Webinar | GMA Trucking’s Pilot Procurement: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead

In this webinar recorded on January 15, 2026, GMA was joined by representatives of Nevoya, Etsy, and Amazon to discuss the groundbreaking GMA Trucking pilot procurement that will enable the largest known deployment of Class 8 zero emission trucks and associated charging infrastructure in Texas.

Learn more here. 

See below for a full transcript and presentation slides.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:
Welcome everyone and thank you all for joining us today for this webinar that we’re hosting to do a bit of an overview and lessons learned from our recently closed procurement for the environmental attributes of low-carbon trucking services. So that’s a bit of a mouthful, but we are going to spend some time today really unpacking that and talking about its significance. And so if you could go to the next slide, please.

My name is Andre de Fontaine. I’m a managing director at the Center for Green Market Activation, and I’m really thrilled to have a great set of speakers that are going to help us really communicate what we just did. That includes on the GMA side, Clayton Gerber, the program manager for GMA Trucking, which really led a lot of this work, and then also Stacey McCluskey, who is a program associate at GMA and provided a lot of great support.

So those are the speakers from the GMA side, but we had a much bigger team that was supporting this initiative to make sure that it could be successful, including Sam Pearl Schwartz, a manager from GMA, James Line, who was formerly an intern, and then also Allison Green, who led all the communications efforts, and of course, Kim Carnahan, our president and CEO.

We are very fortunate to have with us today a group of speakers, participants in this deal, who are going to talk about some insights and perspectives, and this includes JV, who is a co-founder and chief commercial officer from Nevoya. Nevoya is the all-electric carrier that was selected through a competitive process to provide the services that our members are purchasing. You’ll hear more about that shortly.

Then we also have a couple of the shippers or GMA trucking members that really, this wouldn’t have been possible without their leadership throughout this initiative. That includes Eleanor Bastian, senior manager from Amazon, and Sam Brundrett, who is the environmental sustainability lead from Etsy. If you can go to the next slide, I’ll talk a little bit about what we are hoping to accomplish today.

So what we’re going to do is an overview of this procurement process, but more importantly, we want to focus in on the lessons learned. This initiative combined book and claim with demand aggregation. It was complicated. We’re not aware of anyone else having done this before. And so with that, there was a huge amount that we learned that we want to capture and convey. And the reason for that is that we think that these mechanisms have a lot of potential to unlock more investment in low carbon, heavy duty freight. And so we want to do more of it.

So with that, it’s important that we capture the lessons learned and take it forward to new and hopefully bigger initiatives into 2026 and beyond. So I will start what I’m doing right now, which is just a bit of the welcome. And then I will pass it over to Stacey that’ll do a deeper dive on the overview and results from the RFP process. We’ll then ask JV from Nevoya to provide some insights from the carrier perspective. Then Clayton will walk us through some of the lessons learned through the initiative, and then we’ll pass it over to both Etsy and Amazon who can speak from the shipper perspective. We’ll do a bit of a look ahead to future initiatives.

Then if we stay on time, and I hope we will, we should have about 10 minutes or so for Q&A. For those of you that are participating on the webinar, please use the Q&A button to type in your questions, and then at the end of the webinar, we’ll see how many we can get through. It depends on how much time we’ve got.

One other logistical item, we are, you’ve probably heard the voice at the outset, we are recording this webinar. So be advised that it is being recorded.

Now if you go to the next slide, I know that we’re eager to jump into the meat of the content, the specific lessons learned. But before doing so, I wanted to provide just a really quick background on the Center for Green Market Activation, or GMA, as we’re more commonly referred to. So we’re a relatively new nonprofit. We were launched in July of 2024. We’re focused on decarbonizing what are commonly referred to as the hard to abate sectors. So this is your heavy industry and your heavy transport inclusive of heavy duty trucking. The premise behind much of our work is that voluntary corporate demand can be a really important lever to drive change in these industries.

But there are currently a lot of pretty significant barriers that stand in the way that prevent customers and customers that are motivated to purchase low carbon goods and services to meet their ambitious climate goals from actually purchasing those goods and services. So what we’ve been trying to do is to develop mechanisms that can more efficiently connect the producers of those goods with the buyers.

We’ve focused a lot on book and claim. We’ll talk more about this through the course of the webinar, especially its application to trucking. But essentially within book and claim, what you’re doing is you’re separating the environmental attribute from the physical product. When you do so, it creates more flexibility in the system, opens up more demand sources and expands the investment playing field.

Alongside that, what we do is we aggregate demand through these buyers’ alliances. Through that, rather than limiting ourselves to bilateral purchasing, we’re pooling demand across several buyers to send a larger demand signal. That ideally creates the confidence for the producers to scale up more rapidly because they know that there is a group of customers that are out there that are willing to pay the premium and make the investments needed to purchase these low-carbon goods and services. If you advance to the next slide, I’ll talk a little bit more about where we’re active currently.

So we do all of this work in partnership with other NGOs. In the aviation space, SABA is our most mature program. It’s been around the longest, and we do that in partnership with RMI and EDF. In maritime, we support the Aspen Institute, which leads the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance, and then Trucking, which is the focus of today, we do with our partners at the Smart Freight Center. We recently launched SCoBA, which is the Sustainable Concrete Buyers Alliance, focused on cement and concrete, and that’s also in partnership with RMI. Then as far as the developing initiatives, chemicals is actually pretty far along, and this is another initiative that we do alongside RMI.

