Supply Chain by the Numbers
   
 

- Sept. 10, 2015 -

   
  Supply Chain by the Numbers for Week of Sept. 10, 2015
   
 

Industry Insider Says Trucks Killing People; How Big will Container Ships by by 2030? Is Carbon Fraud Widespread in Cap and Trade Markets? Google Express Now Handling Fresh Produce

   
 
 
 

3964

That's how many people were killed in truck-related accidents in the US in 2013, the last year for which data is available, up 17% from 2009. That from a provocative new op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "The Trucks Are Killing Us" by Howard Abramson, former publisher and editorial director of the American Trucking Associations' Transport Topics magazine, with a long career covering transportation. The article basically says the trucking industry was using its powerful influence to roll back or prevent many safety related regulations, such as working to get Congress to suspend the 34-hour restart rule pending additional study. Arbamson is also very critical of the move to allow heavier and/or longer trucks, either or both of which may still find their way into a new highway bill. The piece not surprisingly has drawn much praise from safety-related groups, and much surprise from many in the trucking industry that know Ambramson.

 
 


 
 
 

26,000

That's how many TEU the largest container ships will likely carry by 2030, according to a new report on the future of the shipping industry from Lloyd's Register Group Limited, QinetiQ, and the University of Southampton. That would be an increase of roughly 35% from today largest ships with capacity of 19,200 TEU, but nowhere near the growth seen from 2000 until today, when ships sizes increase 240% from just 8000 TEU capacity then. The report expects the development of what it calls the "Techomax" container ship, which will embrace a number of new technologies to transform ocean shipping, from vessels made from a new generation of advanced materials to leverage of big data and analytics to systems tied to sensors that will keep a ship operating at peak efficiency all the time. You can find more here: The Techomax Container Ships are Coming

 
 
 
 
 
80%

That was the percentage of emission reduction units, or ERUs, created under the Kyoto Protocol that had "questionable or low environmental integrity," according to a new study by the Stockholm Environment Institute, a respected Swedish think tank. The details are hard to follow here, but at the core is what is often termed "carbon fraud," in which so-called international carbon credits - which companies can buy on exchanges to "offset" their own carbon emissions - are in fact bogus, and were not generated from any real reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The report cites a surge of such credits emanating from Russia and Ukraine in 2012, resulting in windfall profits for some there, but carbon fraud appears to be widespread. One easy way to generate fraudulent carbon credits is to claim that projects that were going to happen anyway - e.g., the construction of a hydro dam to replace a coal-fired electricity plant - are only happening because of carbon pricing. Another is to create greenhouse gases and then capture or destroy them, for no reason other than to generate carbon credits. Global cap and trade schemes could be coming out of the UN climate summit in December, and this report should be a warning of potential big problems.

 
 
 
 

2

That's the number of cities in which Google Express will soon begin delivering fresh fruits and vegetables to customers, in partnership with retailers such as Whole Foods and Costco. One of those cities for the test will as usual be San Francisco, with the other one to be named later. Google Express, which already delivers merchandise, including dry foods, to customers, says it is expanding the service to include the fresh produce. "For a lot of our merchants that have been successful with this, we're not representing the whole store today," said a company executive. "It's in our incentive, as well as the merchant's incentive, for us to help customers get the full store delivered to them." The fulfillment wars roll on. Meanwhile also this week Google said IT is expanding next-day deliveries in the Midwest for more than 25 million potential customers in places such as Indiana, Wisconsin and Ohio, adding to the service it already offers in Manhattan and Chicago.

 
 
 
 
 
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