North America’s leading environmental certification program turns 15 with bigger ambitions

By David Bolduc, President, Green Marine

Green Marine has much to celebrate as it marks 15 years as the leading environmental certification program for North America’s maritime industry with more than 450 members as participants, maritime associations, partners and supporters. Thanks to the voluntary, dedicated efforts of the ship owners, port and Seaway authorities, terminal operators and shipyard managers involved, major strides have been achieved in improving air, water and habitat quality.

Responding to emerging issues with the membership’s guidance, Green Marine has added eight performance indicators to its original six over the years to take up new challenges that include addressing underwater noise, improving the safety and sustainability of ship recycling, and charting the way for ports to further improve their community relations. A lot of this has also been influenced by the more than 90 supporters from environmental, scientific and governmental organizations invited to discuss emerging issues and their potential solutions directly with the industry members.

Consistently taking an inclusive and collaborative approach, Green Marine has changed how the industry approaches environmental matters. There’s still healthy competition, but the industry’s leadership has realized the environmental, social and economic advantages of working together on common sustainability issues. It leads to a fuller understanding of maritime transportation’s various logistical challenges, produces better results and, thereby, return on investments in time, money, labour and other resources.

Frank Camaraire, Director of Climate Change Policy at BC Ferries, is among those who praise Green Marine’s networking value. On congratulating Green Marine on 15 years, he says it’s been a great way for BC Ferries “to develop a robust environmental program… reduce our environmental footprint, foster a culture of continual improvement, and exceed regulatory compliance.”

Isabelle Brassard, Fednav’s Senior Vice President, Logistics and Sustainable Development, notes that Green Marine’s focus on “continual improvement is just as fundamental today as when the program was launched 15 years ago.”

Turbulent origins

As is often the case, it took a crisis to gather forces. A few industry leaders initially met following public outcry about the introduction of aquatic invasive species through ballast water into the St. Lawrence Seaway and Great Lakes navigational system. While the maritime industry has generally strived to do better when it knows better, the AIS issue brought intense media attention. As Ray Johnston, Green Marine’s past president, recently noted: “We knew, and kept telling media, that marine transportation was actually greener than other modes, but that story wasn’t getting across. We realized it wasn’t enough to simply keep repeating this… We had to find ways to clearly demonstrate it.”

Green Marine arose from a small group of industry CEOs making a real commitment to having their company operations go beyond regulations on six prioritized issues, and clearly demonstrate their progress on each of these fronts in a transparent, measurable way. After lengthy discussions, it was decided to establish four levels of increasingly demanding criteria beyond Level 1’s monitoring of regulations in a true commitment to continual improvement.

The program’s framework is one of Green Marine’s biggest successes. It holds the industry’s participants to the same rigorous standards. However, it gives new participants some time to familiarize themselves with the extensive requirements at each level, while also obliging them to continue to improve year over year until they achieve Level 2 best practices for all their applicable performance indicators. Participants continue to subsequently improve, bringing the latest overall annual performance average to 3.0.

Continual evolution

Green Marine’s framework adapts well to new challenges. When ports called upon the program to better gauge their progress in community relations, Green Marine ventured beyond its existing scope into the Social Sciences to find ways to fairly assess efforts that can be more challenging to measure in terms of results. With a quickly rising number of shipyard operators in the program, Green Marine is now developing criteria specifically for these participants that originally shared the performance indicators created for terminal operators. The overall program is reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that all of its criteria remain sufficiently challenging at each level beyond regulations and in light of new science, technologies and industry best practices.

The framework’s success is largely due to the involvement of the program’s four regional advisory committees, working groups established to explore specific issues, as well as the regular input from the more than 90 supporters representing governmental, scientific and environmental interests. In fact, it’s why, after a global survey of existing programs, the not-for-profit Surfrider Foundation Europe sought to license the model to launch Green Marine Europe in 2020. This collaboration is already proving to be mutually beneficial with our two organizations working in tandem but keenly aware of geographical and regulatory differences.

As for the AIS issue, Green Marine’s participating ship owners, along with others, advanced solutions by trialing mid-ocean ballast exchanges that subsequently became mandatory and have proven highly effective. Participants have also tried out different ballast water treatment systems before they became compulsory to install. Ahead of regulations, Green Marine has furthermore expanded its criteria to include ways to address biofouling.

Yet another key example of Green Marine’s industry-based collaboration is with Transport Canada towards standardizing the approach to measuring greenhouse gas emissions at ports. After successful voluntary trials of the Port Emissions Inventory Tool by Green Marine participants in Canada and the United States, Green Marine licensed the PEIT in 2016 for its entire port membership to use without cost as a mean to achieve the program’s Level 4 GHG performance indicator requirements.

Decarbonizing mission

Green Marine is again charting a new course when it comes to decarbonizing maritime transportation. The 2022 program includes the reduction targets that ship owners must achieve to surpass the International Maritime Organization’s 2050 GHG reduction goals.

Participants have already significantly lowered GHG and other air pollutants since Green Marine’s inception through fleet renewal, vessel retrofits, optimized voyage planning, improved waste management, shoreside plug-in power, electrically powered equipment, and other strategies. However, the route towards decarbonization is the start of an entirely new era of unprecedented challenges for the industry. It requires extensive investment in the research, development and testing of cleaner sources of energy to establish their feasibility for various maritime conditions and types of operations, as well as an evolution in market forces to subsequently provide these sources on the large scales required.

Although daunting, Green Marine’s membership has accepted this challenge knowing that it’s only possible if clear markers of progress toward the ultimate objective are laid out. It is why extensive discussions were held to determine the steps required to meet this lofty goal.

As a result, Green Marine now requires ship owners to achieve a 2.4 per cent annual GHG reduction to obtain the certification program’s highest Level 5 ranking for this performance indicator. Here, too, is where Green Marine’s strengths come to the fore. Green Marine calls upon key industry representatives, technology innovators, and environmental, scientific and governmental experts within the membership to share applicable knowledge and experience. Now with Green Marine Europe onboard, there’s also greater insight as to what is being done across the Atlantic as well as in other areas where European vessels regularly operate.

Green Marine’s participants have established a strong culture of sharing their direct experience with environmental innovation and best practices to benefit the industry as a whole. As a result, there’s less ‘reinventing of the wheel’ with participants relating, for example, their experience with cleaner energy sources, such as hydroelectric shore power, liquid natural gas and most recently biofuels, which all constitute key interim steps to reducing emissions on the route to decarbonization.

Decarbonization and underwater noise weren’t even common terms when Green Marine set out to change the way maritime transportation’s key players collaborated on environmental issues 15 years ago. There’s no doubt that the next 15 years will bring about even greater change as the organization’s membership works to further advance environmental excellence. Here’s to the next 15 years and onward!

For more information about Green Marine, visit: www.green-marine.org