When it comes to port expansion and preparing for the next surge in containerized cargo, sustainability isn’t just an environmental buzzword, it’s the whole ball of wax, according to participants at a recent engineering summit presented by the American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA).

The three-day session was held at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, S.C. and ranged widely over such diverse topics as inland distribution logistics, regional transportation planning, asset management, and the changing environment for capital investment.

But it was two largely forward-looking panels—one o on the hot button topic of climate change and the other on port sustainability—that most challenged attendees to think differently when they returned to work.

While it’s understandable that port engineers think mostly in terms of budgetary cycles and simply meeting the challenge of keeping their facilities running day-to-day and month-to-month, the charge from speaker after speaker was to practice to engage in long-term thinking.

“It’s really about the capacity to endure, to remain diverse, and to remain productive over time,” said David Knuckey, the moderator of the sustainability session and director of engineering at Port Freeport on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Economy, ecology, and equity

The traditional definition of sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future.

Those who spoke on the subject firmly endorsed that high-minded intention, but each framed their comments slightly different.

To Knuckey, for instance, sustainability in the port industry means striking a balance between “economy, ecology, and equity.”

Jay Jahangri, president and environmental health/safety director for TRE Consulting Inc., of Martinez, California, preferred to describe it as the intersection of three intersecting circles, representing people, profit, and planet.

“The challenge to [coming to terms with this] is the absence of clear leadership on the federal level,” Jahangri said.

“What that’s led to is a hodge-podge of local regulations and voluntary standards, and in some cases, organizations creating internal standards of their own,” he continued.

Although environmentalism has been around as a movement since the 1970s, and sustainable building and policies promulgated since the 1990s, in really wasn’t until the start of the current decade that ports began to look at the issue, Jahangri said.

Tipping the scale were concerns about air quality, greenhouse gases, and carbon efficiency that began gripping coastal communities from Long Beach to Anchorage at precisely the same time that cargo began flooding into the west from Asia.

“There’s a strong social component to all this, of course, because tensions arise when unsustainable development occurs,” Jahangri said. “That’s why sustainability isn’t just the right thing to do, or the healthy thing to do, in a very real sense, it’s a passport to future growth.”

Buy-in needed from the 'big guys'

The pursuit of the durable and sustainable practices in business requires that systems be in place to secure effective participation.

“First of all, there has to buy-in from the big guys,” Jahangri said. “You have to convince the executive director and the board.

“Then you have to establish a port-wide policy, a corporate commitment, and then you have to implement a program to back it up,” he said.

Jahangri emphasized that it’s vital to incorporate sustainable polices into the master planning process, and to apply them from the conception of any new project, through the permitting process and on through to completion.

“The biggest challenge in terms of selling this to port leadership, is that the social dimensions are not tangible, so a lot of work has to go into educating and empowering stakeholders, educating the naysayers, to the need to develop port and maritime-specific green standards,” he said.

“But if sustainability isn’t incorporated this way, it’s simply not going to happen,” Jahangri said.

As one might expect, when programs and policies are developed locally rather than implemented on a national level, standards and commitments vary widely.

While there are many green building initiatives in the world, like the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED suite of standards for environmental construction, the Asian CASBEE standard, and Britain’s Breeam assessment method, no one has come up with a green standard for maritime handling facilities.

“Of course, when it comes to buildings, you can apply the same standards developed for other buildings, but ports also have unique considerations,” Jahangri said. “For instance, there are green dredging practices that you can consider, there’s the sustainable management of construction projects, and there’s how you operate your facilities and infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

“The thing is, you have to have the mindset that sustainability is the route of least resistance when it comes to expansion,” he said. Your goal, everybody’s goal, is to ultimately be carbon neutral.”

The rock star in the room was Nicholas Kozma, senior program manager for the Port of Long Beach. Not only is he doing green, as opposed to talking the talk, he’s doing it on a grand scale at the fifth largest port in the world.

In fact, the morning he spoke, the Port of Long Beach was signing a multi-million dollar deal with California Edison to provide the infrastructure for wharf side power. The connection to the grid at multiple berths will allow container ships to shut down their engines while discharging their cargo, dramatically reducing emissions.

But as Kozma reported, this was just the latest initiative tied to Long Beach’s four-year-old Green Port Policy, which he described as a “framework for environmentally-friendly port operations.”

“The guiding principles of the policy are protecting the community from harmful environmental impacts of port operations, employing the best available technology to avoid or reduce environmental impacts, to implement sustainable practices in design, construction, operational and administrative practices at the port, and to engage and educate the community through an ongoing dialogue,” he said.

Among the specific initiatives the Port of Long Beach has undertaken are the consolidation of smaller terminals on its 1,200-acre site, implementation of clean truck and slow ship policies to reduce harmful emissions in the port district, and the removal, treatment, and beneficial reuse of contaminated soils and sentiments in the harbor district.

“Our goal is to reduce air pollution in the harbor district by 45 percent over the next five years,” Kozma said, while admitting that a lot of the initiatives are being pushed or supported by state lawmakers as part of California’s broader clean air and environmental strategies.

