TAIWAN: The format of Yang Ming’s Sustainability Report looks old-style in some of the chapters (and still uses the old fashioned name of CRS for its report), the narrative could be broader and deeper because, besides fuel consumption and GHG emissions, there is not much more on the environmental side. Why, then, is Gliese Foundation giving 4.5 stars out of 5 to this report? A straightforward reason: of all the Sustainability Reports of the largest liners in the world, the report by Yang Ming is the one that provides the most exhaustive set of data on CO2 emissions. Contrary to MSC of Hapag-Lloyd, which have longer reports, full of narrative, but with very scarce data, Yang Ming has clear that reporting is almost synonymous with data; it could be sparse in words, but numbers are naked truth. If the shipping companies were to provide as much data as Yang Ming next year, we would conclude that the shipping industry has leapfrogged in its environmental reporting. Regarding the narrative, the communications specialists inside each company could take the path they would like, but it would be as if all were stepping into hard soil rather than walking on swampy mud due to the lack or poverty of data.

 

Regarding the current measures to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, Yang Ming has a similar stand to most of the other liners: besides the use of energy efficiency equipment and applications and the typical maintenance or improvements such as hull cleaning, propeller polishing, and retrofittings, the hope relies on larger and more efficient newbuilts: “The new-built energy saving fleets are capable of reducing pollution emissions and improving efficiency with further cost savings as well. Furthermore, long-term-chartered vessels with higher charter rates have been redelivered to owners at the expiration of contracts (redelivery of seven chartered vessels in 2018 and 2019 respectively and four chartered vessels returned in 2020). 

 

Yang Ming and the other companies tell us that they use a mix of “ingredients” (measures) that, in the end, reduces fuel consumption and CO2 emissions per TEU-km, but all of them say nothing about the contribution of each “ingredient” in the final result. In other words, it is a dark box of which we only know the two final numbers: thousands of tons of fuels and thousands of tons of CO2 emissions. One wonders if either they do not want to share the contribution of each “ingredient” or if they themselves have no idea about the percentage that could be attributed to each “ingredient” in the final reduction of CO2 emissions.

 

Regarding another number, Yang Ming is among the handful of companies that tell the number of vessels of the share of its fleet that has been retrofitted with scrubbers: “Once the fleet with scrubber retrofit has been completed and deployed to the service, the estimated ratio of scrubber retrofitted fleets is 27% and the rest shall use the low-sulphur fuel.” How simple is to provide such a number, but believe it or not, most liners did not.