Lightweighting Shipping Containers: Life Cycle Impacts on Multimodal Freight Transportation

Abstract

This thesis is an exploratory study conducted through Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (LIFT) to investigate the energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted during the multimodal life cycle of a shipping container as well as the potential reductions in environmental burdens for six container lightweighting scenarios. The burdens and savings are reported first for a single shipping container, and then are scaled up to indicate the savings possible if all shipping containers were lightweighted first in the United States and then globally. Additionally, a case study is conducted to examine the environmental burdens associated with several routes possible for the transportation of shipping containers from Shanghai to Detroit, Michigan. This thesis highlights the tradeoff between fuel savings incurred through lightweighting and potential increased production burdens associated with some of the lightweighting strategies. Furthermore, it indicates the influential nature of modal distribution and route selection on life cycle results and demonstrates a specific use of multimodal modeling that could be replicated and applied to other transportation systems. The work presented in this thesis has been recently published in the journal Transportation Research Part D: Transport and the Environment: Buchanan, C. A., Charara, M., Sullivan, J. L., Lewis, G. M., and Keoleian, G. A. (2018). Lightweighting shipping containers: Life cycle impacts on multimodal freight transportation. Transportation Research Part D, 62, 418-432. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2018.03.011. The thesis contains additional detail related to the methods used.