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Inside the Port of LA’s zero tolerance pollution plan for ocean shipping

By ussa-login on Monday, December 12, 2016 - Blog

The Los Angeles/Long Beach port complex is at the front end of making ocean shipping through their ports more environmentally friendly by eliminating fouling aspects. International ocean shipping has had a negative impact on the environment over the years, but the Port entities are endeavouring to turn that around. Pollution is a major concern at the LA/LGB ports as hundreds of tons of diesel emissions  from ships, big rigs and freight-moving equipment coming in and out of the port. Theses emissions are harmful not only to the environment but to the people as well. Burning fossil fuels create air pollution that is linked to respiratory disease, premature death, and cancer.

LA/LGB’s goals to reduce harmful chemicals and other pollution from port-related activities include:

  • Making the ports earthquake safe, eluding power outages and becoming less dependent on exhaust-spewing diesel and more reliant on greener power.
  • Improving community health and meeting some of the new state restrictions by adopting zero-emissions or near-zero emissions freight-moving equipment such as electric forklifts and cranes.
  • A maintenance yard with solar panels: energy from such panels could be stored or fed into a microgrid.
  • Using dock equipment powered by electricity and other low- and no-emissions fuels.
  • Changing the way containers are transported to and from the ships.
  • Investigating ways to have the ports running on renewable energy such as solar and hydrogen, making a massive difference in the number of harmful chemicals that are currently being deposited into the atmosphere.

Bringing all these aspects into play will be a hard task to complete and it will take several years to fully set all the goals in motion. LA/LGB ports have, however, already started with smaller projects to reduce emissions.

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