As the pale morning light flickered across the Seine, Captain Freddy Badar steered his massive river barge Le Bosphore past picturesque Normandy villages and snow-covered forests and headed for Paris.
On board were containers full of furniture, electronics and clothing that had been loaded the night before from a cargo ship that had docked in Le Havre, the seaport in northern France. If the load had been transported further by road, 120 trucks would have clogged the highways. The efforts of Le Bosphore and its four-person crew prevented tons of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.
“The river is part of a broader solution for cleaner transport and the environment,” said Captain Badar, his eyes scanning other ships carrying goods on the Seine. “But there’s a lot more we could do.”
As the European Union steps up its fight against climate change, it must decarbonize freight transport, which is responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
To get there, it resorts to a centuries-old solution: its rivers. With 23,000 miles of waterways crisscrossing the European Union, officials see huge potential to help remove trucks – the biggest source of freight emissions – from the roads. The European Green Deal, the European Union’s decarbonization blueprint, would turn rivers into highways by 2050 and double inland waterway transport.
There is a lot of room for improvement. Today, rivers carry less than 2 percent of European freight traffic. For comparison: around 6.5 million trucks cross Europe’s roads and account for 80 percent of freight transport. The rail share is around 5 percent.
If rivers are to handle more traffic, much of Europe’s decades-old waterway infrastructure, including ports and locks, will need to be modernized. A warming planet further complicates the challenge: droughts in recent years have paralyzed some forms of transport on the Rhine and pose a threat to the Seine.
Although the Seine isn’t the busiest river in Europe – that’s the Rhine, which flows through Germany and the Netherlands – the goal is to make it one of the most important experimental hubs for climate change.
“We are working on a transformation to get companies to massively shift their logistics routes,” said Stéphane Raison, the president of France’s largest port operator Haropa, which has invested over 1 billion euros (or $1.1 billion) in the Seine invested.
Turning towards the river
Before leaving Le Havre for Paris, the Le Bosphore’s crew packed containers tightly into the hold as heavy snow fell in the dark, checking a bill of lading as a gantry crane swung overhead.
Le Bosphore, part of a 110-barge fleet owned by Sogestran, France’s largest river transport company, will head to Gennevilliers, a port five miles outside Paris that is a distribution hub for the capital region’s 12 million consumers. The journey will take approximately 30 hours.
The Seine could carry many more barges like Le Bosphore, which is longer than a football field and saves 18,000 truck trips per year between Le Havre and Paris. The government hopes to bring four times as much cargo onto the river as the 20 million tons it currently handles each year.
To achieve this, Haropa is accelerating the expansion of the port of Le Havre, located at the mouth of the Seine, to attract ships from the larger ports of Rotterdam in the Netherlands or Antwerp in Belgium. The cargo deposited in these ports is then transported to France by trucks.
At its five other port terminals on the Seine, Haropa is installing electric stations that will allow ships to plug in at berth instead of running engines.
While much of Europe’s inland waterway fleet still runs on diesel, a small but growing proportion is switching to biofuels. Electric boats are coming onto the market. Prototypes of barges that run on hydrogen are also being developed.
Companies like Ikea and river transportation startups are helping drive the movement. They are developing carbon-free last-mile delivery services to appeal to consumers – and to get ahead of strict environmental regulations that European cities are adopting to limit heavy, polluting vehicles.
A chain for “cleaner transport”
Eight hours after departing Le Havre, Le Bosphore reached Rouen, an important stopover for river freight to and from Paris. At around 10 a.m. a new four-man crew led by Captain Badar boarded for a week-long shift and the journey towards Paris continued.
Inland waterway traffic on the Seine has only increased by 5 percent compared to the previous year. As the government tries to speed things up, “rivers have been neglected for too long,” said Capt. Badar, the third generation of riverboat captains in his family. He belongs to a rare breed. Many ship captains in Europe are approaching retirement age and there is a shortage of qualified personnel, a problem that threatens to slow the hoped-for growth of river traffic.
Captain Badar noted that for centuries rivers were virtually the only way to transport goods across France: The ancient symbol of Paris is a boat. But waterways fell out of favor as trucks and trains dominated transportation in the 20th century, particularly after World War II, when highways and railroads were expanded across the continent.
Governments support these industries “because they have strong lobbies and unions,” said Captain Badar as he drove past a medieval castle built by Richard the Lionheart as the sun lit up the afternoon sky.
“Now we are starting to talk about the environment and it would be best to see the river as part of a larger chain of cleaner transport.”
France’s largest supermarket chain Franprix is ahead. The company has been transporting goods by barge to its 300 Paris stores for a decade. Workers unload 42 containers near the Eiffel Tower every morning. This saves 3,600 truck trips per year on highways and has reduced Franprix’s CO2 emissions by 20 percent, the company said.
Kitchen cupboards and coffee beans
Le Bosphore entered the port of Gennevilliers before dawn the next morning and docked alongside other barges loaded with goods for Parisian companies. A crane unloaded three layers of containers from the hold and placed them on the pier, where they were stacked sideways by forklifts. Despite the voluminous load, Le Bosphore had only used the fuel of around four trucks on the entire journey.
On the other side of the port, an experiment was being carried out to make the last mile of delivery more environmentally friendly: a huge warehouse set up as part of a deal between Haropa and Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, in 2022 to achieve a carbon neutral Possibility to create the delivery of goods to the Seine.
Pallets full of Ikea kitchen cabinets and sofas, ordered online less than 48 hours earlier, were loaded onto a barge bound for central Paris. There they would be loaded onto electric trucks and delivered to customers.
The process is not fully decarbonized – the barge to central Paris burns fuel, as do the trucks from Ikea’s factories in Poland and Romania – but the agreement last year allowed Ikea to remove the equivalent of 6,000 trucks from the streets of Paris, said Emilie Carpels. Head of the Ikea river project.
Other companies strive to be more innovative.
Europe’s first hydrogen-powered inland waterway vessel, the Zulu, is scheduled to begin operations in the spring. Designed by Sogestran, the wagon can transport up to 320 tons or the contents of about 15 trucks. “We are moving into a future with increasingly clean traffic,” said project manager Florian Levarey.
For Fludis, a French start-up, this future is already near. Its president, Gilles Manuelle, founded the company with two boats powered by electric batteries and a fleet of electric cargo bikes.
Around 7 a.m. one morning, a dozen crew members loaded one of the small barges with boxes of coffee beans, copy paper, kitchen towels and other goods to be delivered to French bistros and shops. As the boat moved silently past the Louvre to its first berth, the workers on board loaded their bikes with orders and raced onto the street as soon as the captain docked.
“We’re starting small,” Mr. Manuelle said. “But it’s small solutions like this that can become much bigger and help reverse global warming.”
Back in Gennevilliers, the crew of Le Bosphore filled the now empty hold with French exports: flour, lumber, luxury handbags and champagne. At 2 p.m. the cruise was scheduled to begin back to Le Havre, where the crew would unload and then start again.
“I’ve known for a long time that the river is the most environmentally friendly means of transport,” said Captain Badar, getting back behind the wheel. “Now policymakers really need to make this happen,” he added. “The potential is huge.”
Source link
2024-03-26 04:00:35
www.nytimes.com