So if you go to the next slide, I will spend not much time here because this is really going to be what we expand upon over the course of the remaining time that we have together. The major components or the scope of this effort includes demand aggregation. This is the process of bringing motivated shippers and a few freight forwarders together, understanding how much and what they want to purchase. We were able to leverage the SFC’s market-based measures framework for the book and claim system design, then we identified a high-quality project and route through a competitive RFP processes. This is how we landed on the Nevoya route that we’ll talk about more.

Then finally, contract facilitation. This is a really important part of the process, because we really think it’s important to go from commitment all the way through contracting. The contract is what ultimately unlocks the investment, and it was complex. We’ll talk a little bit more about this as we go through the webinar, but there was a lot that we learned through the contracting process that we are excited to share today.

So with that, I will stop talking and pass it over to Stacey, who’s going to do a little bit more of a detailed overview of the program and the process.

STACEY MCCLUSKEY:

Thanks, Andre. As Andre mentioned, I’m going to be walking through our approach to addressing the road freight challenge. Now, much of this has been covered in previous GMA Trucking webinars, so we’re going to move through it kind of quickly. But if you have any questions, you can find additional resources on our website, or we’ll have time at the end for Q&A.

Heavy-duty trucks are a massive source of global emissions, accounting for roughly 3% of global energy-related emissions. To stay on a net zero trajectory for 2050, we need zero emission trucks to make up 35% of sales by 2035. While some markets like China are moving in that direction, the U.S. market has essentially collapsed. Sales peaked at less than half a percent last year and have since dropped to nearly nothing, with fewer than 200 electric trucks sold in the first half of 2025. That is an 80% decline compared to the same period in 2024.

Policy rollbacks haven’t helped, but this isn’t just about regulation. Even at its best, the U.S. barely sold 700 zero-emission trucks in one quarter. Next slide, please.

The challenges to deploying zero-emission vehicles are numerous, but four really stand out. The vehicles and charging infrastructure are costly, significantly more so than traditional diesel trucks. Corporate customers interested in decarbonizing often find their trucking emissions are buried deep in their value chain, making them difficult to identify and address. Further complicating that issue is the use of third-party logistics providers, which add a degree of separation from the carrier. And even when shippers connect directly with carriers, short-term logistics contracts conflict with the long, useful life of the vehicles that the carriers have purchased.

So without confidence in long-term demand, these carriers just can’t justify the premium for zero-emission trucks. These challenges won’t resolve quickly on their own, so we need new tools. GMA Trucking’s book and claim system is just one lever that can make zero-emission trucks deploy in near-term.

Book and claim, as Andre mentioned, decouples the physical shipping service from the environmental attribute, and that’s what we at GMA Trucking call zero emission trucking certificates, or ZETcs. Though newer in the on-road transport sector, many of you are likely familiar with this concept in other sectors, like RECs for electricity and sustainable aviation fuel certificates for aviation.

Unlike those, though, where, for instance, in electricity, the functional unit of a wreck is the quantity of energy, meaning one megawatt hour of renewable electricity, the functional unit in the trucking sector is the quantity of trucking service provided, meaning moving one ton of goods, one kilometer on a zero-emission truck.

Let’s kind of put this into an example. Let’s say Shipper 1 wants to transport their goods on a zero-emission vehicle, but is unable to find a carrier or a route that supports that. As such, Shipper 1 is going to continue to move their goods through Carrier A, which in this example is a traditional diesel trucking service. Because Shipper 1 is able to move their goods on a zero emission vehicle, they decide to buy a ZETc issued by another carrier, in this case Carrier B. Because Carrier B is selling ZETcs through a book and claim model, they’re able to deploy the zero-emission vehicles in geographies and on routes that are most economical for them, even if the physical shippers on those routes don’t want to pay the premium associated with the zero-emission trucking service.

As such, Shipper 1 contracts with Carrier B to procure the environmental attributes associated with their service. Carrier B is still transporting another shipper’s goods at diesel prices, while Shipper 1 pays the premium associated with operating the zero-emission vehicle in exchange for the ZETc. By procuring the ZETc, Shipper 1 is allowed to claim the resulting emission benefit from Carrier B’s usage of the zero-emission truck. Meanwhile, Shipper 2, whose goods are still being transported by Carrier B, cannot account for or claim the zero-emission reduction.

I also want to note that this example shows two different carriers on two different routes, but book and claim also works when you just have a single carrier who’s able to offer a zero emission route, a zero emission trucking service on one route but not another.

Book and claim in general solves many of the challenges I previously mentioned. It lets carriers deploy zero emission trucks for their most operationally efficient, maximizes vehicle and infrastructure utilization, and because buyers are willing to commit to purchasing ZETcs rather than moving their physical freight on zero emission trucks, they’re more comfortable with longer multi-year contracts, as we saw through our pilot procurement. Together, these factors make projects more economical and feasible.

GMA Trucking goes beyond establishing a book and claim system. We also operate a buyers alliance for companies interested in purchasing the ZETcs, acting as demand aggregators. Coordinated demand sends a strong market signal that there’s real appetite for zero-emission trucking services. Companies in the alliance also get better deal terms because they’re going to the market as part of a larger project than individually, and the alliance facilitates peer-to-peer learning, with members knowing that the environmental attributes that they purchased meet strict environmental integrity standards.

