Railway based container transportation to greening supply chains: a case study in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The scale of export and importation has been rapidly increased in Sri Lanka recent past. Large percentage of this fall into local manufacturing industry which are scattered around number of export processing zones around the island. Due to road based container transportation, most of the highways experiencing traffic congestions especially around main cities and in Colombo city where the only container handling port is located. Not only the traffic congestion contribute CO2 emissions but also the large number of trucks which transport containers are the major contributory factor of transportation related emissions. However, there is dearth of research on these issues in local context especially on the alternative mode of container transportation. Conversely, local railway network is connecting commercial hub with eastern, southern, northern and central regions of the island. Further, Sri Lanka Railways currently upgrades the track conditions to run high speed trains and rehabilitant northern line after the war. Therefore, this research focuses on to investigate the feasibility of adapting railways as a mode of container transportation in order to reduce CO2 emissions during the container transportation. The inward and outward bound containers to the export processing zones from/to Colombo harbour are considered for this research. The in and out bound containers to the 11 export processing zones over the last year were analyzed to investigate the feasibility of converting transportation to railways since there should be reasonable number of containers necessary to run a freight train in economical manner. IN addition to the emission comparisons cost benefit analysis also carried out in this research. The results revealed that 4 out of 11 export processing zones have necessary quantities of containers which can be transported by railway mode. The level of direct emission reduction out of the transportation is significant and based on indirect factors such as traffic congestions, this value increases further. The baseline information and comparison were carried out according to IPCC guidelines.