We see green innovation in many places: cars, homes, telecommunications, home appliances, food packaging, public transport and, of course, power generation. That’s just for starters. While we see green progress in most areas of our lives – there are even green car washes and green dry cleaners now – there’s one industry that would appear to be stuck in the 1970s in terms of pollution and waste: the global shipping industry, one of the most prominent eco-Neanderthals in the world.

Studies have found that maritime carbon dioxide emissions are sky-high – higher than previously thought – and set to rise by as much as 75 percent over the next two decades if world trade continues to grow at present levels and no attempts are made to curb the emissions. By some estimates, the global shipping industry produces somewhere between 600 million and 800 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, or about 5 percent of the global total. (The aviation industry, for all the criticism it attracts from environmentalists, is estimated to produce only about 2 percent of global emissions.)

To put this in perspective, says the UK’s Guardian, the shipping industry is responsible for more emissions in one year than the entire continent of Africa will produce in the same time period. A single container ship can emit as much as 50 million cars, and 15 of the largest container ships in the world together can produce as much greenhouse gas as every car operating on Earth today. Today, there are an estimated 70,000 to 90,000 transport ships operating in the world’s oceans and waterways. If you figure that each ship operates 24 hours per day about 280 days per year, these ships combined use about 280 million tons of fuel annually, a figure that is expected to climb to between 350 million and 400 million tons by 2020.

While it’s easy to become enraged by these figures, it’s important to keep them in perspective. The global shipping industry moves about 90 percent of the world’s trade, and the emissions that would be produced were those goods shipped by truck or train would likely equal or exceed those produced by ships, which means shipping is actually “greener” than land-based methods.

Still, little has changed in the shipping industry in the last few decades. Container and transport ships are rather filthy vessels. They generally use something called Number 6 class “bunker fuel,” or residual fuel oil (residual meaning it’s what’s left after the more valuable cuts of crude oil have boiled off).

There are a few bright spots of green in the shipping industry, however.

Japanese car company Nissan is putting a little of its green into the way it ships its all-electric Leaf model: domestically, at least.

Solar panels installed on the deck of Nissan's Nichioh Maru car carrier.

The company’s newly completed Nichioh Maru transport ship, built by Shin Kurushima Dockyard, put to sea for its maiden voyage on January 27 of this year. The ship, a “roll on, roll off” carrier (hence its nickname, “RORO”) was designed to carry up to 1,380 cars. The 18,000 horsepower ship is 450 feet long – the length of one and a half football fields – and took four years to complete. The carrier was designed to make two 2,200-mile domestic round trips each week, from Oppama Wharf near Yokohama to Kobe to the southern island of Kyushu and back again, one of Japan’s main coastal shipping routes, operating at a top speed of 24.4 miles per hour (22.1 knots).

So what’s green about it?

For starters, the ship features an electronically controlled diesel engine (a MAN B&W 8S50ME-C8, if you want to get technical) run by special software that optimizes the engine’s efficiency in operations, according to HybridCars.com. The transport ship also features 281 solar panels mounted on its deck that power LED lights in the ship’s hold and crew quarters. The photovoltaic panels – the first in the shipping industry, says Nissan – have the capability to create about 50 kW of power, some of which can be stored in a battery for future use. In addition, RORO features a low-friction coating on its hull to make better sea mileage.

Each round trip uses roughly 13 tons fewer fuel than a typical ship of its size, for a reduction in CO2 emissions of around 18 to 20 percent. The ship is part of Nissan’s corporate green program, called “2016,” which aims to cut emissions, use more renewable energy and turn Nissan into an eco-warrior among automobile manufacturers. Nissan says RORO won’t be alone for long, as the company plans to commission several more eco-carriers of its type to join it.

All in all, the Nichioh Maru will use 1,400 fewer metric tons of diesel fuel than a standard carrier of comparable size each year. That’s enough fuel to run a compact diesel car for about 350,000 miles – two and a half times as long as the average driver in the U.S. keeps a car. It also translates to an annual reduction of about 4,200 tons of CO2 emissions. (You can watch a video about the ship’s launch and operations here.)

Technically, it’s not Nissan’s first sustainable carrier, though it’s the first purpose-built for the company. Nissan began using a ship called City of St. Petersburg in 2010 for international routes in Europe. That ship features a semi-spherical prow that reduces wind resistance by up to 50 percent compared to a conventional vessel (an idea first put forth by Popular Mechanics in 1934.) The shaped prow alone can help cut annual fuel consumption by 800 tons, says the company, reducing CO2 emissions by 2,500 tons. The ship can haul about 2,000 vehicles at a time, and brings cars and trucks to Northern Europe and Russia from Nissan’s factories in the UK and Spain.

Not to be outdone, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has developed a new bulk carrier that is reportedly able to reduce CO2 emissions by 25 percent using, of all things, bubbles. The MAL (Mitsubishi Air Lubrication) system reduces friction between the ship’s hull and the water using air bubbles that are produced underneath the ship. That design already has a taker: U.S. food giant Archer Daniels Midland Company has commissioned the MAL system for three of its new grain carriers.

According to Mitsubishi, the ADM vessels, to be built by Oshima Shipbuilding of Nagasaki, will also sport a high-efficiency hull and a newly designed bow shape designed to reduce wave-making. (More waves cause more friction and resistance and require the ship to use more fuel.) To streamline propulsion, the new ships will also have positioning fins forward of the propellers.

