Cargo is still king
In early January, the Port of Seattle joined a growing list of ports with Green Truck programs.
Basically providers of “drayage” (short runs between local terminals and the docks) have trucks with engines built in 1994 or later. In the future, the standards will tighten further, so that delivering cargo to Seattle’s docks will be required to meet 2007’s emission standards.
In New York/ New Jersey, the Port Authority has a program to assist truckers in upgrading to modern equipment (funded in part by Federal stimulus money), a precedent set in southern California where a combination of State and Federal money will assist truckers with their investment.
Like diesel fumes that such efforts hope to reduce, these programs are inherently messy, requiring determined leadership in often fractious political environments against opposition funded by well resourced labour and sometimes equipment leasing interests.
The fragmented nature of ports, sometimes competing with each other for business, works against the necessary centrality to fight back. In most transportation that I’ve been involved with, cargo is king; the transportation providers are often cash-strapped little guys. The testimony against initiatives to clean up the air around docks always points to the poor and struggling truckowner; capital investment is sometimes out of reach.
Let’s think about a way that ports can assist big Fortune 500 shippers, big box retailers, and others who fill up those containers, gaining bragging rights for who is greener. Ultimately, the big shippers pay the freight, yet there is not a great nexus between the big guys’ logistics and the environmental initiatives at individual ports.
I can envision the large cargo providers squaring off, in a competition to be “greener”. It does not matter whether the motivation is altruism or possible PR benefits. Information technology, and social media, are powerful tools; I am a big fan of transparency and disclosure, and would hope that ports would think about going beyond the little people (the poor bedraggled owner-operator) and look at who is controlling the cargo on the trucks.
And, if there were a leak to the press (by extension, Twitter or Facebook) that a well known company had its cargo aboard a fume spewing truck, that would probably be that shipper’s last non-compliant drayage move. The deep pocketed entity might even fund some new truck purchases for the little guys around the docks.
