News / 'Move to -15' gains support and moves up the shipping agenda

A campaign to reduce emissions in the cold chain is gathering momentum after appointing a chairman to lead its expansion who used last week’s S&P TPM conference in Long Beach as platform to invite new members.

Last week, the Move to -15 coalition, which launched COP28 in Dubai last year, last week announced it had appointed veteran reefer shipping executive Thomas Eskesen as its first chairman.

According to the research on which the campaign is based, transporting frozen goods at -15ºC, rather than the current norm of -18ºC, would lead to significantly reduced emissions. Based on the number of frozen shipments annually, the 3ºC increase in reefer temperature would save 17.7m tonnes of CO2 a year, the equivalent emissions from 3.8m cars.

“I was first exposed to this concept less than half a year ago – I had never heard of it; in fact, in my old job we were looking at taking temperatures lower,” Mr Eskesen, the former head of Maersk’s reefer business, told TPM24 delegates.

“I’m now a convert. It’s a very subtle change, but is backed by a lot of science. I’ve already reduced the temperature of my own freezer by three degrees, and whenever I go to a friend’s house I find myself doing the same,” he added.

Mr Eskesen said that one of his first decisions was to annul the position of a lead sponsor, because the movement “has to be completely neutral”.

The campaign initiated by DP World, which is understood to have been keen to relinquish the role once a sufficient number of supporters had joined it.

He explained: “We, as an industry, need to be totally transparent on this and go to regulators as a coalition – if a shipping line goes to them alone, or a major food producer or retailer, the question regulators will ask is ‘what’s the hidden agenda?’. A large part of our work will be around how we deal with regulators in the US, in the EU, in China and elsewhere.”

Mr Eskesen said the most likely first steps would be to identify particular commodities and food types where trials could be undertaken, or in selected supply chains.

“Frozen French fries, for example, would seem to be a good food type on which we could test this; or perhaps another quick win would be studying how it performs from, say, a farm in Idaho to a store in Detroit,” he said.

However, he added that, since the widespread installation of monitoring devices in reefer containers over the past few years, shipping lines also had increasingly in-depth data that could forecast the effect of raising reefer temperatures.

“I asked one very large shipping line what this would mean to them, and they found out within a day exactly what the effect would be – they already have so much data,” Mr Eskesen explained.

Meanwhile, the campaign continues to receive support from other industry stakeholders, with Holt Logistics, JB Hunt, reefer leasing firm SeaCube Containers and cold store operator Americold the latest to add their names to the lengthening list of Move to -15 supporters.