Associated British Ports’ Jeffe Baker says: “There are major customers of the deepsea lines which are very keen to demonstrate their green credentials, and able to persuade shipping lines to bring their containers to the port nearest to their distribution centre. Examples include Tesco, which is developing at Teesport, while we are seeing the same apply to companies like Ikea, which has a distribution centre in Doncaster.”<\/p>\n
However, he says: “Nobody is going to pay you any more for being green. But if it is cost-neutral, then green is the solution that is favoured. Ideally, large importers are looking for a green solution that saves them money. We just need to be creative.”<\/p>\n
ESPO’s Patrick Verhoeven says a slowdown in maritime traffic growth seems unavoidable but expects a time delay: “Probably the impact will only see its full strength somewhere next year,” he says.<\/p>\n
“What remains difficult to predict is whether the effect will only be short term of will have a long-term impact. I am personally not convinced that ecological restrictions will soften, however; I think these are here to stay.”<\/p>\n
And he warns: “Ports may even find it more difficult to get necessary development plans through because of expected reductions in growth rates. Environmental lobbyists will certainly use this argument to stop or slow down infrastructure projects.”<\/p>\n
High fuel prices in spring 2008 encouraged a shift of cargo from road to shortsea shipping, which suffered from the costs too, but to a lesser extent, says Vincent van den Bosch, of PNO Consultants.<\/p>\n
Now the combination of lower margins and reduced cargo volumes are forcing hauliers to “keep on driving”, just to keep the trucks running – clearly not good news for shortsea shipping.<\/p>\n
He says shortsea shipping companies, if they are not already doing so, should shift to provide door-to-door services, to cut out the need for a road transport company “in between”.<\/p>\n
“Manufacturing companies are more and more committed to reducing their carbon footprint and having a ‘green’ supply chain. Shortsea shipping companies not offering door-to-door are facing road transport companies that just keep on driving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When it comes to the crunch, do green issues, and hence sea transport, still remain important?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport-congress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}