As the pale morning light flickered on the Seine, Captain Freddie Bandard steered his massive river barge, the Bosphorus, past picturesque Normandy villages and snow-covered woodlands, charting a course for Paris.
On board were containers filled with furniture, electronics and clothing that had been loaded the night before from a cargo ship that had docked in Le Havre, the port in northern France. If the cargo had continued by road, 120 trucks would have blocked the highways. The use of Le Bosphore and its crew of four prevented tons of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.
“The river is part of a wider solution for cleaner transport and the environment,” said Captain Badar, his eyes scanning other ships carrying goods up and down the Seine. “But there’s a lot more we could do.”
As the European Union steps up its fight against climate change, it must free up freight transport, which is responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.
To get there, it returns to an age-old solution: its rivers. With 23,000 miles of waterways stretching across the European Union, officials see huge potential to help get trucks — the biggest source of freight emissions — off the road. The European Green Deal, the European Union’s decarbonisation plan, will turn rivers into highways and double barge traffic by 2050.
There is a lot of room for improvement. Today, rivers carry less than 2 percent of Europe’s cargo. In comparison, around 6.5 million lorries ply Europe’s roads, accounting for 80% of freight transport. Railroads account for about 5 percent.
If rivers are to handle more traffic, much of Europe’s decades-old waterway infrastructure, including ports and locks, will need upgrading. A warming planet adds to the challenge: droughts in recent years have grounded some transport on the Rhine and pose risks to the Seine.
Although the Seine is not the most heavily trafficked river in Europe – namely the Rhine, which runs through Germany and the Netherlands – the ambition is to turn it into one of the main experimental hubs for climate transition.
“We are working on a transformation to make businesses massively change their logistics routes,” said Stéphane Raison, chairman of France’s main port operator Haropa, which is investing more than 1 billion euros (or $1.1 billion) in the effort of the Seine.
Turning towards the River
Before leaving Le Havre for Paris, as heavy snow fell in the dark, Le Bosphore’s crew packed containers tightly into the hold, checking a manifest as a bridge crane hovered overhead.
Le Bosphore, part of a fleet of 110 barges operated by Sogestran, France’s largest river transport company, will head to Gennevilliers, a port five miles outside Paris that is a distribution hub for the capital’s 12 million consumers. The trip will take about 30 hours.
The Seine could carry many more barges such as Le Bosphore, which is bigger than a football pitch and saves 18,000 truck trips a year between Le Havre and Paris. The government hopes to attract four times more goods to the river than the 20 million metric tons it now moves each year.
To achieve this, Haropa accelerated the expansion of the port of Le Havre, located on the estuary of the Seine, in an attempt to attract ships from the larger ports of Rotterdam in the Netherlands or Antwerp in Belgium. Cargo deposited at these ports is then trucked to France.
At the other five port terminals on the Seine, Haropa is adding power stations that allow ships to dock while docked, instead of running engines.
While much of Europe’s barge fleet is still powered by diesel, a small but growing portion is being adapted for biofuels. Electric boats are hitting the market. Prototype hydrogen barges are also being developed.
Companies like Ikea and river transportation startups are helping to drive the movement. They are developing carbon-free last-mile delivery services to attract consumers – and get ahead of strict environmental rules imposed by European cities to limit heavy, polluting vehicles.
A chain of “cleaner transport”
Eight hours after setting sail from Le Havre, Le Bosphore pulled into Rouen, an important stop for river freighters to and from Paris. Around 10 am a new crew of four, led by Captain Badard, was taken on board for a week’s shift and the voyage to Paris continued.
Barge traffic on the Seine has increased by just 5 percent since a decade ago. While the government is trying to plan an acceleration, “rivers have been neglected for too long,” said Captain Badar, the third generation of riverboat captains in his family. He is of a rare breed. Many riverboat captains in Europe are approaching retirement age and there is a shortage of skilled personnel, a problem that risks limiting the expected increase in river traffic.
For centuries, Captain Badar noted, rivers were essentially the only way to transport goods through France: The ancient symbol of Paris is a boat. But waterways fell out of favor as trucks and trains dominated transportation in the 20th century, especially after World War II, when highways and railroads extended across the continent.
Governments support these industries “because they have powerful lobbies and unions,” said Captain Badar, walking past a medieval castle built by Richard the Lionheart as the sun glows in the evening sky.
“Now we are starting to talk about the environment and it would be better to see the river as part of a wider chain of cleaner transport.”
France’s largest supermarket chain, Franprix, is ahead of the game. It has transported goods by barge for a decade to its 300 Parisian stores. Workers unload 42 containers every morning near the Eiffel Tower. This saves 3,600 truck trips a year on motorways and has reduced Franprix’s carbon emissions by 20%, the company said.
Kitchen cabinets and coffee beans
Le Bosphore entered Gennevilliers harbor the next morning before dawn, docking alongside other barges loaded with goods for Parisian business. A crane unloaded three layers of containers from the hold, placing them on the wharf, where forklifts stacked them over the side. Despite the massive cargo, Le Bosphore had only used the fuel of about four trucks in its entire journey.
Across the harbor, an experiment was underway to make the last mile of delivery more environmentally friendly: a massive warehouse, created as part of a 2022 deal between Haropa and Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, to create a carbon neutral way of delivering goods using the Seine.
Pallets filled with Ikea kitchen cabinets and sofas, ordered online less than 48 hours in advance, were loaded onto a barge to take them to central Paris. There they would be loaded onto electric trucks and delivered to customers.
The process isn’t completely carbon-free — the barge in central Paris burns fuel, as do the trucks from Ikea’s factories in Poland and Romania — but the deal allowed Ikea to take the equivalent of 6,000 trucks off the streets of Paris last year, said Emilie Carpels. director of the Ikea river project.
Other ventures aim to be more cutting edge.
Europe’s first hydrogen-powered river barge, the Zulu, is expected to enter service in the spring. Designed by Sogestran, it can carry up to 320 metric tons, or the contents of about 15 trucks. “We are moving towards a future of increasingly cleaner transport,” said Florian Levarey, the project manager.
For Fludis, a French startup, that future is already at hand. Its president, Gilles Manuelle, founded the company around two battery-powered boats and a fleet of electric delivery bikes.
Around 7 o’clock on a recent morning, a dozen crew members loaded one of the small barges with boxes of coffee beans, copier paper, kitchen towels and other goods to be delivered to French bistros and businesses. As the boat silently passed the Louvre for its first disembarkation, workers on board loaded their bicycles with orders and sped out into the streets as soon as the captain docked.
“We’re starting small,” Mr. Manuelle said. “But it’s small solutions like this that can become much bigger and help reverse global warming.”
Back at Gennevilliers, Le Bosphore’s crew filled the now-empty hold with French goods for export: flour, lumber, fancy bags and champagne. At 2pm she would begin a cruise back to Havre where the crew would unload and then start all over again.
“I’ve known for a long time that the river was the most ecological mode of transport,” said Captain Badar, easing back into the wheel. “Now we need policymakers to actually make it happen,” he added. “The potential is huge.”