Now that we’ve discussed how book and claim and demand aggregation can be a solution to decarbonizing the trucking sector, I also want to talk about GMA’s pilot procurement for ZETcs in more detail. I just want to note that while we are striving to share as much as possible about this procurement, we are unable to share confidential data such as pricing and specific contract details.

But getting to it, in late 2024, GMA Trucking pulled demand from its members and launched a competitive procurement for zero-emission trucking attributes. The RFP gave carriers about four months to work with truck manufacturers and charging providers to put together proposals. We asked for a variety of information, including the price per unit of activity in 10 kilometers, average payload, and financial and operating history. Because the procurement was going to use a book and claim system, we allowed projects to be anywhere in the continental US. They didn’t actually have to match our members’ actual shipping routes, which gets back to the geographic flexibility that I mentioned previously.

We did set additional guardrails as well. Carriers had to use class 8 battery electric trucks backed by renewable electricity or fuel cell trucks that met the strictest 45V tax credit requirements. Emission reductions also had to exceed legal requirements, adhering to the principle of regulatory surplus.

Overall, we were thrilled with the response, so we received 36 proposals from 9 carriers covering 14 states and representing 1,400 million ton kilometers of potential zero-emission trucking services. Overwhelmingly, 95% of the proposals had carriers choosing battery electric over hydrogen fuel cell. This wasn’t totally surprising to us, and we believe this reflects the market trends more broadly, where improving batteries, falling prices, and growing uncertainty around hydrogen policy kind of led carriers to that decision.

What did surprise us was the geographic spread. We got competitive bids well beyond California, where we expected the most to come from due to infrastructure and supportive policies that typically make zero emission projects easier. Carriers also submitted strong proposals for Pacific Northwest, the Mid-Atlantic, and some routes along the I-10 corridor.

In May 2025, we began evaluating these proposals, and after some follow-ups with carriers, we shortlisted the bids based on a list of criteria, among them being the price per attribute, how well the volume aligned with our member demand, and the overall bid quality. This shortlisting included carrier interviews to gather more information and an in-depth due diligence process that we conducted with a third-party consultant. We believe that the end responses that we got, especially those last three bids, were really solid, and from those 36 bids, we narrowed to three finalists before selecting our final winner.

With that, in September 2025, after months of review and discussion, GMA Trucking announced Nevoya as the winner of our pilot procurement. Nevoya is set to deploy 40 brand new class 8 battery electric vehicles on a route between Dallas and Houston, the largest known deployment of zero emission trucks in Texas.

To put this number into even more context, remember that the first half of 2025 only saw 200 electric trucks that were sold. So these 40 trucks that one carrier, Nevoya, is about to put on the road equates to 20% of what was done all across the country over the course of six months. That is a huge achievement. We are absolutely thrilled with our selection and have the utmost confidence in the success of this project.

After the announcement in September, GMA Trucking and Nevoya began the process of drafting a template contract for members. The contracts our members sign are bilateral, meaning that they’re between the buyer and Nevoya. Though GMA coordinates alignment on key terms and preferences, facilitated discussions between Nevoya and members, and played the role as coordinator. Even throughout that, we are not signatories to the contracts ourselves.

So I do want to highlight again, like these are bilateral contracts just between the buyer and Nevoya. Some of the innovative terms that we negotiated on behalf of our members include payment upon delivery of the ZETcs, which protect members from underperformance risk, multi-year contracts to give Nevoya demand certainty, tiered pricing to guarantee members the lowest price possible, and the option to extend at a discount.

We’re really excited about the novelty of this contract, even compared to the other procurements GMA Trucking has, or GMA has run in other sectors.

With all that said, I am so pleased to introduce JV, the Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder of Nevoya, to share some words on what winning the GMA’s pilot procurement means for them.

JOHN “JV” VERDON:

Stacey, thank you so much for that introduction. I very much appreciate it.

So as Stacey mentions, Nevoya is fully electric truckload carrier and it now focuses making zero emissions freight seamless and cost competitive for shippers and 3PLs. Currently running about 30 trucks across over the road and drayage operations in California, Texas, and Arizona. As Stacey mentioned, incredibly excited to be deploying 40 trucks between Dallas and Houston as part of the GMA RFP here.

So I think it was worth talking through a little bit more about Nevoya, and then I’ll give some perspective and feedback on how it was working with the team as part of this RFP, and then a little bit more on why it’s so important for helping us accelerate the transition to electric freight.

I’m assuming most people on this call do have that fundamental belief in the long-term economics of electric trucking, but one of the things that we’re sort of increasingly seeing is that electric operations require demand purpose-built technology. Achieving the asset utilization rates in order to drive the cost competitiveness with diesel is going to mean understanding charging optimization, range prediction, and efficiency training, having that directly integrated in your day-to-day operation.

One of the things that we’ve built out ourselves has been an AI and EV-native transportation management system that is very much purpose-built to account for those unique constraints that come with electric trucks. Whether it’s the range, the charging logistics, the state of charge, and how do you think through integrating AI into the workflow of your dispatch and day-to-day such that the team can really lean into driving a high level of utilization.

