Green Marine Celebrates 15 Years of Continual Sustainability Improvement

Green Marine, North America’s environmental certification program for the maritime industry, is celebrating 15 years of sustainability improvements with the release of its 2022 Performance Report.

The program includes 52 ports, 49 shipowners (620 vessels), 17 shipyards, & 71 terminals operators (209 sites) in North America, and the report displays all the individual results of the participants in addition to the overall average and an analysis of the environmental performance for the year concerned. Their progress is evaluated on a 1-to-5 scale whereby Level 1 indicates the monitoring of regulations and Level 5 reflects excellence and leadership.

There were 183 reports submitted on calendar year 2022 environmental performance, representing an 11% increase over the 165 reports for 2021 and maintaining Green Marine’s year-over-year average percentage increase.

49% of participants improved by at least 1 net level compared to last year. The ports' most significant progress was made in efforts to reduce GHG emissions: a 12-level increase. Terminals show the biggest increase in the number of reports submitted: up by 18%.

The greatest improvement on the shipowners' side concerns aquatic invasive species, with an increase of 9 levels. Community relations made the highest debut for a new performance indicator with an overall average of 2.7.

The overall average by participants was maintained at 3.0 on the program’s five-level scale. Remaining steady at or nearly 3.0 over the past decade, this overall average reflects the program’s well-balanced while ever-evolving criteria, says Green Marine. The program sets out challenging but still achievable goals as new environmental priorities are introduced from time to time, and the criteria for existing performance indicators are augmented to be sufficiently demanding at each level as new regulations are introduced and/or new guidelines and technologies become available.