Measuring Avoidance: The Logistics Industry’s Climate Opportunity

In global logistics, efficiency is everything — yet one of the biggest inefficiencies is often ignored: the return trip.

Every day, thousands of shipping containers, trucks, and rail cars move goods across vast distances, only to return empty. These return journeys consume fuel, generate emissions, and occupy capacity — without moving a single unit of cargo. 

In the container logistics industry, this practice is referred to as "empty repositioning." It’s expensive, emissions-intensive, and largely invisible in climate reporting.

In India alone, it’s estimated that 25–30% of all container truck trips are empty. Globally, more than 100 million container movements per year are empty repositioning trips. These non-value-adding trips contribute significantly to the logistics sector's carbon footprint — yet they rarely show up in emissions audits or ESG disclosures.

For a sector responsible for more than 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, this is a critical blind spot.

Why Traditional Carbon Accounting Doesn’t Work Here

The logistics industry has traditionally focused on calculating actual emissions — how much CO₂ is emitted during a trip, based on fuel consumption, distance, and mode of transport.

But what about the trips that didn’t happen?

What about the emissions we avoided?

There’s immense untapped potential in quantifying the emissions avoided by reducing or eliminating unnecessary transport. These avoided emissions aren’t just good for the environment — they represent cost savings, operational efficiency, and a powerful climate narrative for logistics providers.

The challenge?

Avoided emissions are harder to track, and even harder to validate — unless you have the right data, methodology, and tech infrastructure.

The Climes Approach: Measuring What Didn't Happen

At Climes, we’ve built a carbon intelligence engine that can track both actual and avoided emissions — using real-time operational data, mode-specific emissions factors, and validated baseline scenarios.

In the logistics sector, this means we can:

• Track emissions from truck, rail, and ship movement, trip by trip
• Model a “business-as-usual” baseline for return trips
• Quantify avoided emissions per container when empty repositioning is reduced or eliminated
• Deliver trip-level data that is auditable, API-integrated, and usable across ESG, investor, and client communication

This is carbon accounting built not just for compliance — but for climate leadership.

From Invisible Cost to Visible Impact: The MatchLog Case

One of the most compelling use cases of this approach is our partnership with MatchLog, India’s leading container reuse platform.

By reusing import containers for export directly, MatchLog eliminates the need for thousands of empty return trips. Working with Climes, they were able to quantify over 41,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided, standardise their emissions reporting, and enhance their ESG credibility with trip-level climate data.

📖 Read the full case study here.

And if you’d like to hear the full story straight from the source — MatchLog’s co-founder, Dhruv, joined us on The Voice of Gen-C podcast to unpack the scale of the problem, how they’re tackling it from the inside, and how working with Climes has brought more credibility and clarity to their sustainability value proposition.

🎧 Listen to the podcast below:

Avoided Emissions Are the Next Frontier in Climate Accounting

We believe that measuring what didn’t happen is just as important as what did.

As supply chains digitise and carbon transparency becomes a business imperative, avoided emissions will play a critical role in decarbonisation strategies across logistics, mobility, energy, and beyond.

At Climes, we’re building the infrastructure to make this measurable, verifiable, and actionable — so that companies don’t just offset emissions, but actually reduce them. 

If you’re a logistics leader looking to make your emissions count — and your avoided emissions matter — get a free carbon assessment from Climes and see what you’ve been missing.