Short distances and even perishables
Inland waterways operators and promoters invest in solutions that meet the demands of forward thinking shippers and operators who penetrate new markets by aiming at innovative logistics, advanced vessel technology and intelligent data interchange.

Fighting city and port congestion
Port mobility is relieved through short-distance inland waterway transport. In Hamburg, barge container logistics are a bypass for road congestion between terminals. In Amsterdam, a smart vessel with crane onboard picks up and delivers goods between production facilities and terminals in the wider area. In Antwerp, container barge transport was the eye opener for many companies during the  ring road works. A chaotic situation was avoided and on top of that each day 1,500 tons of construction material were transported to the wharves. Utrecht has a beer-boat supplying restaurants and cafés along its narrow canals.

Vacuum cleaner on the river
Avebe Latenstein, an international cooperation of starch potato growers, makes use of the Mercurial Latistar, a freight "vacuum cleaner" with an automatic loading and un-loading installation that has been specifically designed for the transport of food and non-food pellets. Since June 2002 over 140,000 tonnes of wheat flour are thus shipped in over the water, one shipment containing 1,200 tonnes, compared to 30 tonnes by road previously. Some 1 million truck movements a year less on the roads in the Netherlands! The system is copied on the Finnish lakes where wood pellets will be scooped up for transportation to a power plant.

Water transporting water
Spadel, the Belgian water company, mainly produces mineral and bottled water and lemonades for the Benelux market, but still exports 7% of its production. 600 million liters of beverage are thus transported every year. Of this, 5% are shipped by inland navigation, a transport mode that was mainly chosen for its environmentally friendliness: CO2 emissions are reduced to one fifth!