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This story appears in the Feb. 24 print edition of Transport Topics.

In the beginning, it was just a germ of an idea among some trucking leaders and environmental regulators: Improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions in the freight-transportation sector by forging a voluntary partnership between government, trucking and shippers.

The result was SmartWay, which turned 10 years old this month. The program has grown from 15 charter partners to thousands of�� carriers, shippers, retailers, logistics companies, manufacturers and railroads. And, according to EPA, it has saved millions of barrels of oil.

SmartWay was launched in February 2004 by the Environmental Protection Agency, American Trucking Associations and a group of shippers at ATA’s winter leadership meeting.

By then, the 15 charter partners already had spent two years ironing out their differences and developing the formulas and reporting systems that measure a carrier’s fuel use and emissions.

Mike Kelley, chief of sustainability at YRC Worldwide Inc., said he didn’t realize back then how popular SmartWay would become.

“Now every year, over 2,000 trucking companies sit down and do . . . a very good specific assessment that calculates fuel mileage and different practices . . . to determine if they’ve progressed on their sustainability goals or emissions reduction goals,” Kelley said. “And it’s not like filing a tax return; they don’t have to do it, but they want to.”

At the time, Kelley was representing a charter partner, Yellow Transportation, which later merged with another charter partner, Roadway Express, to become YRC Worldwide, based in Overland Park, Kan.

Today, there are more than 3,000 SmartWay partners — carriers, shippers, retailers, logistics companies, manufacturers and railroads. The U.S. Postal Service is one of the newest SmartWay partners.

“It’s really been what I would call a great success,” said David Berry, vice president of Phoenix-based Swift Transportation Inc., another charter partner. “It has helped steer the states and the nation toward much cleaner air and less use of carbon fuels.”

Since its founding, SmartWay has saved 120.7 million barrels of oil — the equivalent of taking more than 10 million cars of the road for an entire year — and eliminated 23.6 million metric tons of CO2, 478,000 tons of NOx and 22,000 tons of particulate matter, EPA said.

Glen Kedzie, ATA’s energy and environmental affairs counsel, described SmartWay as a “symbiotic relationship” between trucking and shippers.

Carriers agree to report fuel use and emissions data annually to EPA and to continue to reduce both. Shippers can see which carriers are the most efficient and, in turn, to be SmartWay-certified themselves and agree to use those carriers frequently.

“Shippers that have sustainability at the forefront, they can easily identify who the best of the best are in terms of fuel efficiency, greenness [and] reduction of pollutants,” Kedzie said.

Until SmartWay, there was no official third party to credibly verify a carrier’s fuel and emissions reductions, said Steve Duley, vice president of purchasing at Schneider National Inc., in Green Bay, Wis., another charter partner.

“It gave you a way to kind of validate how you compare with others and how you compare with standards,” Duley said.

SmartWay also tests technologies and best practices to determine which reduce fuel use and emissions most, he said.

“There’s so much advertising that’s misleading and inaccurate, it’s hard to get to the facts of what, if you invest in this technology, it’s really worth,” Duley said.

Technologies, such as the trailer skirts and low-rolling-resistance tires that SmartWay tested and approved, are what the California Air Resources Board ultimately made mandatory for trucks running there.

SmartWay also pioneered fuel- saving strategies that helped form the basis for the federal government’s heavy-truck fuel- economy standards.

Those working on SmartWay understood there was a risk that parts of it could become mandatory, Swift’s Berry said.

“But what I reminded everyone was . . . at least by the industry having used these technologies three, four or five years, we knew that they would work,” he said. “So we got much more and better proven technologies — and [regulators] weren’t going down some of these less productive routes.”

Those that worked on SmartWay said two things propelled its creation: its voluntary nature and its timing.

“It was at a time when the sustainability or environmental issues were starting to ping on the industry’s radar screen,” YRC’s Kelley said.

The trucking industry was ripe to make sustainability a hallmark, just as it had made safety a hallmark in earlier decades, he said.

SmartWay was a program trucking “could stand behind,” said Kedzie, “something that was proactive, getting out in front of an issue, namely carbon reduction, before carbon reduction even became a widely known catchphrase.”

And shippers were feeling pressure from consumers to be greener — more environmentally conscious — and passed the pressure on to carriers, Berry said.

SmartWay’s voluntary nature is still its touchstone, said its director, Cheryl Bynum, who was an EPA staffer at the time the program was developed.

“It always was going to be voluntary, and that was the whole point,” she said. “We wanted to find out — what are the natural market levers that connect shippers to carriers; how do they find out about one another?

“We knew that when shippers get contacts to move their goods, they base it on reliability — Is the carrier insured, what’s their on-time record, what’s their price?” Bynum said. “But there didn’t seem to be a way to give a signal to the market about environmental performance. That was kind of the missing piece.”

That’s what the early discussions between trucking, shippers and EPA focused on, she added, noting interest in how to measure carrier performance, how to make carriers comfortable sharing fuel and emissions data with shippers and how to design a reporting system that was data-driven and fair to carriers.

The two things that surprised her about the effort, she said, were what hard work it took to devise the fuel and emissions reporting systems and how, in the end, it wasn’t just large carriers that joined SmartWay, but it also was midsize and “mom and pop” carriers.

While a voluntary environmental program between business and government may seem like a win-win situation, that was not the case when trucking and EPA began talking about SmartWay, the charter members recalled.

“Typically, industry and EPA, they don’t work well together . . . so we were a little suspicious of each other,” Kedzie said.

Trucking had to educate the EPA staff “on our industry and the nuances and what could work, what wouldn’t work, because this is probably as close as you could get to a regulatory approach without it being a regulation,” Kedzie said.

One benefit of SmartWay is the “trust dividend” that EPA and trucking earned with each other, Berry said.

“It was a courageous act on everyone’s part, and especially EPA’s part,” he said. “It took a lot of courage on their part to do this because they were an enforcement agency and they’d never done a voluntary program before.”

Another benefit was that trucking now has a seat at EPA’s table, Berry said.

“The engine manufacturers had a seat, the truck manufacturers had a seat, the environmentalists had a seat, the utilities had a seat, the oil companies had a seat, but trucking did not have a seat, and now we do, and that is a huge win,” he added.

Looking to the future, SmartWay wants to grow its number of partners and target drayage haulers at the nation’s ports, Bynum said.

It is also spreading its model abroad. Canada already has ended its similar FleetSmart program in favor of adopting SmartWay. The program also is now sharing its experience and its models with Mexico, Europe and China, she said.