Now, I share that to say that, and it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that we operate in this world of constraints right now. So trucks are more expensive, the battery range is more limited, and charging infrastructure isn’t yet prevalent across the country. So I think it is easy for us all to sit here in a sort of a pessimistic and cynical manner about these realities.

Alternatively, the approach that we’ve taken at Nevoya and very thankfully we’ve started to see both in terms of the GMA, the GMA members and the industry at large, there is an opportunity here to lean into that focused can-do attitude and approach that I’ve spoken about in the past. We want to work with partners in the industry to find the solutions that customers want and need. That could be us figuring out how to deliver direct freight capacity in certain markets, or it could be in the establishment of this wonderful book and claim program for trucking.

Both Andre and Stacey mentioned how book and claim mechanisms are already gaining traction in other sectors, whether it’s the sustainable aviation fuel space, the maritime space, and major shippers are looking to use those as tools to drive their decarbonization agendas. For us, it’s incredibly exciting to work with the GMA to establish both the operational and the commercial framework here for book and claim in the trucking industry. It kind of sets that stage for the future.

Stacey also did a really good job of talking through the RFP process more generally. I think you can all attest to the fact that it was incredibly rigorous, collaborative, and in fact, this is first of kind and is market defining. So again, really excited to partner and work with the GMA on establishing that foundation, setting the stage for the future and the ability to go even bigger as time progresses.

From our perspective, the RFP process forced carriers to think pretty systemically. Whether it was the TCO modeling, whether it was the infrastructure planning, understanding the sustainability compliance, and the book and claim architecture in an integrated fashion, we had to really, really dig deep. Worth mentioning that we had two full-time employees working on the RFP for three to six months, building a strong sense and understanding of how can this be a tool for us to catalyze and accelerate the transition to electric freight.

I think what set us apart was that systems level approach. I don’t think we just showed feasibility. We worked to demonstrate sort of simulation validated network design, integrated infrastructure planning, and also digging into what does the data architecture and infrastructure need to look like in order to capture the verifiable data that demonstrates the integrity and the trustworthiness of this program. Crucial that as we go to market with this, we are giving all of the different stakeholders exactly what they need through this program.

For me, this was like a really great example of the importance of the ecosystem approach in solving this challenging problem. We’ve all got a part to play here and that must be baked in operational practicality. The engagement we had both with the GMA and then with the members really centered around like what does this real world deployment look like, not just theoretical concepts.

A couple of other nice call outs for me I’d have here would be we found that the team on a day-to-day basis were an incredible thought partner. Again, like we were creating contractual terms for the first time and understanding the nuance of that, how that mattered from a carrier perspective, how that would matter from a shipper perspective, how that could work from a 3PL perspective, and ultimately like what is the right way to approach that from a compliance and regulatory perspective. It wasn’t easy, but in hindsight, it was a lot of fun.

I have to express my own personal gratitude for the hard work over the holidays in particular. Getting these closed out within a three-month period is no mean feat.I know that I in particular was pretty demanding and pestering of a number of folks who are on this webinar. So personal gratitude on that. It was a genuine pleasure to work getting this up and running.

Other things to say is I think there are from a values perspective, like we were very much aligned. So at the get-go, making sure that we all understood the simple things around being a catalyst for change, having this ability to build in public and share the information with the industry at large, incredibly important to all parties.

But also around like some of the regulatory components, whether it’s additionality, the credibility of the accounting, leaning into the MBM framework, and also just making sure on a day-to-day basis, the way in which we would communicate with the members, the GMA, and those other stakeholders who were involved, incredibly transparent and with a high level of integrity, meaning that when there were challenging conversations around contractual terms, everybody was on the same page. I think that combination and that willingness to step up to the plate and work together was the thing that got this all over the line.

Last couple of comments from me around the importance of book and claim as a tool. From a carrier perspective, it’s abundantly clear that book and claim is a tool that can unlock the scale at which you’re delivering the zero emissions freight. For us, this is this perfect example of deploying 40 trucks in the Texas market, capital formation is typically a challenge here. If you think about the upfront capital expenditure for trucks, charging infrastructure, that can be pretty prohibitive when you are looking to build a network in the new market. For us, having that committed revenue over a four-year period via this GMA RFP program massively de-risks the deployment. It enables the financing of the trucks. It helps facilitate the underwriting of the infrastructure built out, and that ultimately allows us to expand into new markets where customer freight density is still building from an EV perspective. So hugely important in our understanding of how that capital formation comes together and our ability to serve in a market ahead of time.

Another component that is often talked about, and rightfully so, is the TCO piece. The book and claim program here really accelerates that path to cost parity. As I mentioned, EVs have the higher capital expenditure, but a lower operating expenditure, so you need the utilization and the infrastructure efficiency to reach that TCO parity with diesel.

That problem, in order to hit those, like book and claim lets us really front load those investments that drive that efficiency. We can focus and deploy optimal charging locations from day one. We can deploy a larger number of trucks, which means better charger utilization and therefore a lower per truck infrastructure cost. Then we can also go through the process of really refining the operational model such that we are pulling forward that time period of driving to cost parity.

The final piece I’ll mention around is around the network economics. I think a unique piece here is EV deployments in general can be pretty challenging because it is tough to find the return trips in an efficient manner. So what we have here is this ability to fill back hauls at diesel rates in markets where there is the density of freight because the environmental attributes are decoupled and sold separately.

