On Tuesday afternoon, Luxembourg's Minister for Sustainable Development and Infrastructure, Francois Bausch, officiated at the 2nd LEAN and GREEN Awards in The Grand Duchy organised by Luxembourg for Logistics (LfL) and held at the offices of ProGROUP in the Solarwind building in Windhof.

Introduced by LfL Manager, Malik Zeniti, Minister Bausch congratulated the initiative for making Logistics and Transport companies aware of environment issues regarding reducing CO2 emissions, and stressed the importance of air cargo companies now being seen to be respecting environmental concerns as well as road haulage operators. He also praised the organisers for expanding the awards to also include Europe-wide initiatives.

The LEAN and GREEN Club is open to companies which offer solutions which improve logistics companies' ecological footprints. It encourages the sharing of best practices, including more ecological tyres, alternative fuels, multimodal projects and optimisation transport systems.

Joining Arthur Welter, CFL Multimodal, LuxairCargo and POST - winners in 2015 - were 2016 winners, as follows:

- Cargolux (air cargo transport): they presented a plan which foresees a CO2 reduction of 11% over 5 years by an increase in tomme-km, route optimisation and operational initiatives to reduce fuel consumption;

- GN Transport (specialised in transport between Sweden and France-Luxembourg) is engaged in a project to identify the CO2 emissions within the company and reduce them by setting clear targets, including a reduction in CO2 emissions of 23.83% over 5 years by operating 15% of its Luxembourg-Lubeck traffic via multimodal train;

- Offergeld (a Luxembourg-based logistics company) plans to a 22.96% reduction of CO2 emissions over 5 years by a 100% renewal of its fleet to euro 6 standard and will train all drivers in eco-driving;

- Transalliance (a privately-owned French company with 2,000 trucks throughout Europe) planned to reduce its CO2 emissions by 21.6% by working on consumption on its own fleet and also outsourced partners, optimising routes and reducing unproductive kilometres, increasing its modal share.

Photos by Geoff Thompson