Environmental performance — A constant evolution for the 2021 results
Above and beyond2021 results show a strong ongoing commitment to steady improvement
Green Marine participants can take great pride in the advances they’ve made to North America’s maritime industry in terms of greater sustainability over the past 15 years. The 2021 results published for release at the GreenTech 2022 conference in early June show again how the program’s ship owners, port administrators, terminal operators and shipyard managers continually strive to reach a bar that has repeatedly been made wider and higher.
The overall average for the 2021 environmental performance by all the certified participants reached 3.0 on the program’s 1-to-5 scale, after being at 2.9 for three years in a row.
The slight improvement is notable because it has been achieved in the context of a number of challenges put forth by the very nature of the program’s dynamic structure.
All the program’s existing criteria are reviewed on a regular basis and then augmented as necessary to remain sufficiently demanding at each progressive level beyond existing or expected regulations and in keeping with newly available technologies. As a result, landside participants had a substantial revision of the spill prevention and stormwater performance indicator for their 2021 reporting after a thorough review of the U.S. regulatory baseline and standard practices. Ship owners had more stringent criteria within the oily discharge performance indicator to keep it sufficiently challenging beyond current regulations and best practices.
New criteria
Through Green Marine’s consensus-building process, new performance indicators are introduced from time to time to deal with an emerging issue. These new indicators require the relevant participants to assess a new array of criteria at each of the program’s five levels so they can benchmark their current performance and subsequently take specific actions to improve year over year. For 2021 reporting, ship owners were required to relate their ship recycling efforts for the very first time after a number had done so voluntarily for the previous year.
Another key factor is the continued expansion of the participating membership. Green Marine’s 2021 results had 11 new participants reporting for the first time and, in some cases, for more than one location. In Green Marine’s experience, it takes a while for new participants to become familiar with all the program’s criteria and proceed from the initial and essential benchmarking to figuring out what they can feasibly do to further improve.
What’s truly heartening is how Green Marine’s participants have voluntarily demonstrated steady progress on all the designated fronts over the years
They invested the necessary efforts to keep the overall average hovering in the 3.0 range – give or take a decimal or two – since the evaluations reported for 2010 onwards. The 2.9 to 3.2 range has been maintained even though the program has established far more expectations than the original six performance indicators.
The participants who have stayed with the program year after year have demonstrated the steadiest progress with their step-by-step approach backed up with significant investments of money, time, labour and in-house and/or consulted expertise and, most importantly, a tried-and-true commitment to advancing environmental excellence. They, along with the new participants, are further committed to addressing the necessary challenges ahead.
To read all of the 2021 results as well as previous reporting, read our Annual performance report or visit the Results page for the latest and all previous years' results.