So that ability to spread more ton miles of activity lowers the cost per certificate and can be more, and enables us to be more competitive from a direct procurement, effectively enable us to serve shippers with a variety of solutions.

I’ll wrap it up there and hope that gave a useful carrier perspective as to the why. But again, like massive gratitude to all of the folks involved in the program. It was, it’s been a wild ride, but it’s been incredibly fun working with you all. Thank you. Passing it over to Clayton, I believe.

CLAYTON GERBER:

Awesome. Thanks so much, Dave. We really appreciate it and really helpful to hear your insights. Just want to share my own gratitude to you and the rest of the team. It’s been a pleasure getting to work with you all through this point. I’m excited to continue that work.

I’m just going to take a few minutes here and walk through some of the things that we’ve learned. Other folks on the call today have noted a few of those things, but I’m just going to step a little bit deeper and kind of make sure that y’all are taking away some of the real insights that we see.

At a high level, just quick summary, this procurement was really valuable to us in this nascent market as we look to expand and scale in the future. JV noted on a few of these things, but really the impact of book and claim on that increased utilization of the vehicles, also the power of demand aggregation and that increased demand on enabling charger maximization and decreasing costs over more assets and more operations. The impact that longer contract duration has on lowering the price per mile or price per certificate.

Then also, the innovative commercial structure really demonstrates the way that we can align incentives for future projects to be able to make sure that both the demand and the supply are comfortable in reaching that financial approval to be able to go through with these kinds of investments or partnerships.

Then lastly, the role that demand aggregation in a central node can play in aligning commercial terms over a number of different buyers and shippers in this case, the way that played a really catalytic component in keeping those contracting conversations organized and streamlined.

So stepping into the first one, JV mentioned this a little bit, but visually demonstrating the impact that truck utilization has on the overall TCO. This is a simplified illustrative graph on the right here, just demonstrating that the battery electric trucks have that higher capital costs for both the assets as well as the chargers and the infrastructure compared to diesel. But when we look at the operating costs, those are lower typically in most geographies than that of diesel. So the higher utilization gets you closer to that point of TCO parity.

What the RFP responses demonstrated is that many of the battery electric responses for existing trucks, or those that were already operating today, were for more often lower utilization trucks. That’s obviously a component of several different factors, both from the technical range capacity, but also the route planning constraints that they were under, as well as the ability to find carriers to help partner in that deployment. What we saw typically is that higher premiums were coming from those lower utilization, in particular those that were from existing trucks.

On the other hand, many of the trucks that were coming from net new operations could really see the impact of book and claim on the vehicle utilization to close the gap between the better electric and the diesel TCO. So by having that higher utilization, we can reap the benefits of that lower operating costs more extensively, and that will lead to the lower green premium and amortizing costs over more miles, spreading that out over more miles and therefore emissions impacts.

On the second insight here around the charger maximization, so just quickly demonstrating that outside of the truck expense, obviously charging infrastructure is a critical component and a critical expense. So what we see typically is that when charging infrastructure is deployed, they may not have full assurance on the utilization of those chargers. Typically then we can see a higher price.

What the RFPs showed is that with a lower amount of demand, we’re going to have a higher price per charger or per charging infrastructure site per truck, and therefore a higher relative cost. When we look at the higher demand that we could bring and we can flex up some of the procurement, excuse me, some of the responses, we could see that would lead to lower per unit costs for the charging and therefore decrease the overall green premium or the overall ZETc price. So the RFP was a really valuable insight into actually having the cost economics and data to be able to demonstrate this impact in a really real way tagged to specific projects.

The next one is around that contract length. What we demonstrated both from the RFP itself and the responses, but also kind of all the preceding conversations is that there’s generally a reluctance to go through longer term contracts for direct shipping engagements with carriers. That’s due to a number of very legitimate business changes and operations and risks that may happen to shippers.

What the cause of that from trying to deploy battery electric trucks and infrastructure is that carriers are typically more interested in concentrating a higher proportion of the CapEx premiums into that shorter duration of contract because they’re not confident or not necessarily contractually assured that they will be able to recoup more of those costs after that contract. So we can see a disproportionate amount of that coming in and therefore a higher premium.

When we’re able to more flexibly have a longer contract that’s really enabled by that book and claim chain of custody model, we can see that therefore the charger premium and the vehicle premiums are spread over more years and that means more miles. What that then ultimately results in is a lower cost, a lower marginal cost of green miles or green emissions, emissions abatement.

Therefore, this is really a catalytic component to the book and claim system, being able to really more readily allow organizations and more comfortably allow organizations to engage in this market for longer term contracts. Many of the companies that we’re procuring through this RFP are comfortable or may be going through other kinds of long-term contracts, such as power purchase agreements that look different, obviously, than typical logistics contracts. But there may have team members who are able to leverage some of their expertise across different sectors to understand what are these contracts look like and how might this benefit them.

The next one is around the commercial model here and the pricing. So as I said, I’m not going to share anything more detailed than this around any specific pricing. But this was one of the, I’d say, most complex of the contracts that we’ve engaged in GMA because of the forward-looking nature of it. These trucks are not yet in operation, but they will be. So we had to be able to bridge the gap of incentives across the different parties as well as the risk exposure. So we needed to work with our members and Nevoya to be able to come up with the right pricing and commercial model here.

