By: Marty Pilsch, AJOTToday, the maritime industry depends upon the ability of the port industry to establish the initiatives to institute significant changes in the way business is conducted. As one drills down the chart listing the challenges facing ports, shippers, steamship lines, truckers, railroads, equipment manufacturers and labor, the tasks ahead appear daunting. Ports realize that the impacts of such issues as the introduction of technology, security oversight, land use and the environment, if left unattended, can be significant and the question, as usual, is, which one do we deal with first? While acknowledging all of these challenges and demands, port organizations try to choose their priorities but often are faced with the reality of dealing with many things at the same time. In some cases, fortunately, while they juggle a number of balls in the air, certain issues surface, calling out for priority. The environment has become one of those issues, rising to occupy the highest priority and the port industry has announced that the effort to achieve sustainability is underway. Like the Irish on St Patrick’s Day, ports will be wearing the green. Initiatives from the State of California, have single handedly created an environmental movement that has enveloped the country’s largest container handling port complex, Los Angeles and Long Beach and swept the United States. The Southern California ports have responded to State led organizations such as the California Air Resources Board and local organizations such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District. California state regulators and local Southern California citizens groups have driven home the message that they want their air and water cleaned up or future port expansion will cease. Many seaport administrators along the West Coast north of Southern California and those on the Great Lakes, Gulf Coast and East Coast, fearing similar hold ups, have seen the handwriting on the wall. For the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the issues surrounding the environment were quite simple and the message quite clear. The ports had run out of mitigation points and to develop new facilities, they needed some trade offs. Billions of dollars were at stake and air emissions became the obvious target. While acting alone for quite a while, the California port’s response to the pressures of reducing harmful air emissions has begun moving across the United States from West Coast to East and into Canada. For ports in other regions of the country, the issue has not been so cut and dried since until recently, their air emissions issues had not appeared on the radar screen. As long as the EPA air emissions program was taking the heat, they were happy. The warning shots, however, have been fired from the West Coast and they simply cannot be ignored. Cleaning up the air is not a simple task, as recognized by the EPA whose regulations involve a tiered approach to diesel engine emissions. EPA guidelines expect that transportation industry diesel engine technology will reach acceptable standards by the year 2011. This year, Tier III engines must be in all new heavy-duty over-the-road transportation vehicles. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) requirements go a bit further, calling for all 2008 and subsequent model-year heavy-duty DOT/EPA engines in vehicles with a gross weight greater than 14,000 lbs to have an engine shut down system. This system must automatically shut down the engine after 5 minutes of idle or, the engine must be certified to an optional NOx idling emission standard of 30 grams per hour. (A 2008 Cummins diesel engine for over-the-road trucks as example is rated as a 50 state engine, meeting the 30 gram per hour requirement and does not have to be shutdown.) Looking out over their domain, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach came to a logical conclusion to help resolve their dilemma. Their customers on the waterside, their tenants at their terminals and their customers on the landside operated