MSC Confirms Long-Standing Commitment to Reducing CO₂ Emissions

MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company, a global leader in shipping and logistics, is strongly committed to further reducing CO2 emissions and supporting longer term goals to fully decarbonise shipping and ensure it is a truly sustainable industry.

While continuously increasing its TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit, the size of a regular container) capacity to meet the growing demand, MSC operates a modern, green fleet and is investing heavily in low-carbon technologies and extensive new-build and retrofit programmes to boost performance and minimise our environmental impact. 

For example, MSC’s fleet improvement program has resulted in a 13% reduction in CO2 emissions per transport work* in 2015-18. Furthermore, the latest newbuilding additions to the fleet - led by MSC Gulsun, the largest container ship in the world - has introduced a new class of sustainable container shipping, with the lowest carbon footprint by design, at 7.49 grams of CO2 emissions to move 1 ton of cargo 1 nautical mile.

MSC fully supports reporting CO2 emissions transparently and precisely in the European Union (EU) Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system, as mandated by EU legislation. It is however vital that the raw data reported in the system are analysed accurately and take operational realities fully into account, to give a realistic picture of the related emissions.

In this respect, a recently published report by Transport and Environment (T&E) offers an incomplete analysis of these data and therefore does not give an accurate picture of the emissions from the shipping sector. In particular, the T&E analysis fails to take a number of operational aspects of MSC’s services fully into account, and thus does not offer a complete assessment of our role and impact in terms of emissions.

Furthermore, CO2 emissions should be compared on an equal basis. The analysis by T&E focuses on emissions in the EU and, if it is to be fully comparable across shipping lines and industries, should only take into account emissions which actually occurred in the geographical area of the EU. 

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