Restoring Trust in Carbon Credits: A Freight Industry Perspective

The pressure on businesses to meet government-mandated carbon reduction targets has never been greater. Yet as companies strive to take meaningful climate action, many face a troubling dilemma: how to achieve genuine emissions reductions without falling into the greenwashing trap that has plagued so many sustainability initiatives.

This challenge is particularly acute in the logistics sector, where hard-to-abate emissions have made carbon credits a necessary tool. However, the inconsistent legitimacy of these credits has severely damaged public perception, leaving businesses caught between regulatory requirements and reputational risk.

Tom Isler, Sustainability and Innovation Manager at Baxter Freight, offers a unique perspective on how a new generation of carbon crediting could provide the robust, transparent solution the industry desperately needs.

The Easy Wins Are Over

“When it comes to carbon credits, businesses have been making the ‘easy’ changes for more than a decade: LED lighting, car sharing, limiting air conditioning and heating,” Tom explains. “Yet this isn’t enough to reach the heavily bejewelled titles of Net-Zero or Carbon Neutrality.”

The reality is stark. After implementing all the straightforward internal measures, most companies find themselves still far short of their targets. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and the emissions that remain are often the most challenging to address.

“Businesses must look for external carbon reduction strategies, beyond the realm of their own carbon footprint,” Tom notes. “Carbon credits have been catalysts of external carbon reduction for a number of years.”

The Credibility Crisis

The problem isn’t with the concept of carbon credits itself, it’s with how they’ve been implemented and verified. Negative media coverage has exposed projects that don’t deliver the carbon savings they claim, or worse, have little to do with carbon reduction at all.

Tom is blunt about the disconnect: “Investing in an orangutan sanctuary in Bali should not allow companies to reduce their emissions caused by logistics, for example. The cause and effect are simply not the same.”

While such projects may have environmental or conservation value, they don’t represent genuine equivalence to the emissions being “offset.” This mismatch has fuelled accusations of greenwashing and eroded trust in the entire carbon credit system.

“The varying legitimacy of the credits has led to negative media coverage, with their purpose being put into question when the project associated with the credit is not saving the same amount of carbon being claimed,” Tom explains.

A New Era of Carbon Crediting

So what’s the solution? According to insights from Baxter Freight, the answer lies in establishing genuine faith and confidence in how carbon credits are generated.

“The precision, governance and technology coming into the industry is causing a new era of external carbon reduction strategies,” Tom says. This new generation of carbon crediting offers something the old system often lacked: true accountability and measurable impact.

The key innovations include:

•         Scope 1 and 2 emissions can be inset against carbon sequestering projects with verifiable results.
•         Scope 3 logistic emissions can be inset using book and claim methodologies, ensuring transparency in the supply chain.

“This means that one carbon credit can truly represent one tonne of carbon saving, helping businesses to validly and accurately contribute to global sustainability efforts,” Tom notes.

Overcoming the Legacy Problem

The biggest challenge facing this new era of carbon crediting isn’t technical, it’s reputational. “The only challenge now facing the new era of carbon credits is their inherited ugly name’s sake,” Tom observes.

Years of questionable practices have left deep scars on public perception. Even as the industry implements stricter standards and verification processes, it must overcome the scepticism built up by its predecessor’s failings.

“Once faith is restored in both the corporate and media worlds, we can begin to use carbon crediting to make real change,” Tom argues. “The delivery of projects such as electric shipping and carbon capture requires heavy investment to materialise.”

Making Corporate Investment Work for Climate Goals

Here’s where properly functioning carbon credits become powerful: they create a mechanism for corporate investment in essential climate infrastructure that might not otherwise materialise.

“Carbon crediting is a means for the corporate world to proportionally contribute to these necessary upgrades, whilst reaping some carbon saving in their own end of year reports,” Tom explains.

This isn’t about companies buying their way out of responsibility. Rather, it’s about channelling corporate resources toward projects that genuinely accelerate the transition to low-carbon systems, projects that often require significant upfront capital that’s difficult to secure through traditional means.

The Long Road Ahead

Tom is realistic about the timeline for achieving true sustainability across global supply chains. “There may be a point where every country has the perfect portfolio of low-carbon transportation and high-yield carbon sequestration; however, that is very far away.”

Until that distant goal is reached, the need for credible carbon crediting mechanisms will remain. The question isn’t whether businesses should use carbon credits, it’s whether those credits represent genuine, verifiable climate action.

“Until this time, there will always be a project somewhere which will benefit from a carbon credit scheme, with a corporate sustainability strategy looking to benefit from funding it,” Tom concludes.

The Bottom Line

The freight industry’s perspective on carbon credits reveals a broader truth about corporate sustainability: easy solutions are exhausted, and meaningful progress now requires external strategies backed by rigorous verification.

The greenwashing scandals that have plagued carbon credits weren’t inevitable. They resulted from weak governance, poor verification, and a fundamental disconnect between claimed impacts and actual outcomes. The new generation of carbon crediting, built on transparency and technological precision, offers a path forward.

For businesses navigating the complex landscape of carbon reduction, the message is clear: external carbon reduction strategies remain necessary, but they must be grounded in credible, verifiable impact. The era of vague offsets and questionable projects is ending. What emerges in its place could finally fulfil the promise that carbon credits always held, genuine corporate contribution to the climate solutions we desperately need.