Port Everglades, Florida’s top container port and one of the three busiest cruise ports in the world, readily accepted a challenging opportunity with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality (EPA) to partner and coordinate research and modeling for covering port-related operations, technologies, and growth scenarios. Port Everglades is the first port in the United States to partner with the EPA in this way. Other seaports called it a bold and brave partnership. We called it the right thing to do.
Port Everglades’ leadership agreed to work together with the EPA to teach them about port operations and to allow them to use Port Everglades as a training ground. This way, they could evaluate various effective technology and operational clean air strategy scenarios for seaports in a real port versus a virtual port. By collaborating to research and model port operation and technology scenarios in terms of air quality outcomes and solutions, EPA can now cite practical seaport centric examples in discussions with other ports, related agencies, and stakeholders about lessons learned.
Since participating in the program, the EPA has used the Port Everglades model in their presentations for reaching out to other seaports across the United States.