So a couple of the components I wanted to highlight are these are payment upon delivery of the ZETcs. What that means is as the trucks will actually be operated on a recurring basis, then once they actually move, that is only what the buyers will contribute to and be able to transfer. There’s no ex ante component of this from an either emissions accounting or a payment perspective.

The next is around tier pricing. What we did here is we’re trying to balance the incentives from the carrier side and the shipper side on making sure that there’s no payment for things that they’re not actually being able to receive or that the carrier is not left with a significant portion or component of the green premiums without the ability per their contract to be able to actually contribute and buy down those premiums. What we did is we looked at having kind of a higher price for a tranche of those TKM, or ton kilometer of ZETc, and then that price steps down as they utilize the vehicles more.

The last component here was kind of an option. This is something that gave our members a bit more confidence and comfortability and being able to know that this is like an early access. They have an access here to be able to purchase more ZETcs as the vehicles may live longer than the contract duration. So they have the option of having an extension here.

All these things combined really are this innovative approach to the commercial model allowed the buyers and members to get comfortable as well as for Nevoya to get comfortable with this kind of model. So really taught us the value of commercial, definitely worked really hard with the team to be able to come up with this approach.

The last thing that’s very connected to those terms I just mentioned is the nature of a central node in these conversations. As we said, the contracts are signed bilaterally across the buyers, and in this case, Nevoya. But being able to organize all these different preferences, all these different terms, into the central player of the GMA Trucking team and then in coordination to have those direct early stage conversations with Nevoya significantly streamlined the process for us because we couldn’t have every single member negotiating separately with Nevoya without some sort of commonality and through line to help really make sure that there was efficiency in this process.

What  we really learned is that this was a critical component of this broad demand aggregation. Without it, there may have been deviations that could have put the project at risk.

So really, really appreciate both the partnership from Nevoya in these conversations, from our lawyers, and also obviously all of the buyers that were involved in this, which was a really collaborative process. It was really great to see everybody coming together and being able to help shepherd through this really innovative approach.

So with that, I am excited to introduce the two shippers that we will hear from, both from Amazon and Etsy. So with that, perhaps I’ll hand it over to Eleanor if you want to share a few words about what this process meant for you and any reflections you have.

ELEANOR BASTIAN:

Thank you, Clayton. And thanks for hosting this webinar. It’s great to have this out here. I’m glad you’ll have a recording because you’ve really shared so much specifics about what we’ve developed over the last year or so, and I hope it’s really valuable to everyone here. And thanks for joining.

I’m Eleanor. I’m with Amazon. I work in worldwide operations sustainability. What I’d like to share is that sort of as GMA covered at the beginning, at Amazon, we see the utility of book and claim in a lot of different spaces. You can look at it as hard to abate or just nascent supply chains or high initial costs. But when it’s difficult to directly procure, consume a low carbon solution, such as for electric trucks, as well as building materials like steel and concrete and fuels like sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel,book and claim mechanisms, we think, can really advance decarbonization, provided that they are designed with clear rules, terms, and conditions that are high integrity.

So that’s what we created here with GMA Trucking, and we’re really proud to be part of this today and discuss it with everyone. What we see that book and claim did here was provide producers with a set of buyers without creating these issues for truck utilization. Then it, in a very seamless way, gives the buyers like Amazon the ability to make these credible and verifiable environmental claims that can go towards our climate goals.

What we have seen over the last few years is that it’s really hard for carriers to adopt electric trucks when they have a lot of different customers or shippers because they have this sort of ad hoc interest from all their shippers that’s not really, it’s a lot of different lanes, a lot of different times of the year, et cetera. That can just destroy your vehicle utilization or the number of miles you drive on a vehicle a year. That utilization is how you manage your total cost of ownership and principally.

This whole approach that they’ve described in detail today avoids that whole challenge because we’re separating out this benefit from going and getting loads that work for that vehicle on a daily basis. So you’re getting the maximum amount of miles per year.

I’ll just say one more thing that there’s a lot of different types of buyers that were involved here. Amazon is a little different because we are a carrier. We own trucks. We are a shipper. We are sort of a freight forwarder. We buy a lot of fuel. We work with OEMs. One thing that’s really cool here that’s different from other market-based mechanisms is that within a year or so, we may be able to physically procure truckloads from Nevoya in Texas, and have this combination of a market-based solution with EACs as well as, they’re just running our loads with the volumes that we have in Texas, which are pretty significant.

So I can say a little more about what my feedback is in the process, maybe after we hear from the other buyer.

But I just wanted to say now that Amazon is really proud to work with the Center for Green Market Activation on this initiative and other initiatives and really proud to work with Nevoya as well. So thank you to Clayton, Stacy, Andre, JV, and Sam.

CLAYTON GERBER:

Awesome. Thanks. Thanks so much for that. I really, really appreciate it. And it’s been a pleasure working with you as well. Sam, I’ll turn it over to you for a few words as well.

SAM BRUNDRETT:

Yeah, thanks, Clayton. Hi, everyone. I’m excited to participate in today’s call and help announce the launch of this pilot.

My name is Sam Brundrett, and I’m the Environmental Impact Lead at Etsy. A little about our business and our decarbonization journey that I think will help write context.

We operate two global two-sided marketplaces, Etsy.com and Teapot. These marketplaces connect with millions of buyers and sellers around the world. We don’t own inventory. Instead, we facilitate shipping by negotiating rates with carriers like USPS, UPS, FedEx, a bunch of others, and we offer those shipping labels to sellers.

