The green washout: Can global freight ever truly prove its claims?

For most of its modern history, the logistics sector has operated on a convenient workaround: when precise emissions data was unavailable, companies substituted industry-average emission factors and basic distance-weight calculators to produce estimated carbon footprints. According to Daniel Chan, CEO of CO2 Connect, this workaround was tolerable when climate disclosure was voluntary and auditors were rarely in the room. However, frameworks like the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT) Directive and the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) supply chain guidelines are dismantling that tolerance at pace. Both frameworks now require green claims to be substantiated by verifiable, primary data, meaning that references to estimated emissions derived from generic averages are increasingly exposing companies to enforcement action and reputational liability.

To address this shift at the data-collection layer, Chan explains that CO2 Connect’s CO2X platform ingests activity data directly from the operational sources where emissions are actually generated, rather than accepting industry-average defaults. For companies operating their own fleets, GPS vehicle trackers equipped with CAN BUS (Controller Area Network Bus) interfaces provide continuous, near-real-time monitoring of fuel consumption, mileage, and engine parameters at the individual vehicle level. Where IoT deployment is not feasible, the platform connects via API to existing enterprise resource planning or transport management systems to extract verified cargo weight, route, and operational fuel data. For carriers who lack digital infrastructure, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and AI-assisted document ingestion extract activity data from bills of lading, fuel receipts, and freight invoices, creating a traceable digital record where none previously existed.

Critically, Chan notes that every data point entering the platform is assigned a data quality tier, Primary, Modelled, or Default, in strict accordance with ISO 14083 and the GLEC ( Global Logistics Emissions Council ) Framework, with each emissions result carrying a corresponding uncertainty label. This deliberate transparency allows auditors to immediately understand the quality of the underlying evidence, creating a clear record of where defaults are still being applied and establishing a direct, quantified incentive for companies to migrate toward primary data over time. The CO2X methodology has been independently validated by Bureau Veritas and certified by the Smart Freight Centre for its conformance with ISO 14083 and the GLEC Framework, making it one of the very few transport emissions platforms globally to undergo formal, independent third-party scrutiny.

This technological transition addresses a major cultural hurdle in the market. Farah Minwalla, Manager of City Management, observes that the primary difficulty is less technical than cultural. She points out that the data largely exists and freight providers can produce primary emissions data, but for years the industry leaned on offsets because they were simple, cheap, and defensible on paper. Moving to verified primary data means event and venue operators have to renegotiate the entire relationship with their logistics partners by asking for fuel and distance data at the telematics level, fleet specifics, and modal breakdowns. Minwalla notes that many providers simply are not set up to report at that granularity yet, meaning the operator ends up policing a standard the supplier hasn't built capacity for. Operationally, she describes it as a fundamental shift from buying a clean conscience to auditing a supply chain, which requires an entirely different skill set and resourcing commitment.

This structural friction is particularly evident in the "Last-Mile Paradox," where companies display highly visible, clean electric delivery vans to the public while masking a heavy, diesel-dependent first- and middle-mile backbone. From Daniel Chan's perspective at CO2 Connect, this paradox is a structural accounting failure as much as it is a public relations problem. When a company's sustainability report features electric delivery vans completing the final kilometer to a customer's door, the emissions from that visible leg are typically well-documented and genuinely low. What those reports frequently omit, or obscure through aggregated, averaged figures, is the far larger carbon burden carried by the diesel-heavy road freight, ocean shipping, and hub operations that move goods from factory gate to regional distribution center: the first and middle miles that the public never sees and that most basic calculators treat as a single blended average.

To dismantle this blind spot, Chan highlights that the CO2X platform covers all eight transport modes recognised by ISO 14083 and the GLEC Framework, ranging from road freight, ocean shipping, air cargo, rail, inland waterway, pipeline, and ropeway systems to hubs and transshipment operations like ports, airports, and warehouses. Where a single consignment moves across multiple modes, the platform follows ISO 14083's allocation rules to apportion and separately report emissions for each leg of the transport chain, expressed as kg CO2e per tonne-kilometre for full cross-modal comparability.

