The Dutch scaleup Eveon is working hard to unlock the market for used shipping containers internationally via an e-commerce platform. After Germany (2020), the United States (2021) and Canada (2022), Eveon is now also active in its home country of the Netherlands. Belgium will follow soon. The plan is to roll out further to dozens of countries in the coming years. The aim is to let more used shipping containers find their way to a second life. This results in a huge CO2 reduction.
Eveon is the only fully digital player worldwide without a traditional sales organization that focuses solely on used containers and deliberately does not offer new containers for sustainability reasons. Eveon is the first to calculate and publish the CO2 emissions from the production of one new shipping container. That’s 12,000 kg of CO2. That is roughly equivalent to the CO2 emissions of driving eight times this container on a truck from Rotterdam to Rome. This calculation was commissioned by Eveon by the experts of Climate Neutral group. This internationally known CO2 reduction consultancy was called in because nothing can be found about this footprint.
AAD Storm, founder and CEO of Eveon: “the container market is not transparent, so we wanted to investigate that footprint ourselves. The Climate Neutral Group is the best. We are now the first to announce the CO2 footprint of 12,000 kg per newly produced container. For us, this result was a reason to resolutely stop selling new containers as early as 2021 and go all the way to the sustainable use of used containers. From a financial point of view, that was a solid leapfrog for us as a young company, because 40 percent of the sales in the first six months after launch in Germany were new containers. Our mission is to make the choice of used containers in this market as transparent and accessible as possible.”
After the first successful launches in Germany, the United States and Canada, the Dutch scaleup from Rotterdam is now also starting in its home country. In the United States, Eveon opened an office in Charleston, South Carolina in August 2022. A container purchased from Eveon can be delivered on site or picked up at a depot. In the United States, Eveon has stock available in 40 cities including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In Canada in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. And in Germany in Hamburg, Bremen and Stuttgart. In the Netherlands stocks are available in Rotterdam and soon in Belgium in Antwerp.
With the 12,000 kg CO2 footprint per newly produced container, Eveon has also been able to make an estimate of what can be saved in terms of CO2 footprint if, when purchasing a container for use on land, not a new one but a used one is purchased. It is estimated that between 3 and 6 million new shipping containers are produced annually. 13 to 18 percent of that is not used at sea. Roughly you can say that an average of around 735,000 newly produced shipping containers are purchased annually for storage and transport purposes on land. Which you don’t have to produce if you purchase used containers instead. That amounts to around 8 billion kg less CO2 emissions.
