Port of Rotterdam Authority and DeltaPort are boosting cooperation in North Rhine Westphalia

The largest European seaport and the DeltaPort Niederrheinhäfen (Lower Rhine Ports) port group aim to deepen their cooperation. The aim is to open up the North Rhine Westphalian hinterland even better with the aid of digitalisation in order to cut CO2 emissions in transport and logistics through the optimal use of waste heat. The two parties signed a memorandum of understanding to that effect in Munich today.

Emile Hoogsteden, director of Containers, Breakbulk and Logistics at Port of Rotterdam and Andreas Stolte, chief executive officer of DeltaPort

A total of five ports linked trimodally are now available in heavily congested North Rhine Westphalia with the Wesel city port, the Rhein-Lippe Wesel port, the Voerde-Emmelsum port and the ports of Emmerich and Rheinberg-Orsoy. This will facilitate a shift from truck transports to the ecologically significant waterways and rail.

For Rotterdam, DeltaPort is the ideal partner to open up more efficient access to the Ruhr region, Münsterland, East Westphalia Lippe and southern Westphalia. The DeltaPort Group, with its capacities and strengths in bulk agricultural produce, project logistics and container logistics offers excellent preconditions for optimising the supply chain in the above regions.

Cooperation between the two ports will focus on three strategic fields:

1. Cold Chain Logistics
   Both ports are seeing strong growth in the area of cold chain logistics. The two partners will together explore how these freight flows can be supported and transported even more reliably, efficiently and sustainably.
2. Digitalisation
   The digitalisation process in logistics needs to be driven forward. The focus of joint developments are: more efficient arrangement of processes in transport, during transfer, storage and order picking, as well as increasing transparency for customers.
   Structural digital information exchange between the two ports will be further extended (e.g. by means of Rotterdam products like Boxinsider and mobile OCR). Greater transparency and increased reliability will facilitate the continued expansion of intermodal transport and thus contribute to improved accessibility for DeltaPort and Rotterdam.
3. Sustainability
   Attention will also be focused on ecologically sustainable design of the individual steps in complex logistics solutions. Here, Rotterdam will input its experience on the way to an emissions-free port over the long term, while DeltaPort will ensure increasing utility to customers by means of innovative technological projects.

In this regard, the sustainability project EcoPort 813 - which will in future make use of the existing waste heat potential on a scale of 136 GWh of the aluminium plant in Emmelsum port to provide temperature-controlled logistics premises with CO2-neutral energy - needs to be highlighted. Cuts of 27,000 tons in CO2 emissions can be made in the context of providing energy to the refrigerated warehouses to be erected.
Apart from using the waste heat for logistics centres in the port, the sustainability of modes of transport (e.g. waterborne) will be investigated in greater detail.

Projects of this kind represent for both partners the future in the sustainable development of their ports and the logistics chains linked to them. Emile Hoogsteden, director of Containers, Breakbulk & Logistics at Port of Rotterdam, and Andreas Stolte, chief executive officer of DeltaPort, sealed the memorandum of understanding with a handshake, stressing the significance of this step for all those involved. "Not only do we see in Rotterdam the largest European seaport, but much more than that one of the leading drivers of innovation in port logistics," Stolte says. "We are also convinced that through this cooperation we are jointly making a major contribution to the sustainable development of logistical chains and so to easing the load on our environment."