Sustainable development on the Seine corridor

In order to pool the good practices and efficiently share skills and experience, an Environment Business Club was created with the environment officers from the ports of Le Havre, Rouen and Paris. The Seine and its estuary form a vital corridor for European ecosystems, wetlands in particular.

One of the missions of HAROPA is to protect this natural environment. HAROPA’s “green” policy is based on:

• Promotion of virtuous logistics solutions
• On-going efforts to reduce the impact of the activities
• Preservation of wilderness areas and better integration of the ports in urban areas.

Virtuous logistics solutions

This is an important target for HAROPA. The role of a port system is to help to make freight transport faster, cheaper and above all less polluting. HAROPA thus encourages modal shift. The use of combined transport enables the professionals of logistics and transport sector to save 35% in greenhouse gas emissions. River transport is 3.7 times cheaper than road transport.

As the Seine corridor is a genuine sustainable logistics asset, HAROPA is developing key infrastructures. €140 million has been invested at the Port of Le Havre for a new multimodal platform. Being delivered in 2015, this unique infrastructure in France – operated by LHTE- will help to improve the market shares of rail and inland waterways, which currently represent 15% of HAROPA container traffic. The goal is to reach 25% in 2020.

Equipped with railway sidings, a rail yard and a river yard with four on-shore connections for barges directly related to shipping terminals by a system of scheduled rail shuttles, the multimodal terminal will allow the mass transport of containers and swap bodies to serve a vast hinterland, while reducing the environmental impact of our activities (saving of 500,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year).

Since 2012, HAROPA - Port of Rouen has also improved access for shipping, by providing one metre of additional draught by dredging the 120km channel separating Rouen from the sea. This will reduce CO₂ emissions estimated at 30,000 tonnes less per year, by decreasing the congestion of access roads to the port.

HAROPA - Ports of Paris is supporting the Seine-Metropolis West Port Project (PSMO). This new river platform will focus on the supply by river of building materials for the Greater Paris construction sites. The construction of a new public transport system will generate at least 40 million cubic metres of rubble that will also have to be evacuated. To give more time priority to river transport, four multimodal platforms have been included in the master plan for evacuating cuttings. Construction work of PSMO should begin in 2018 and result in 100,000 fewer trucks on the roads in the Paris region.

Environmental support

HAROPA is also helping its clients to set up their industrial projects. In order to provide contractors with sustainable turn-key solutions, HAROPA has developed a support and environmental advice policy.

HAROPA also takes an industrial ecology approach, based on circular flows (heat recovery systems used for housing units, upgrading of dredging sediments, etc)

To encourage the use of less polluting ships, HAROPA - Port of Le Havre has been a founding member of the Environmental Ship Index (ESI) since 2009. The ESI approach encourages ship-owners to reduce the emissions of their ships and encourages them to go beyond the regulatory requirements alone.

Since 2012, 610 maritime companies have been rewarded by HAROPA. Companies transferring all or part of their logistics to an alternative mode of transport benefit from financial assistance delivered by HAROPA - Ports of Paris. Support is given in the form of a discount on the rent for land or buildings leased by their companies.

In addition, HAROPA - Port of Le Havre is a member of a local network in charge of monitoring air quality and forming part of 39 associations approved by the French Ministry of Environment, which measures all the pollutants emitted into the atmosphere including, carbon dioxide (CO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and particulate matters (PM).

Reducing environmental impact

At the same time, HAROPA carries out on-going efforts to reduce the impact of its activities.

Thanks to an environmentally friendly management of industrial areas and a voluntary certification policy, HAROPA ensures the continuous improvement of the environmental performance of its ports.

HAROPA - Ports of Paris has been ISO 14 0001 certified since 2013 for the operation of the multimodal platform of Gennevilliers which is the largest in the Paris area HAROPA - Port of Le Havre has been PERS certified since January 2015, etc. It has also launched several actions to reduce impacts and monitor port activities including monitoring of ship waste, sanitation master plan, cleaning of the river banks, caring out pollution diagnoses, etc.

All these efforts make HAROPA a special reception area for innovative industries- offshore wind industries in Le Havre, production of bio-fuels in Rouen, clean-ups of polluted land in Paris, etc.

The last mission for HAROPA is to preserve wilderness areas and to better integrate HAROPA ports in the cities they are located in. HAROPA manages many industrial areas and consequently there are many natural wilderness areas that need to be protected. Since 2008, the ports of HAROPA have thus acted as environmental managers.

That’s why HAROPA has committed itself to the 'Green and Blue Belt network' (a programme created to preserve and restore the ecological continuity of the land) at the regional scale and implements the ‘Prevent Mitigate Compensate’ initiative to minimise the impact of its developments on the natural environment.

HAROPA also boosts the city-port interface by redeveloping some key urban areas on the border of harbour zones and by helping the inhabitants to regain control of the river banks.

Thanks to an approach based on a constant dialogue, HAROPA regularly shares its regional environmental strategies and objectives with all kinds of partners. Because HAROPA is convinced that ports areas are shared spaces that need to be sustained, HAROPA’s on-going efforts were rewarded in June 2015 by the international award “Best Green Seaport”, delivered by Asia Cargo News.