Furthermore, the platform is designed to capture not only directly operated transport under Scope 1, but also the Scope 3 Category 4 emissions generated by subcontracted and outsourced carriers sitting in the hard-to-see middle of most supply chains. When a carrier is onboarded, actual telematics data flows directly into the shipper's inventory. For carriers not yet onboarded, the system processes carrier manifests, bills of lading, and freight invoices via OCR Optical (Character Recognition) to extract route and cargo data, applying the appropriate GLEC emission factor while utilising AIS (Automatic Identification System) feeds for ocean legs and flight data for air cargo. In practice, Chan states that a shipper operating a battery-electric last-mile delivery fleet may discover that those vehicles account for only a fraction of its total supply chain emissions, while diesel-powered long-haul trucking and port-to-warehouse drayage represent the dominant share.

Minwalla echoes this infrastructure bottleneck from her own operational experience, agreeing that the last mile is where everyone concentrates because it is public-facing and the easiest to clean up. However, she stresses that it represents only a small fraction of total emissions. The true carbon weight sits in the long-haul road freight, ocean, air, and cross-border movement of heavy infrastructure before it ever reaches the city. The structural challenge is that operators have the least visibility and the least leverage exactly where emissions are highest. While an operator can mandate clean last-mile operations within their own city, they cannot easily dictate how a shipment moved across three countries before it arrived. Closing that gap requires contractual reach back up the chain, which most event timelines and procurement structures are not currently built to accommodate.

The financial and regulatory consequences of ignoring these blind spots are severe. Chan warns that the enforcement risk embedded in the EU Green Claims Directive and the UK CMA's supply chain guidelines is principally about what a company can legally prove, placing the burden of substantiation firmly on the entity making the environmental claim. Passing unverified, aggregated, or default-derived emissions metrics down a supply chain creates a chain of liability extending from tier-one suppliers to brand owners, bringing civil penalties, mandatory corrective advertising, and reputational sanctions.

To insulate companies from this liability, Chan details that CO2 Connect secures audit-readiness through cryptographic immutability and role-separated access. Every emissions calculation performed on the platform writes a SHA-256(Secure Hash Algorithm) hash of its inputs, emission factor identifiers, allocation parameters, and outputs to an append-only ledger stored in AWS Quantum Ledger Database, preventing any calculation result from being silently altered. Time-stamped daily snapshots are versioned in a private cloud architecture with a five-year lifecycle policy, and all data files transferred to auditors include a manifest with SHA-256 checksums delivered via SFTP( Secure File Transfer Protocol) over TLS 1.3 encryption( Transport Layer Security) to ensure a tamper-evident chain of custody.

Independent verifiers and regulatory auditors are granted time-bound, read-only "Verifier" tokens to directly view calculation logs, underlying data, and change management records without the ability to alter them, with every access event logged for ten years. Double-counting is further mitigated at the booking event, registry level, and reporting stage via strict multi-tenant data segregation between client accounts, ensuring no emission result is simultaneously claimed by more than one entity in a supply chain without explicit, logged allocation.

As these legal liabilities sharpen, the landscape of corporate procurement is shifting permanently. Minwalla notes that standardisation in the bidding process is becoming entirely inevitable as operators seek to protect themselves. She anticipates that operators will soon embed frameworks like GLEC and ISO 14083 directly into vendor qualification, mimicking the way safety and quality certifications became non-negotiable years ago. The shift will transform sustainability from a mere scoring bonus into a strict pass-fail gate to even participate in a tender. Minwalla believes that the mega-events moving first will gain an advantage by pushing their supplier ecosystem to build reporting capability early, allowing a handful of large events to drag an entire regional supply chain toward auditable standards. Ultimately, when an auditor asks a company to substantiate a claim under the ECGT ( Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition) framework, Chan concludes that the answer can no longer be a spreadsheet of estimates, but rather a time-stamped, traceable data record linked directly to operational activity.