Every week I talk to someone at a carrier who is trying to sell cleaner shipping and someone at a brand who says they would buy it. They are usually describing the same voyage. They rarely see the same number.
The gap between them is a line on an invoice that does not exist yet. It should, and it belongs on the bill of lading.
A premium nobody sees
Ships that burn methanol, bio-blended fuel or, soon, ammonia pay more for their bunkers than ships on conventional fuel oil. Carriers recover some of that through a green surcharge, a low-carbon product sold to a few large customers, or simply by spreading it across the general rate. The result is a premium that most cargo owners never itemise and many never know they paid.
That suits nobody. Carriers cannot prove demand to the shipyards and fuel suppliers they are asking to invest. Brands cannot put the cost in their own emissions accounts with any confidence. The customer at the till cannot see anything at all.
Meanwhile the premium is real money, and it has to land somewhere. When a carrier absorbs it, the carrier's shareholders are subsidising the emissions reports of its customers. When it is spread across every box on the ship, the shipper who never asked for clean fuel pays for the one who did and then claims the credit. Neither arrangement survives much scrutiny.
The cost per pair
Here is my own arithmetic, with round assumptions. On a long Asia–Europe voyage, moving one forty-foot box on low-carbon methanol might add somewhere between $400 and $900 to the fuel bill, depending on the blend and the price that week. A forty-foot box holds roughly 5,000 pairs of trainers.
That is between eight and eighteen cents a pair. Less than the shoelaces. Less, certainly, than the marketing budget spent telling customers the shoes are sustainable.
We have been told the cleaner voyage costs too much. Nobody has ever shown me the number per product. When I worked it out myself, I was embarrassed.
That was Imogen Clarke, head of supply chain at Kestrel Outdoor, a mid-sized footwear brand, after we went through the same sums on a whiteboard.
Put it on the document
The bill of lading already travels with every cargo. It names the ship, the ports, the goods and the parties. Adding two fields would change the conversation: the fuel the voyage burned for that cargo, and the premium paid for it over a conventional baseline. The carrier states it. The shipper sees it. The buyer downstream inherits it.
Once it is on the document, it becomes something a cargo owner can choose, audit and pass on. A brand could buy clean-fuel voyages for one product line and not another, and say so on the label. A retailer could require it in its purchase contracts. A customs authority or a carbon registry could read it without asking the carrier for a separate report.
What carriers will say
Carriers will object that fuel is bought for the whole ship, not for one box. True, and irrelevant: accountants allocate shared costs every day, and the industry already allocates bunker surcharges per container. They will say the premium changes weekly. So does the bunker surcharge. They will say customers will choose the cheaper voyage. Some will. The ones who do not will finally be paying for what they claim.
The honest objection is administrative. A new field means new software, new audit rules and a common definition of the baseline. That is work, and some of it belongs to industry bodies rather than any single carrier. It is also exactly the kind of work the industry already did when it introduced the bunker surcharge.
A cleaner fleet needs a buyer who can see what they are buying. At present that buyer is looking at an invoice that tells them the weight of the box and nothing about the air behind it.
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