The Green Award Foundation concept
In the late 80’s, with a few good friends sharing the same vision, we all gathered at the port of Rotterdam and came out the idea of how to motivate the industry in order to promote quality shipping initiatives. That vision resulted in the Green Award Foundation in 1994 which is an International Foundation, a non- profit and independent initiative. The whole philosophy of this new program was to share the idea for quality shipping with ports, service providers, banks, insurers, P&I Clubs, also to find some ship owners who like to participate and give money to Green Award in order to carry out inspections. In return, their ships were granted the Green Award Certificate indicating that when ships calling at ports, represent quality standards.
Figure: The concept of ‘Green Award’
Certification program is based on three main pillars: Quality, Safety and Environment. For Green Award, as its own name states, the Environment is of the most importance. But of course, safety and quality are equally important and absolutely relative to achieve the goal of protecting the environment. Green Award certificates are for oil and chemical tankers, dry bulk carriers and LNG carriers. Office audits takes place every three years and ship inspections every year. Also, Green Award has recently started an inland shipping Europe program. The Green Award Foundation is actually an initiative by ports and authorities to improve the environment and to handle incidents with seagoing vessels, to stimulate quality improvement in shipping and to improve environmental awareness performance by reducing risks from ship’s operations. And of course, we have in mind what stakeholder wants. They demand measures for greener shipping such as energy efficiency, proper ship design, water ballast, green house gas elimination.
There are many economical challenges. What Green Award does, is to regard these challenges as opportunities. Green ships are actually a new demand but regarding the economic crisis, many think that these are a deterrent. But still, we hear about new measures for energy efficiency and green technology. All these reveal that Green shipping is a requirement. So, we have to focus on initiatives for greener marine environment. It is sad that only the 25% if the global fleet goes for environment- friendly ships. But it is nice to see that there is a trend for Green Initiative. Regarding multiple local requirements from ports, industry environment requirement and IMO convections, there is a need for collaboration; this is the reason why Green Award likes to collaborate with other organizations, such as Rightship, IAMH/ WPCI and OCIMF. Collaborations focus on cost reduction and of course the more partners joining, the better. Preference for quality tonnage leads to continuous improvement in shipping, resulting in a better environment for ports.
Above article is an edited version of Jan’s Fransen presentation during 2012 Safety4Sea Annual Forum
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