Through this process, we facilitate hundreds of millions of parcel shipments each year that travel through a network of consolidated along all middle mile and last mile transport modes. Shipping is therefore super important for our climate strategy. We have an SBTi-approved net zero goal that includes all of the emissions that we facilitate through our marketplaces, and it’s about 60% of our total footprint, or about 300,000 metric tons of CO2. The majority of that is coming from ground transport.

Historically, our decarbonization levers have included enabling local commerce through search and filters on our platforms, advocacy, and carrier engagement and selection. But because sellers ultimately have or choose the carrier and shipping methods, our ability to directly influence emissions reductions have been somewhat limited.

This is why we see book and claim as such an important and complementary solution, provides credible, scalable way to support zero emissions trucking in regions where our shipping volumes are pretty high, but where access to physical electric trucking services remains somewhat limited or non-existent.

It also allows us to help accelerate the deployment of these solutions today rather than waiting for their availability in the future.

Lastly, I’ll just say we’re particularly excited about this project because Etsy has millions of buyers and sellers in Texas. It’s a big market for us. So supporting cleaner freight in this region improves reliability of shipping ecosystem and delivers local air quality benefits to communities.

Through the book and claim approach, we plan to apply these certificates towards progress on our net zero goals, using frameworks like the AIM standard, as well as the Task Force for Climate Action Transparency, or TCAT, while helping inform the updates to the SBTi and GSU protocol standards related to use of market-based mechanisms in scope 3 over the next month, two months to a year.

Just thank you very much to the GMA folks. As Eleanor said, they have done just such an amazing job of shepherding the initiative from program design, running the RFP, and supporting the contract development process, which I know just sounds so banal and boring, but it is just like such a painful process for anybody who’s been on either side of that process. So to have support there is really instrumental, as well as obviously looking forward to participating or partnering with Nevoya and continuing to learn from their GMA trucking buyers.

So with that, I’ll pass it back to Clayton.

CLAYTON GERBER:

Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you both. Really, again, it’s been a pleasure working with you and all the buyers, and thank you for sharing the words on this webinar today. It’s really helpful, I think, to have folks hear from you directly to be able to really share the insights and learnings and learn how to get involved. So thank you.

In the last couple of minutes here before we turn over to Q&A, and we’re right on time, which is awesome. I just want to make a couple of different announcements on what is coming next for us and what we’re continuing to explore for 2026 and how to get involved.

So building on these lessons learned, we are looking to explore another concept here, which is more intentionally trying to pair together the book and claim concept with the physical demand that’s more traditional in the market to bring these two things together to lower overall economics and increase that utilization, as we’ve been talking about a lot today, to be able to move towards that future state where physical demand is kind of all we need.

One of the things I’ll note that we haven’t mentioned yet today is especially in this sector, but across all our sectors, but especially in this one, we don’t see book and claim as the 2050 target necessarily. We do hope to see a world where the total cost of ownership and the cost of these assets, as well as the charging, are ubiquitously available across the US and ideally around the globe at some point so that a shipper can say, “Hey, we want electric or battery electric services, please provide that carrier.” And they can actually do so.

But right now we need to bridge the gap and we need to accelerate the market as fast as possible. So another thing we’re going to be exploring this year is can we integrate these two things to try and bring kind of the power of both of them to that solid physical demand as well as that flexibility of book and claim. That would hopefully increase the utilization of those vehicles, again, further decrease the cost of chargers by increased utilization. And then again, allow that optimization for both charging and route planning.

We also will be exploring doing another pure play version like we did last year, but we’ll kind of depend on the overall demand that we have and the different project scoping that we’re going through now. So very excited for what is to come next.

Last thing I’ll just say just a little bit about GMA Trucking. So we are, as I said, a membership organization of those buyers, bringing them together to be able to have the demand aggregation function. That includes both the shippers as well as freight forwarders who are looking to address emissions within their scope 3 primarily. We also work, really, membership is global, but we focused this last on the US. We are looking to expand in the coming years, and then there are discounts available for having different memberships across the different GMA programs.

Then the last thing I’ll note is that commitment and involvement provides a lot more than just the RFP. There’s a lot of shared learning, influence into the system and the decisions we make. So actually members are not required to join in their procurement. We don’t ask for a commitment up front. Obviously we want folks to be involved, but it’s not a commitment just to join, and any decision on buying or participating in the RFP can come later.

But we also, it’s not just on the shipper side. We do a lot of engagement with every intermediary and every part of the value chain, whether that be CPOs, carriers, freight forwarders. We really want and need to learn from the market and get everybody involved to be able to have this process scale in the future.

So we are always looking for folks to speak with. You can reach out to us at the trucking@gmacenter.org e-mail or reach out on LinkedIn, our website, anything else like that.

I’ll also note that we will be publishing a white paper in the coming weeks that we’ll go through in more detail some of the different things that we talked about today so that you can review and ask if there’s any other questions. And hopefully that’s a helpful resource to you all.

So with that, we have about 5 or 6 minutes left.

I want to just open it up, Sam, if you could help, GMA Sam. It’s confusing to have multiple Sams on the team, but if you could help shepherd us through some questions here, I’m happy to answer some, and for those that we don’t answer, we will look to try and provide some responses after the call.

