Coastlink was established as a UK organisation to advance the cause of shortsea container shipping around the UK coast. It has now become a European organisation covering the whole coastline from Spain to St Petersburg. At their annual conference in Dunkirk at the end of September, logistics specialists and shipping lines gathered to discuss shippers’ attempts to improve their green credentials. Multimodal solutions are being developed in order to take freight off the road, and ports such as Calais are looking at constructing intermodal terminals where containers and swap bodies could be transferred to road chassis.