Carbon-Neutral Shipping Goes Mainstream: The Book-and-Claim System Reshaping Freight Procurement
The green logistics market is projected to reach $1.39 trillion in 2025 and grow at an 8.29% CAGR to hit $2.06 trillion by 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence. Behind that explosive growth is a quiet revolution in how companies actually achieve carbon-neutral shipping — and it doesn't require every truck, ship, or plane to run on biofuel tomorrow.
Enter the book-and-claim system: the mechanism that's making sustainable freight procurement scalable, auditable, and accessible to shippers of every size.
What Is Book and Claim?
Traditional carbon reduction demands a direct, physical link between your cargo and green fuel. If your container ship burns conventional heavy fuel oil, your shipment carries that carbon footprint — period. The book-and-claim model breaks that constraint.
Here's how it works:
- A fuel producer creates sustainable fuel — biofuel, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), or renewable marine fuel — and feeds it into the global supply network.
- A certificate is generated representing the environmental benefit of that fuel replacing fossil alternatives.
- A shipper purchases those certificates ("books" the green attributes) and "claims" the emissions reduction against their own supply chain footprint.
The physical fuel doesn't need to power your specific shipment. Instead, the system ensures that somewhere in the global network, conventional fuel was displaced by a sustainable alternative — and you funded that displacement.
As the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) explains, book and claim allows customers to decouple specific attributes from the physical product and transfer them separately via a dedicated registry. This approach mirrors what the renewable electricity sector has done successfully for decades with Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs).
Why Book and Claim Is Gaining Traction Now
Three forces are converging to push book and claim from niche pilot programs to mainstream procurement strategy.
Regulatory Pressure Is Intensifying
The EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and California's Advanced Clean Truck regulation now force shippers to embed carbon criteria into freight bids. Procurement leaders are allocating up to 3% of logistics budgets to compliance-linked decarbonization projects, according to Mordor Intelligence's 2026 market analysis. Carriers without credible sustainability roadmaps risk exclusion from preferred supplier lists as early as 2027.
The Physical Supply Can't Keep Up with Demand
Sustainable aviation fuel currently represents less than 1% of global jet fuel supply, even as ICAO's Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme (CORSIA) caps net aviation CO₂ at 2020 levels through 2035. Maritime biofuels face similar supply constraints. Book and claim bridges this gap — shippers can act on sustainability commitments today without waiting for the physical fuel infrastructure to catch up.
Scope 3 Reporting Demands Auditable Solutions
For most manufacturers and retailers, transportation emissions fall under Scope 3 — the hardest category to measure and reduce. Book-and-claim certificates provide the documentation trail that auditors and ESG reporting frameworks require. Companies like DHL are already targeting 30% SAF blending by 2030, and the certificates generated create a market mechanism that funds further production.
How the System Creates Real Impact
Critics argue that book and claim is just "paying for someone else's green fuel." But the economics tell a different story.
Every certificate purchased represents additional demand signal for sustainable fuel production. When a shipper books green attributes for a trans-Pacific ocean shipment, that purchase directly funds biofuel producers who are competing against entrenched fossil fuel supply chains. Without that demand signal, sustainable fuel facilities don't get built.
The Smart Freight Centre — the organization behind the Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC) Framework — puts it plainly: book-and-claim systems help jumpstart logistics decarbonization because altruism only gets us so far. An organization's value chain investments via book and claim must count for the system to scale.
Digital freight operators have accelerated adoption significantly. Major logistics providers recorded tens of thousands of climate-contributing shipments in the first half of 2025 alone, using book-and-claim frameworks to offer shippers verified carbon reduction on standard freight lanes.
Integration with Carbon Removal Projects
The most sophisticated implementations go beyond fuel certificates. Leading shippers now combine book-and-claim fuel credits with verified carbon removal projects — direct air capture, biochar, enhanced weathering — to achieve true carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative shipping.
This layered approach addresses a key limitation: book and claim reduces the intensity of emissions per ton-mile, while carbon removal addresses the absolute emissions that even sustainable fuels can't eliminate entirely.
What This Means for Freight Procurement
For procurement teams, book and claim fundamentally changes the RFP process. Sustainability is no longer a separate line item or a nice-to-have checkbox — it's embedded in rate negotiations.
Here's what forward-thinking shippers are doing:
- Requiring carbon data in carrier bids — not just price per mile, but grams of CO₂ per ton-kilometer, with book-and-claim options clearly quoted
- Setting portfolio-level carbon targets — allocating a percentage of total freight spend to certified green lanes
- Using TMS platforms to track and compare — modern transportation management systems embed carbon calculations directly into quoting and booking workflows
- Demanding certificate provenance — RSB, ISCC, and other certification bodies provide the chain-of-custody documentation that prevents double-counting
How CXTMS Embeds Carbon Intelligence into Freight Operations
CXTMS integrates carbon tracking directly into the freight quoting and procurement workflow. When carriers submit rates, the platform calculates and displays emissions data alongside cost — giving procurement teams the visibility to make informed trade-offs between price and sustainability.
The platform supports book-and-claim certificate tracking, allowing shippers to monitor their green freight portfolio across modes, lanes, and time periods. Automated reporting pulls the data auditors need for Scope 3 disclosures without manual spreadsheet reconciliation.
As net-zero mandates tighten and green logistics grows into a multi-trillion-dollar market, the shippers who embed carbon intelligence into their procurement workflows today will hold the competitive advantage tomorrow.
Ready to integrate carbon tracking into your freight procurement? Contact CXTMS for a demo and see how book-and-claim visibility transforms your sustainability reporting.
