The transportation sector accounts globally for 24 per cent of CO2 emissions, of which 40 per cent represents the freight traffic. It is exactly the railroad, which has been showing absolutely the lowest energy demand, and, at the same time, CO2 emissions of all the modes of transport. One of the ways, how to alleviate the environment, consists in implementing to a bigger extent purely rail transport or the so-called multimodal transportation on road/rail/road.

To ascertain the actual transportation chain effect on the environment DB Schenker initiated together with partners the development of EcoTransIT World ecological calculator. This Internet tool may calculate the amount of generated CO2 emissions, exhaust gases and energy consumed in case of any type of transportation chain throughout the whole world. The calculator may be freely accessed on www.ecotransit.org.

For your idea we introduce a specific example of multimodal transportation:

Transportation of goods, weighing 24 tons (13.6m semi-trailer), from Brno to Athens. The total length of the route equals to 1 750 km, and, the railroad portion represents 1 500km.

The calculation result shows us that by giving preference to the use of road/rail/road multimodal transportation over purely road transportation a significant CO2 (greenhouse gas) reduction from 2.62 tons to 0.97 tons may be achieved, which corresponds to a decrease in 63 per cent. Likewise, the amount of energy used is to be reduced from 39,413 MJ to 17,935 MJ, which is by 55 per cent. 

This comparison is at least worth considering, what environmental effect has the goods transportation.

www.ecotransit.org