YILPORT Gävle is located in Sweden and is the home to a general cargo terminal as well as a container terminal, which happens to be the largest container terminal on the Swedish east coast. Being set in the heart of mid-Sweden and its close proximity to large industries, a lot of base industry exports are being made through YILPORT Gävle’s two terminals.
A lot has happened in the past few years for YILPORT Gävle. In 2020, the port built a shared-user automated paper warehouse. In 2022, the container terminal expansion was finished, doubling the yearly capacity. In 2023, the General Cargo terminal needed to expand its area for sawn timber stuffing and prepared an area five times larger than before. The timber is stored there and later on stuffed into containers with the help of load plates in order to not drive trucks into the containers.
Now, YILPORT Gävle is continuing ahead on its sustainability journey. Last year, the terminal expanded its equipment fleet with eco-friendly options. This includes six reachstackers, two forklifts, and an empty container handler from Kalmar’s Eco Efficient product line. And a significant milestone was met with the introduction of the port’s first fully electric knuckle boom crane, a Liebherr 150, which is the latest addition to their equipment fleet. The versatile crane can be used to serve all types of general cargo and is replacing two older diesel-powered cranes.
But YILPORT Gävle is not stopping there. In addition to this milestone, YILPORT Gävle has recently carried out electric conversion on two of its mobile harbour cranes to further reducing its CO2 emissions. The cranes, one Liebherr 400 and one Liebherr 500, are now fully electric and have not seen any drop in weight capacity. To ensure mobility between the different quays and vessels, this solution is paired with a small, biofuel-driven engine which allows for uninterrupted operations.
The ongoing transition from diesel power to using electric powered marks a substantial step forward in YILPORT Gävle’s mission to shrinking its carbon footprint. The YILPORT Gävle General Cargo terminal is expecting that the result of converting the terminals’ most utilized cranes to be an annual 75% reduction in fuel consumption.
YILPORT Gävle’s sustainability initiatives extend beyond equipment electrification. As fate would have it, the General Cargo terminal’s trucks accounts for most of the pickups and deliveries to the Container Terminal due to its extensive CFS operations handling mostly steel, paper and timber.
In order to streamline the container pickup and delivery processes, YILPORT Gävle has implemented a vehicle tracking phone app for all truck drivers to use when picking up or delivering a container. The app has been made to create fair and efficient ‘first come, first served’ system with precise GPS technology that minimizes waiting times by identifying the closest truck to its designated container. This integration of GPS technology with the terminal’s operational system ensures real-time updates for truck drivers if anything changes, transparency and control over deliveries. And all GPS data is deleted after the transaction is completed.
With shorter queues within the terminal, there’s less idle time for trucks awaiting their turn, resulting in reduced emissions in the long run.