The Port of Barcelona is leading environmental consulting initiatives to contribute to the sustainability of its business and its environment, as is the case, from 2013, of the ecocalculator (www.portdebarcelona.cat). This freely accessible web-based tool makes it possible to calculate quickly, simply and graphically the environmental footprint generated by the transport of a container between a European location, the Port of Barcelona and any other port in the world, as well as comparisons with other ports.
2016 marked a step forward in providing information to promote efficient and environmentally friendly transport chains. The new tool, called Port Links (www.portdebarcelona.cat/port-links) contains the complete and updated range of maritime and land services offered by the Port of Barcelona. It provides detailed information on transit times, distances, emissions of CO2 and other pollutants (NOx, PM2.5, CO, NMVOC and SOX) as well as an economic assessment of the externalities generated by the transport in terms of congestion, accidents, noise, pollution, climate change, infrastructure maintenance costs and other environmental impacts.
The requirement for environmental sustainability in economic activities, particularly in transport, represents a competitive advantage of the Mediterranean coast compared to the Atlantic: Mediterranean ports are more environmentally efficient for traffic between Europe and Asia than those of Northern Europe, since they involve four or five days less navigation and therefore estimated average savings of 20% in CO2 emissions. In other words, the Mediterranean port option helps to reduce congestion in road transport networks in the north and reduces logistics costs which favours the competitiveness of European business.
Achieving more sustainable transport requires diverting a greater proportion of traffic towards modes that generate fewer negative externalities - air pollution, global warming, noise, accidents, congestion and infrastructure costs - thereby fostering rail, river and/or sea in routes wherever possible.
Here, the Port has been able to quantify savings in externalities resulting from its intermodal strategy: in 2016, all of these services represented an annual saving of € 139 million in the cost of the negative externalities that would have been generated by the same volume of cargo transported by road, a saving of 78%.