The Great Lakes Tow­ing Com­pa­ny and Great Lakes Ship­yard each received their cer­tifi­cates for par­tic­i­pat­ing in Green Marine in 2018.

Green Marine holds course as it expands participation and priorities

Green Marine, the lead­ing envi­ron­men­tal cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram for North America’s mar­itime indus­try, released the results of its par­tic­i­pants’ sus­tain­abil­i­ty efforts in 2018 at the organization’s annu­al Green­Tech con­fer­ence ear­li­er today.

“I am sat­is­fied that we are hold­ing course with the per­for­mance lev­els as we con­tin­ue to widen our tra­jec­to­ry in terms of envi­ron­men­tal pri­or­i­ties, as well as tough­en some of our exist­ing stan­dards,” David Bolduc, Green Marine’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, told Green­Tech 2019’s atten­dees at the West­in Cleve­land Down­town Hotel.

The pro­gram has 133 par­tic­i­pants – a 12% increase from last year at this time. These ship own­ers, port author­i­ties, Sea­way cor­po­ra­tions, ter­mi­nal oper­a­tors and ship­yard man­agers vol­un­tar­i­ly com­mit to eval­u­at­ing their envi­ron­men­tal per­for­mance on a year­ly basis. They rank their efforts on a 1‑to‑5 scale based on the detailed cri­te­ria spec­i­fied for 12 per­for­mance indi­ca­tors. These indi­ca­tors address green­house gas emis­sions, com­mu­ni­ty impacts, garbage and waste man­age­ment, and oth­er pri­or­i­tized envi­ron­men­tal issues.

A total of 144 reports were sub­mit­ted for 2018 with some par­tic­i­pants fil­ing for more than one type of busi­ness activ­i­ty or dis­tinct loca­tions. This 17% increase in eval­u­a­tions over the pre­vi­ous year reflects the par­tic­i­pants involv­ing more aspects of their oper­a­tions, which is a wel­comed development.

The over­all aver­age for the 2018 report­ing dipped to 2.9 from 3.1 in 2017, which was not unex­pect­ed giv­en the influx of new par­tic­i­pants, new indi­ca­tors and more strin­gent criteria.

The 2018 results includ­ed the largest group of new­ly report­ing par­tic­i­pa­tions since the program’s 2007 incep­tion. New mem­bers typ­i­cal­ly start out at the program’s low­er lev­els. They usu­al­ly require some time to famil­iar­ize them­selves with the program’s var­ied cri­te­ria, deter­mine their cur­rent stand­ing, and then put into the place the peo­ple, sys­tems and tech­nol­o­gy for tar­get­ed improvement.

Port author­i­ties and ship own­ers oper­at­ing in salt water also had to report on new per­for­mance indi­ca­tors for under­wa­ter noise. Green Marine is one of the world’s first vol­un­tary ini­tia­tives to take mea­sur­able steps to ful­ly under­stand, reduce and mit­i­gate under­wa­ter noise impacts on marine mam­mals and its exper­tise has wide­ly been sought.

Even with the sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er new mem­ber­ship, 82% of the over­all par­tic­i­pants report­ed a Lev­el 2 or high­er aver­age, show­ing a com­bined progress of 77 improved lev­els. The improve­ments were achieved despite the cri­te­ria being made more strin­gent for some indi­ca­tors to ensure their lev­els remained suf­fi­cient­ly chal­leng­ing vis-à-vis exist­ing or immi­nent reg­u­la­tions and the mar­ket­place avail­abil­i­ty of new technology.

All par­tic­i­pants agree to have their results ver­i­fied every two years by an inde­pen­dent ver­i­fi­er trained by Green Marine. They also con­sent to hav­ing their indi­vid­ual lev­els for each indi­ca­tor pub­lished and these results are post­ed on the Green Marine website.

A greener Green Marine!

Green Marine has off­set car­bon emis­sions from its annu­al con­fer­ence since 2014. Last year, it took this ini­tia­tive a lot fur­ther… With the help of Plan­e­tair, it cal­cu­lat­ed and off­set the green­house gas emis­sions gen­er­at­ed by the com­mute and busi­ness trav­el of its employ­ees in 2018, as well as the ener­gy con­sump­tion of its premis­es. Green Marine then pur­chased car­bon cred­its equiv­a­lent to last year’s foot­print of 33 tonnes of CO2.

For more infor­ma­tion about the Green Marine envi­ron­men­tal cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram or the 2018 results, please contact:

Manon Lan­thi­er
Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er
Green Marine
manon.lanthier@green-marine.org
418 569‑5110

Click here to down­load a PDF of the news release.