Maersk Line makes around 850 port calls in Hong Kong every year and it says this move kicks off the first voluntary fuel switch scheme in Asia: the Hong Kong initiative alone will cost the company US$1m a year to implement.<\/p>\n
When asked why the voluntary scheme was worth the money, Jacob Sterling, head of Climate and Environment at Maersk Line told GreenPort<\/em>: \u201cWe are not expecting a premium on our services as a result of our environmental achievements, but we do expect that customers will choose us because of our environmental efforts, at least in the long run.\u201d<\/p>\n The Civic Exchange and the Government of Hong Kong recently proposed that shipping lines calling at Hong Kong engage in a voluntary fuel switch \u2013 so there was an element of getting ahead of the game.<\/p>\n Mr Sterling went on to say that reducing sulphur emissions takes industry wide action, and that part of Maersk\u2019s reasoning was to show that a switch over can be down without technical difficulties, and so help to \u201craise the regulatory bar\u201d \u2013 a bar that will probably come down in favour of those companies who show willing.<\/p>\n Maersk is not the first to take the low-sulphur route in Hong Kong. Air pollution has long been a concern in the Chinese territory and the Hong Kong Shipowners\u2019 Association was notable in supporting Intertanko when it proposed that its whole commercial fleet should switch to distillate fuel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A particulate and sulphur oxide reduction of \u201cat least 80%\u201d will result from Maersk Line\u2019s recent move to switch its container ships to low-sulphur fuel while at berth in Hong Kong, claims the company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4311,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-4310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-greenport"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4312,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310\/revisions\/4312"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4310"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=4310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}