Freight Emissions by Lane and Carrier

For sustainability and ESG teams, transport is one of the harder parts of a carbon footprint to measure well. It is commonly estimated from freight spend, which moves with prices rather than with tonnes and kilometers. This MoveTheWheels concept illustrates a Freight Emissions view under Analytics that is designed to start from each shipment's lane, cargo, vehicle and route distance, and to turn every shipment into tonne-kilometers and estimated CO2e, reported well-to-wheel.

The design lists rail alongside road modes such as trucks, tankers and cane trailers, so the same lane can be compared by road and by rail. The aim is to give logistics and sustainability teams the same numbers: which lanes and carriers are most carbon-intensive, how each figure was calculated, and what a change of mode would save.

The illustration opens with a quarter selector and tiles for shipments, tonne-kilometers, estimated CO2e and average intensity in grams per tonne-kilometer. A stacked bar chart splits each month's CO2e between the own fleet and contracted carriers. The Lanes table lists each lane with its mode, carrier, shipments, tonne-kilometers, tonnes of CO2e, intensity and a method label of fuel-based, distance-based or estimated. The sample lanes run between mills, a port terminal, a distillery, a blending depot, a city distribution center and cane estates, and the same mill-to-port lane appears by truck and by rail so the two can be compared. A Mode-shift proposal card suggests moving part of that road volume to rail, with the estimated saving per quarter and the added transit time, and offers to open it in the route planner or dismiss it.

Two other Burdenoff products complete the picture by design. Own-fleet lanes carry the fuel-based label, with liters per vehicle designed to arrive from the fuel-card export through FluidGrids, while contracted carriers are designed to use mode-specific distance factors from the EcoImpactHub factor library. Footer notes show how the totals are split: fuel liters via FluidGrids, own-fleet emissions already counted in Scope 1 and not re-sent, and contracted freight totaled as a Scope 3 Category 4 draft for EcoImpactHub, where the design envisions it being entered in the carbon ledger. Keeping a method label on every figure is meant to show reviewers which numbers come from fuel records and which are factor-based estimates.