In June, the EU published a study on their ports and how they could become more environmentally friendly. The study found that better definitions of a green ship — and therefore a green port — would significantly help the whole enterprise. This led us to wonder what exactly constitutes a green ship. We have discussed the future of the green ship before, but we haven’t yet detailed what a green ship today looks like. Here are some prominent ideas in the field, and we encourage you to share resources with us and begin a discussion as well.
Journalist Jim Romeo wrote in the Maritime Journal a few years ago that a green ship is all about the carbon footprint. In this conception, a green ship would be one that is fuel efficient. As Bright Hub Engineering says, “the greatest greatest contributor of environmental pollution on a ship is the ship’s engine room.”
From our standpoint, a ship that is carbon efficient is a ship that is largely made of recycled materials. Reusing parts of a ship is so helpful for the environment because it eliminates the environmental cost of making and transporting new materials. It also means that when older ship parts decay or breakdown, they will not end up as marine trash. They will be properly discarded. We are working as hard as we can at Wirana all around the world to prevent ship parts from being handled improperly and ending up as leaky trash.
Recycling ship parts and refurbishing old ships is the most desirable way to handle large vessels. make shipping more sustainable. However, when recycling is not an option, there are new methods being figured out that will allow us to build eco-friendly ships that use renewable energy. Marine Insight recently came out with a number of ways newly designed ships are trying to use solar, wind, and aeronautic power.
A green ship is one that is made up of recycled and refurbished parts, or is run off of renewable energy. This definition can help us move forward in fixing ports to be more sustainable and regulations to be more appropriate.
