ENVIRONMENTAL COMPETETIVINESS OF PORT OPERATORS - DEFINITION AND TOOL

The purpose of the project was to define and develop a practical method to monitor the environmental competitiveness of logistics service companies. The indicators have to be generally approved and they should function as part of environmental management in service companies, but also give customers real comparable indicators of logistics. The participants of the project were six Finnish stevedoring companies, the Ministry of Transport and Communications and the Finnish Maritime Administration. The environmental competitiveness of port operators was defined with a balanced scorecard including the following elements: Customer added value (inquiry to the main customers of participating ports), Management commitment (environmental audit and comparison to ISO 14001 requirements), Operational efficiency and environmental impacts (comparable from real company data; indicators can also be used for life cycle analysis), Staff (attitude, commitment, working methods etc. were asked with personal inquiry), Purchasing (purchasing decisions that have correlation with environmental impacts). Each participating port operator was examined thoroughly to collect data for the comparable indicators. The indicators were reported to the companies so that every port operator got his own indicators and a benchmarking comparison to the collected database. The method including the benchmarking and reporting was developed into a tool, so that new ports can join the comparison and follow-up studies are simple. The results from auditing of management show that systematic environmental development is just beginning. Operational indicators show that the energy consumption and emissions vary between ports and naturally between loading methods. Average fuel consumption is about 0,4 litres per ton with general goods and about 0,8 litres per ton in container handling. The staff and customer surveys showed that major improvements are expected in training and in environmental reporting. Purchasing indicators showed e.g. that in the examined ports 20 % of fuel used in handling equipment is sulphurous. The developed method and tool is internationally unique. The next step is to widen the method to cover the whole transport chain.