SAM PEARL SCHWARTZ:

Yeah, thanks, Clayton. And we’ve had some great questions come in over the chat. So as Clayton mentioned, I don’t think we’ll get to all of them right now, but we’ll get through it. We can over the next 6 minutes and follow up if necessary.

Clayton, maybe I’ll stick with you. We’ve got two questions related to verification and registry, kind of interrelated topics.

So kind of a first question on how are these certificates being certified or verified and then connected to that once they’ve been certified or verified, is there going to be a registry by which these attributes are being tracked?

CLAYTON GERBER:

Yeah, happy to speak to some of that. So they definitely are verified and they’re going to be following the GLEC framework from accounting. So as we talked about earlier, the functional unit here is the emissions intensity of the activity of the service. So that’s going to be looking at the emissions per ton kilometer in this case, following the GLEC or ISO 14083, and then they will be verified by an accredited third party to ensure that all the data going into that calculation is accurate and robust.

Then from a registry perspective, we’ve been working over the last, through this RFP and continuing to finalize exactly what the registry provider will be, but we are looking to partner with one of the existing providers in the registry space. It’s critical to us that certificates are tracked and transparent, and so it’s a really needed component to have this be logged and tracked on a registry.

I’ll also just note quickly, I think there was another question in this, in here, and we kind of sped over the timeline. The trucks are looking to be deployed and actually operational by the end of this year or early next year, and so there is some time here to kind of flesh out some of those details. But absolutely, the accounting is a critical point, as is the verification and the registry.

SAM PEARL SCHWARTZ:

Thanks, Clayton. I’m going to actually stick with you related to accounting.

We had a question on more details on the energy source that’s powering the EVs and more specifically, how are you and how are we calculating the kind of emissions profile of that service?

CLAYTON GERBER:

Yeah, absolutely. So again, in alignment with the GLEC framework and ISO 14083, you will be looking at the energy used for that service. So in this case, for battery electric, that’s going to be the kilowatt hours. So for each kilowatt hour dispense, there’s a whole methodology involved in that standard around what do you do about any losses in the charging infrastructure and what data sources are available.

So we’ve worked with the participants in this process to establish the verification document to be able to ensure that there are credible and most primary data as possible. We really want to focus on having primary data as opposed to any sort of model data.

Again, per the ISO 14083, we will report both the location based, but as a requirement for this process, we want to make sure that we’re backed by renewables. So we require the purchase of Green-E eligible RECs as well to be able to be able to address the emissions coming from the electricity because it’s not just at the wheel, it’s also the well to tank part as well.

So we will have RECs being backed by them and then those will also be sourced from Texas. JV, I’m not sure if there’s anything else you want to share there, if that captures it.

JOHN “JV” VERDON:

I think you captured it really nicely there, Clayton.

CLAYTON GERBER:

Cool.

SAM PEARL SCHWARTZ:

Awesome. Thanks, Clayton. Well, I know we only have two minutes left, so maybe we’ll answer one final question. I’ll note we’ve gotten a bunch of additional questions in the chat since we started the Q&A. So I want to reiterate, we’ll try to address those that we can after the close. Andre, maybe I’ll turn to you just to close.

We had a kind of question about how we see this program scaling and the opportunities for scale, the opportunities for kind of reducing friction points and expanding the scale over time.

ANDRE DE FONTAINE:

Yeah, thanks, Sam, and thanks for the question. I mean, that’s– a big part of what we’re focused on is, how do we take this to the next step? And when you look across our, the programs that the GMA has been involved in over the years, they do follow a similar trajectory where you do an initial pilot, sometimes small scale.

In this case, it’s still pretty significant, and then that proves out the concept. A lot of the communications that go around the results end up drawing more participants in. So part of this is a question for those of you on the call. How can you help us by getting involved and spreading the word?

But we are looking ahead to our next effort. Clayton mentioned combining physical with book and claim, which we think holds a lot of potential. And a lot of our ability to scale, yes, it’s about drawing in more participants, but it also is around standardizing aspects of the process. We learned a huge amount through the contracting. We think it’s going to be a lot easier next time we do this, we think things will be a little bit simpler. Once we’ve got an established registry partner, there’s a lot on the accounting side that we had to work through.

Then just the RFP process itself, I think, can be streamlined along with how we think about pricing. Some of this we do plan to publish.

I think there was a question there about, will we be releasing templates? Yes, we will be doing that. I don’t know exactly which elements we’re going to templatize, but that’s certainly part of the plan to make at a minimum those documents available to our trucking members and then some also to the general public.

I will note alongside this, we are developing a white paper that goes a bit deeper on a lot of the issues that we talked about today, which we will be releasing over the next few weeks, so that’s something that we would encourage everybody to take a look at. I think they’re the insights that we draw out of that process will help us scale to the next steps.

So with that, I think we are right at time. So Sam, should I just close this out now that I’m talking? Okay, great.

Well, thank you so much to all of our speakers today who did such a great job explaining this complex initiative. And thank you to all the folks that took the time out of your day to hear about this.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out. I know that we weren’t able to answer all of the questions and there’s a lot of good ones that we weren’t able to get to. The team is here. We’re always ready to engage with folks productively. So don’t hesitate to reach out and there will be more to come on this issue as we continue to move forward.

So thanks so much. We’ll talk again soon. Thanks, everybody.