, they have used - and paid for - the green TEU miles produced by the shipping line in its overall operations.

Mr Jensen did not see governments playing too big a role in actually creating the accounting system but it would come from within the various industry players. What the government could do was create carbon taxation mechanisms that would speed up and incentivise the adoption of green, decarbonised shipping operations.

Read More: Shipping Lines are Actively Decarbonising - Lars Jensen