Did you know that approximately 150 million Americans, which is about half of the country’s population, live in places that don’t meet federal air quality standards? As the air around us gets more and more polluted, it becomes increasingly dangerous to breathe — which results in more people with asthma and other respiratory illnesses, and raises the risk of cancer. 300,000 people die from particulate matter every year.

Air pollution is also one of the biggest contributors to global warming: as carbon dioxide and other substances gather in the atmosphere, they create a barrier that retains a fraction of the sun’s heat that is supposed to bounce back into space. With this rapidly increasing amount of heat, many environments cannot adapt quickly enough and suffer. National Geographic reports that sea levels are expected to rise between seven and 23 inches by the end of the century due to melting ice.

The Environmental Defense Fund notes that the freight industry accounts for 16 percent of all corporate greenhouse gas emissions, making it one of the biggest carbon footprint contributors. It also mentions,

“Recent research has determined that 15–25 percent of US trucks on the road are empty and, for non-empty miles, trailers are 36 percent underutilized. Capturing just half of this under-utilized capacity would cut freight truck emissions by 100 million tons per year — about 20 percent of all US freight emissions — and reduce expenditures on diesel fuel by more than $30 billion a year.”

The freight industry wastes a great deal of gas, time, and money. Until solar-powered vehicles are mainstream and eliminate freight waste entirely, we are left with no other choice but to at least reduce it. That’s what Fr8 Network aims to do.

How freight waste happens

Trains used to be the default method of shipping. Because there were only so many, and railroads are fixed, trains were much easier to keep track of and could hold larger loads. Trucking, though it has a broader range and more flexible movement, requires a great deal of coordination to keep things running efficiently.

When trucks replaced trains, freight brokers emerged onto the scene to keep the system functioning. They now oversee interactions between 15 million trucks, about 250,000 manufacturers, and 300,000 distributors. However, brokerage is a field with high margins, so it has become extremely secretive and centralized. There’s a lot of important data that connects supply and demand, but this data is hoarded into different spaces, reducing industry transparency, and therefore removing information necessary for participating parties to make practical decisions.

Brokers often connect shippers with the cheapest carriers, which results in a lot of empty vehicle space. This not only decreases truckers’ incomes, but all of the gas burned to power the vehicles is now for nothing. Constant movement is not effectiveness; it is just the illusion of efficiency.

How Fr8 Network is helping

As you’ve probably gathered, improper planning is the biggest contributing source of freight industry waste. To make matters more transparent, we have created a decentralized marketplace for shippers and carriers to coordinate routes and transactions through smart contracts. The Fr8 Board, as we call it, is like a dashboard that gives users information regarding everything they need to know: schedules, businesses, reliability ratings, shipment progress, payment options, and more.

By integrating our platform with blockchain technology — which creates a transparent public ledger that records and displays all transactions — we can dramatically improve the supply industry’s efficiency. Similar to how Uber coordinates people needing rides with people willing to drive them to their destinations, Fr8 Board can help manufacturers look for the best-rated drivers to carry their goods, and then drivers could look for new jobs from the best-rated suppliers for the return trip home.

Blockchain technology is also decentralized, meaning information is not stored in one place (so we have no servers that can be destroyed in a natural disaster, and then poof — there goes the entire system), and no one can gain too much control over the platform. Intermediaries won’t be able to plan half-hearted trips anymore or hoard data: everything is available for everyone else to see, so that everyone can make their best-informed decisions.

As stated previously, capturing just half of current under-utilized vehicle capacity can reduce freight truck emissions by 100 million tons per year. What if we captured all of it? Imagine every a world where every truck on the road at any given time is full to the brim. Driver’s labor hours would be more meaningful. Everyone would receive their expected shipments on time. Everybody could hold one another accountable for any lazy or greedy behaviors. Of course, there would be a lot less gas polluting the air — which means less risk of environmental and health crises. And who doesn’t love to breathe clean air?