Yet, the port has tried to position itself at the forefront of these efforts through the efforts outlined above and others, including a clean harbor craft initiative, “green leases” to ensure that terminal tenants adopt and abide by sustainable practices, recycling of everything that can be recycled, and even the planting of native vegetation in the port district to soften its industrial look while not causing a dramatic increase in the amount of water used on the grounds.

“In every move we make, we’re aiming at targeted effects or targeted benefits, and we’re extending it in every area we can, be it construction, engineering, purchasing, procurement, whatever,” Kozma said.

Since implementing its Green Port Policy in January, 2005, the Port of Long Beach has saved more than $15 million—savings the port has passed on to its customers whenever possible, he said.

“If sustainability is going to work, you can’t lose sight of the fact that a port, ultimately, is a commercial operation—after all, if our tenants don’t make money, we don’t make money,” he said.

John Pauling, vice president of Halcrow, a Sewell, N.J.-based design and management consultancy, contends that when it comes to sustainability, businesses, and particularly large-scale enterprises like ports, can’t afford not to do it.

“What’s the business case?” Pauling asked. “Simply put, sustainability creates value by reducing capital expenditures—for instance, through recycling and reuse—and creates competitive advantage by both attracting high quality workers who have embraced ‘green’ and by attracting customers who are increasingly looking to buy green products or engage with environmentally-conscious partners.”

Not that it’s always easy, Pauling said, particularly when it comes to inspiring buy-in from corporate leaders.

“Why is making the business case so difficult? Because, ‘No one size fits all,’” Pauling said. “There are no universal solutions, the societal case isn’t readily evident—it seems ‘futuristic’—and in some ways, it feels like compliance, like something you’re being forced to do.

“However, I would argue that opportunity trumps responsibility, and the more you look, the more potential benefits you’ll find in sustainable policies and practices,” he continued. “At the very least, you’ll reduce your regulatory risk if and when these policies become mandatory in your state.”

Climate change a growing concern

Looming above it all is the unrelenting issue of global climate change—an issue that everyone grapples with, but few, it could be argued, really understand.

The task of painting the big picture fell to Margaret Davidson, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Services Center in Charleston.

“The neat thing [about Charleston], and discussing climate change and the effects of sea level rise, is that from a marketing standpoint you don’t have to go all the way to the ark scenario to make your point,” Davidson said. “All you have to do is look at the prevailing trend, which suggests that over the next few decades, we may see a sea level rise of about 39 centimeters.”

Although Davidson, as a federal employee, refrains from embracing an advocacy position—preferring instead to “hook concerned citizens up with data sources and let them go out and be the proselytizers—she said over the next decade businesses and semi-public entities like the port will have to adapt to the changing climate if they have any hopes of not breaking the bank over the long term.

“Clearly, the ‘no regrets’ option is to adapt,” she said. “And, that goes for everyone. After all, most of the world’s largest cities are located at the water’s edge, and 98 percent of our consumer economy is based on stuff coming in by port.”

Robert Massarelli, senior technologist for master planning at CH2M Hill in Cape Canaveral, Florida, the other speaker on climate change at the engineering seminar, knows well the challenge of balancing long- and short-term considerations.

But as a master planner on numerous airport, port, commercial, and residential projects, he said development with an eye toward sustainability and mitigation of climate change impacts are increasingly important parts of the planning process.

“You really do have to start right at the beginning, looking at risks and impacts, but on the plus side, when it comes to sustainability, a lot of the steps you can take also happen to be good business practices that save money in the long run,” he said. “For instance, if you look at new Walmarts, they all have skylights and use natural light during the day to reduce their carbon footprint and their electric bill.”

When it came to the question of sea level rise, Massarelli said it’s critical that planners in coastal communities like Charleston view it as an historical reality.

“We know that over the last 400,000 years, sea level has risen and fallen in a series of cycles; what questions there are about it involve where we are in the process and how climate change accelerates it,” he said. “Given the general agreement that sea level is rising and will continue to do so, the question is, ‘How you deal with it?’”

Massarelli described “dealing with it” as essentially a choice between four choices: Mitigation, protection, relocation, or accommodation. The problem is each option comes with both an upside and a downside.

For instance, when it comes to protection, it only works as long as the cost of what you are protecting is greater than the cost of the system deployed to protect it. Relocation, meanwhile—a response employed in the Midwest after last year’s Mississippi River floods—implies that current existing communities would be abandoned.

“Of course, that’s only really appropriate in some areas,” he said. “In certain cases, for instance, rather than a wholesale move, you might be talking about public money being employed to secure the site of planned, but un-built waterfront community, and preserving it as open space—in effect, guiding development to higher ground,” Massarelli said.

Finally, with accommodation, or “learning to live with it,” staying in place along the coast will require the costly flood proofing of structures, bolstering storm water management systems, and potentially having to rely on desalination to deal with saltwater intrusion into the local groundwater. wt



Contributing writer Dan McCue lives in Charleston, SC, where he writes frequently on global trade, foreign direct investment, and port-related issues.