The noticeable increase comes after the company boosted its intermodal capabilities through the year, using new European freight lanes and the newly-opened Kaunas Intermodal Terminal that serves Tilburg in the Netherlands. The aforementioned route also connects the Netherlands with Poland via the city of Rzepin in the western part of the country.
Overall, the company says it doubled the amount of FTLs it carried compared to 2020, with over 16,100 fully-loaded trailers traveling on rail tracks, saving the environment of more than 14.4 million kilograms of CO2 emissions, as the FTLs traveled for more than 15.2 million kilometers throughout the EU.
In addition to the saved emissions, Girteka Logistics has also calculated that carrying FTLs on the back of trains across Europe reduced the number of tires it needed throughout the year by at least 900, and avoided at least 61 accidents on the road, based on the average numbers in the industry.
“The impressive growth of Girteka Logistics’ intermodal operations, which now have doubled in terms of our capacity and our CO2 emissions savings for two years in a row, is no coincidence,” stated Pavel Kveten, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Girteka Logistics European Business Unit. “It is the result of the hard work of our colleagues, who have put their best effort in to not only make sure that we had a ready product presented to our customers but to also assure our clients that our intermodal offering will satisfy their need to become truly sustainable, as evident by the number of emissions that we prevented from entering the environment,” Kveten continued.
The logistics provider noted that growth, in particular, intermodal rail freight services to and from the United Kingdom (UK) will be one of the main priorities going forward in 2022. Overall, Girteka Logistics plans to grow the number of FTLs carried by intermodal rail transport by 50% in the coming year.
I also wanted to highlight the work of our partners who have ensured that our intermodal services were of the highest quality and allowing us to deliver trailers reliably throughout the year,” added the COO, noting that “even in the worst-case scenario, our fully asset-based fleet enables us to react and alleviate any kind of issues on a very short notice, which is a key advantage of our intermodal offering,” concluded Kveten.