Critics call a lot of these green shipping technologies “greenwashing.” They point out that these ships, called “green” or not, still use copious amounts of dirty fuel and spew unacceptable amounts of pollution. Although the ships contain scrubbers that cut down on emissions while they are port, once they are far enough out to sea, they are free to expel pollution and greenhouse gases at will.

The reason for this, in part, is that ships use some of the least efficient oil on earth. Thick and viscous because it’s cheap residue (and the more valuable components have already been removed), before it can be used, it must first be heated to thin it before combustion, using even more energy. (About the only petroleum product denser and thicker than bunker fuel is the smelly bituminous residue used for tarring roads.) Because it’s so cheap, ship fuel is sky-high in pollutants such as sulfur, which forms sulfur dioxide upon combustion. It is, in fact, the cheapest and dirtiest liquid fuel on earth.

There have been some calls for the use of more efficient, cleaner maritime fuels, though they have gained little traction; and they probably never will, without government regulation and a serious drop in price to make them competitive. The demand for, at the very least, a mandatory reduction in the quantity of ash, sulfur and other ugly byproducts in maritime fuel is growing, and some shipping companies have experimented with using liquefied natural gas (LNG), a cleaner burning alternative. (However, while it burns cleaner, LNG is created by cooling natural gas to -259° Fahrenheit, which means a ship that runs on it would need to use a lot of energy to keep its fuel super-cold.)

Interestingly, although shipping remains rather ecologically filthy, much of the pollution from container ships has escaped the heavy hand of environment rules and regulations. While aviation emissions were heavily scrutinized by the global Kyoto protocol – wherein member nations had to agree to standards to improve fuel economy and limit greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft – maritime emissions managed to dodge oversight by both those rules and any other European emissions standards. As has another potent source of pollution from the shipping industry: ballast water, which can contain not only oil and chemicals, but bacteria and non-native invasive species. The U.S. Clean Water Act, so strict for some industries, has exempted the normal discharge of ships’ ballast water from regulations. (Any current federal guidelines regarding ballast water are voluntary; and rather than rules, they are pleas for shipping companies to “avoid” taking on ballast water that contains sewage, harmful organisms and pathogens such as toxic algae blooms, and a lot of sediment.)

There have been some small but positive steps to try and protect human health, if not maritime wildlife, from the shipping industry. The U.S. recently established a 230-mile buffer zone, or “low emissions zone,” along the entire U.S. coast. These rules will begin phasing in this year, and will be fully implemented by 2016.

“Ship pollution affects the health of communities in coastal and inland regions around the world, yet pollution from ships remains one of the least regulated parts of our global transportation system,” said James Corbett, professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware, one of the authors of the report that helped persuade the U.S. EPA to create the buffer zone.

It’s not just a matter of green feel-good sentiment. Some studies have shown that it’s a matter of saving lives. The government of Denmark, through its national health service, has estimated that shipping pollution costs them nearly $8 million each year treating cancers and heart problems caused by shipping emissions. One study suggested that 1,000 Danish people die prematurely each year because of shipping pollution. In the U.S., the EPA’s new buffer zone, once fully implemented, is expected to save more than 8,000 lives a year with new air quality standards that will cut sulfur in fuel by 98 percent, particulate matter by 85 percent and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80 percent.

Perhaps surprisingly, Europe lags behind the U.S. in controlling maritime emissions. Across the ocean, both the UN’s International Maritime Organisation and the EU have been under pressure to tighten laws governing ships’ emissions. While the European continent contains some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, the EU has planned for only two low-emission marine zones, in the English channel and in the Baltic sea. These rules, however, won’t come into play until 2015, and even then, the regulations are less stringent than those put in place by the U.S. EPA.

In the meantime, there have been some rumbles of responsibility from the shipping and shipbuilding industries themselves (the wise ones that understand self-regulation is often a better choice than mandatory government regulation). MAN, one of the largest manufacturers of maritime engines, has launched what it’s calling the “Green Ship of the Future” challenge, the goal of which is to find a way to reduce CO2 emissions by around 30 percent and nitric and sulphuric oxides by 90 percent. The project was launched in 2008 by MAN Diesel & Turbo in conjunction with the A.P. Møller-Mærsk Group Danish shipping firm, Odense Steel Shipyard and Aalborg Industries. The initiative is promoting technologies both existing and new to accomplish tasks like: promoting the use of exhaust gas scrubbers; encouraging lower ships speeds (running at lower speeds reduces emissions and saves on fuel), which means eliminating “utmost dispatch” – or fastest delivery possible – clauses from contracts; building engines that can auto-tune to remain at peak efficiency; reducing emissions using exhaust gas recirculation; and promoting waste heat recovery and reuse.

Another important step to reducing emissions isn’t about the ships, it’s about the ports. Managing ship traffic in ports with software and better scheduling can allow faster turnaround times for docking, offloading and departure, meaning that ships spend less time idling in port…a cause of a lot of maritime emissions.

A “SkySail” being used on a U.N. World Food Program (WFP) ship to help cut fuel use and emissions.

Some ships have even taken to using “sky sails,” which are basically giant kites tethered to the bows of ships that can harnesses the wind and help with propulsion, allowing the ship to reduce fuel consumption by between 10 and 30 percent.

It seems unlikely that the shipping industry will ever attain carbon neutrality, unless we return to the days of fleets of merchant sail ships (not to mention scurvy). However, with a little policy, a little political and ecological pressure and a little technology, the shipping industry may be able to cut its emissions by as much as one third, saving a lot of clean air, and a lot of lives.

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