Transportation benefits of nearshoring
The most obvious and easiest way to measure the impact of nearshoring is to compare the distances a product has to travel to reach their end consumer. When you choose nearshoring the factory is closer to the consumer, it will cover less kilometers and therefore will save money, time and emissions. In terms of overall impact of a garment, transportation on average accounts for about 12% of emissions of a garment. Even though this doesn’t sound like a lot it can still be reduced significantly if production moves closer to the end consumer. To explain this in a bit more detail we have compared the situation of producing in Portugal vs China as a UK based company.
Distance
On average the distance covered from a chinese factory to the UK is 7777km compared to only 1812km from Portugal. Travelling such long distances brings a lot of uncertainties, such as delays and import regulations. Manufy helps you find producers in countries like portugal, spain, bulgaria and more, giving you more stable and faster supply partners.
Transport method
When talking about emissions, the means of transportation is important to determine for each shipment. As there are many options available, such as ship, plane, train and trucks, they all have different level of emissions. For this instance we will compare a plane from China to a truck from portugal, as the most common transport method from these countries for small textile orders like yourself.
We help offset your transportation emissions!
Even though when you choose to use nearshoring there will be emissions that are generated from transportation, which are significantly less than from Asia, but we still need to try and minimize the impact of this. We want to help you as brand to do this and have committed to off-setting every order on Manufy through reforestation projects. These projects are carefully chosen and monitored by our partner Regreener. They offer various carbon offsetting projects, such as agroforestation in Uruguay and wind energy in Turkey. Together with a research team they have established the following formula to calculate the carbon emissions per shipment depending on the type of transportation from location A to B.
Carbon emissions can de difficult to calculate, let us walk you through the method.
Formula:
kgCO2 = weight cargo (ton) x distance (km) * emission factor
Emission factor
– Plane: long distance (>700km) = 1,13382 kgCO2e/tonne*km
– Truck = 0,61628 kgCO2e/tonne*km
According to the following calculations and an average of 100kg (300 shirts) shipment we can conclude that:
- The c02 emissions of the transport from Asia → UK are: 0.1 x1.13382 x 7777= 881,8kg c02
- The c02 emissions of the transport from portugal → UK are 0.1 x 0. 61628 x 1812= 111,6kg c02
This would result that in this example of transportation alone* the environmental gain from producing in Portugal is around 8x better compared to producing in China.
Join our mission
Manufy aims to connect European buyers, manufacturers and freelancers in an efficient, transparent and – most importantly – sustainable way. By doing this we hope to strengthen the European economy, create more support for local sourcing, provide in quality over quantity and help businesses of all sizes grow. Join Manufy today and be part of creating a sustainable future!
