Maersk ecommerce goes green

A big international shipping company is teaming up with a startup to make deliveries to European ecommerce suppliers greener.

Maersk and the Berlin-based start-up Cozero are developing analytics tools to improve greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions visibility for international parcel deliveries in Europe. Since entering the European ecommerce logistics sector in 2021 with the acquisition of B2C Europe, Maersk has delivered millions of international parcels for European online sellers. Due to a higher supply chain complexity, international parcels usually have a larger GHG footprint than domestic parcels, Maersk says.

B2C Europe is a 20-year-old European logistics company that focuses on business-to-consumer (B2C) parcel delivery services in Europe. It also focuses on cross-border deliveries. Maersk acquired it in October 2021.

Maersk has already successfully tested Cozero’s platform with customers. It will now roll out the platform to more ecommerce clients, the company says. The project is key to Maersk’s strategy of providing end-to-end visibility to its customers and will eventually be integrated into Maersk’s existing Emissions Dashboard, providing it with a new parcel delivery emissions module.

Since 2021, Maersk has developed the Emissions Dashboard to provide a one-stop shop to consolidate emissions data across all carriers and transport modes. Smart Freight Centre (SFC) accredits it with an industry-leading calculation methodology that is in conformance with the Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC) framework.

“Our customers in the international ecommerce industry by design have large gaps in their GHG footprint visibility due to the high number of parties involved in the first-, middle- and last-mile delivery process,” says Christian Grosse, Maersk e-delivery chief product officer in Europe.