Maritime Transportation And Shipping Talk

If we are to study this subject I think we should at least get the name right. The correct name is “Green Award”. It is a voluntary quality program for ship-owners, managers and their ships.
In the last article we covered some of the history and laid the base for our articles and study. The next step will be to look at the concept and how it works.
Green Award for shipping is primarily a scheme aiming paying extra attention to three primary items and they are safety, quality and environmental protection. The ambition is to create preference for ships conforming to these requirements, giving them a better market position. A safer ship will have fewer incidents and therefore avoid damage to reputation of owners/managers. Motivation and pride of crew becomes an important factor and will increase as improvement continues.

Ship-owners and managers are starting to recognize the importance of implementing this kind of certification. The cost recovery is also very fast. Conforming to the minimum legal requirements is no longer enough especially for tanker operation being such a high visibility type of operation.

More transparency is demanded by the general public and the shipping companies are starting to understand that they have to do more and also show that they are doing so. A way of showing that transparency is by having the “Green Award” flag flying in their mast visible to all. Visibility in the media was one of the reasons for tanker operators to be the first ones to come onboard in this program. The program was opened up for bulk carriers and their operators back in 2001, however the ship has to be 20000 DWT or more. Informing the general public and media at large about a program like this will hopefully have a snowball effect and have a positive impact on clients and future clients’ relation.

The concept or more correct the Certification System is based on ISO/IEC standards and the requirements formed from that are divided in to three parts under the headings of Basic Criteria, Ranking Criteria and Visual Inspection. Each criterion has its own checklist for auditors to go through together with appropriate department or employee.

First, some history to bring us up to were we are today.

What does the Green Ship term mean? In International shipping “Green Ship” is mainly associated with the Green Ship Award Program. There is also something that is called Green Ship Initiative established in North America and some others but that is a whole other subject that we might get into another time. So here in these articles we are going to concentrate on “Green Ship Award System”.

In order for us to get an understanding of what it all means I think we should lay a bit of background.
The ships that we are using on the seven oceans have always had a great attention to the safety. The ship owners were always greatly concerned with the safety of the vessel and the cargo that it transported. After all the aim was to make money as a transporter. Onboard the ship, crew was always concerned with the safety and the equipment needed in situations of emergency.
As ship types and technology has changed so has the quality of the ship. The navigational equipment used to navigate safely on the oceans and especially in areas of high traffic has seen a great improvement and made the logistic quality very high. Probably the greatest advancement we have made so far is the GPS and all the technology that became possible due to that technology.
Our Ships, the way they are constructed and the way they operate, are safe. The crew onboard and the management office ashore are all part of making it safe. Today the big word in ship safety is prevention.
Just after the Second World War United Nations founded a body name IMCO overlooking the safety of maritime shipping. This body has since become IMO (International Maritime Organization). Imo have been laying the laws applying to shipping and has bodies in place to enforce those rules. These laws that IMO has set for shipping to follow are basic minimum requirements and to some they are not strict enough. Looking at the ships we could see a large spectrum of ship types and also quality. The age of the ship was also an issue. If we had a quality level of let’s say 1-10, 1 being the top, the gap between 1 and 10 was simply too large. There had to be a second set of higher standards set in place and also incentives to owners for bringing the operation up to those higher standards.
This was the base for the governing body at the Port Of Rotterdam when they took the initiative in 1994 to establish these higher standards. It was all on a voluntary basis and became “Green Ship Award ” standards. It was to be applicable to the whole shipping company both ashore and onboard the vessel. The first ships to get into this higher set of standards were tankers. Since then we have seen the bulkers come along also. Personally, I’m still waiting for the container ships to catch up.
I think that in this first article about the Green Ship Award we have opened up for some interesting subjects and discussions. Where are we heading from here? Come back and visit as we get the next article online soon.

Lately there has been a lot about Green Ship and it seem that many owners has decided to join the “Trend”. Is it a trend or is this here to stay. I guess the first thing we have to do is examine what it means to be a “Green Ship”.Where does this Phrase come from.

In this series of articles to be posted we will do just that, examine the subject and also look at what it means to have your ship certified as a “Green Ship”.

The project will be a ongoing thing and we will post our findings and comments here on this blog.