Green Initiative Aims To Make Port A Better Neighbor

By Harry Saltzgaver
Executive Editor

Don’t talk about “no net increase” in air pollution to Dr. Robert Kanter, the man most call the father of the Green Port Policy.

Kanter is looking for a 50% net reduction in air pollution over the next five years while still sustaining the Port of Long Beach’s rapid growth. Anything less, he says, will mean a failure of the Clean Air Action Plan.

“Assuming we move forward in all the areas, we should see around a 50% decrease,” Kanter said. “That’s in all categories of air pollution and with growth on the same pace as today. That would be a net decrease with an increase in traffic.”

The ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles long have been known to be the source for a large share of the air pollution in and around Long Beach. Contamination of water and soil also have worried environmentalists for years.

Some efforts were made to deal with pollutants beginning in the 1990s — shortly after Kanter joined the port as manager of environmental planning. The port purchased the Wilmington Oil Field, which had been designated a 720-acre Superfund site, and cleaned up the contaminated soil.

Then Alan Lowenthal moved from the Long Beach City Council to the state Assembly and began his long battle for cleaner air around the ports with an attack on uncovered coke piles — a primary source of particulate pollution and the omnipresent film of black on much of south Long Beach. By 2000, the coke piles were under cover and Lowenthal (and the ports) had moved on to diesel trucks, dirty ships and the truck-clogged freeways.

“The Healthy Harbor Program (in 2003) was sort of a baby step,” Kanter said. “What we were really looking for was an umbrella policy that could look at all facets. The approach really started to shift with the Green Port Policy. It was a total mindset change.

“We took the approach that we are neighbors in Long Beach, and we wanted to take care of the neighborhood. It went through a lot of our divisions as a re-education process. We looked to institute sustainable practices in our own operations, and started serious work on how we could influence the port operation as a whole.”

Long Beach’s Harbor Commission approved the Green Port Policy concept in January 2006. It created six areas of emphasis — air, water, wildlife, soil/sediment, sustainability and community engagement — and provided an implementation schedule along with periodic progress reports.

Air quality was given top priority.

“It was clear air quality was the major problem,” Kanter said. “If we didn’t deal with that, we weren’t going to get EIRs approved, get projects approved. So we decided to deal with the biggest problem first.”

Working in concert with the Port of Los Angeles, the staffs forged a Clean Air Action Plan that was passed in an historic joint session by both the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbor commissions on Nov. 19, 2006. Regional, state and national regulatory agencies had a hand in the plans creation, which proposed close to Kanter’s 50% reduction in particulates, nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides.

The first efforts aimed at the cargo ships and the activity in and around the terminals. A program called Pier Pass was designed to extend activity at the terminals and cut down on the number of trucks idling at gates during daytime hours. It marked the beginning of incentive plans to encourage pollution reducing activity, with terminal operators and trucking companies receiving credits for non-peak operations.

Another successful incentive program offered shipping firms reductions in dock fees and priority service at terminals for reducing speed — and pollution — as they approached port. The Green Flag Program is voluntary, yet has more than 90% compliance now, Kanter said.

Other initiatives include emphasizing on-dock rail in terminals (reducing the need to use trucks), clean fuel yard equipment (LNG, electricity and clean diesel), transitioning train locomotives to clean diesel and providing docked ships with sufficient electricity to allow them to turn off their engines (cold ironing). Some efforts moved faster than others — only the BP Oil terminal is completely cold ironed, but all switch locomotives inside the Port of Long Beach have been replaced with clean diesels, and virtually all of the yard equipment has been replaced in many terminals.

There still is plenty of room for improvement, Kanter said. The California Air Resources Board attempted to force all ships entering California ports to use low sulfur fuel within 24 miles of the coast, but that regulation was overturned by the courts. Now talks have begun to find an incentive for shippers to use the lower-polluting fuels.

While shippers, terminal operators and the railroads all found things to dislike about components of the plan, progress was made. But the biggest issue, at least in the public’s mind, remained.

“It’s clear the volume impact falls on the vessels (ships),” Kanter said. “But trucks take the pollution right into the neighborhoods. That’s where we are now.”

The battle over trucks is a story of its own. See it on Page 5 of this edition.