Oakland Tribune

Ports dump pollution on poor

Report chides billion-dollar shipping industry for ignoring its pollution

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Douglas Fischer

OAKLAND -- The freight industry places a "staggering burden" on Californians, particularly low-income minorities, as it hauls in billions of dollars in profit distributing goods arriving at the state's major ports, according to a report released Tuesday by a coalition of community and environmental groups.

Some 40 percent of the nation's containerized cargo travels via ports in Oakland, Long Beach and Los Angeles. It arrives on oil-burning ships, gets unloaded by soot-belching cranes, reloaded onto diesel-powered trucks and trains and then rumbles through some of the state's poorest neighborhoods and communities

And it makes money -- lots of it for the companies involved. Ditching Dirty Diesel, a collaborative of 15 environmental, community, activist and labor organizations issuing the report, estimated the freight industry generated $231 billion in revenues from their California operations in 2005.

But industry doesn't pay for the soot, smog, asthma and shortened life spans in the poor neighborhoods around California's freight hubs bearing the brunt of that activity, according to Dirty Diesel's report on the "real cost" of freight transport in California.

"Many companies benefit from being able to use the port," said Margaret Gordon, a collaboration member who lives a mile from the Port of Oakland.

"We are the ones paying with our health."

Shipping companies and ports countered Tuesday they are working on reducing emissions.

Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp. is building a fleet of environmentally friendly cargo ships. Copenhagen-based Maersk has voluntarily switched from dirty bunker oil to low-sulfur diesel, said Port of Oakland spokesman Harold Jones.

APL Ltd., a subsidiary of Singapore-based Neptune Orient has retrofitted yard tractors in both Oakland and Los Angeles and eliminated 6,000 to 10,000 truck trips a week in Los Angeles by extending rail lines to the dock.

"We absolutely understand community concerns about the environment," said APL spokesman Mike Zampa. "We've seen the industry and APL innovate and improve to better manage environmental impact."

But it's not enough, said Swati Prakash, program director at the Pacific Institute and a report co-author.

The cost to significantly clean up industry -- 30 suggestions identified by regulators that range from buying out old diesel trucks to modernizing port equipment -- would be a fraction of the benefits derived from freight transport, the group said. Yet little progress is being made, they say.

Transport companies using California's ports could pay that cost -- $6 to $10 billion over 15 years -- by kicking in one-third of a cent on each dollar earned. Wal-Mart alone could pay for it with less than a penny from every dollar of California-generated revenue, Prakash said.

Instead, citizens of hub cities like Richmond, West Oakland, San Leandro, Long Beach and Merced bear the cost of pollution.

In California, 3,000 school children stay home from school any given day with a freight-related illness, usually asthma, according to the California Air Resources Board. Some 2,400 Californians will die prematurely this year because they lived too close to a freight hub. The 11 communities near hubs analyzed by Dirty Diesel have a median income of $31,829, two-thirds the California average.

"This is a staggering burden." Prakash said. "Some of the biggest companies in the world are making billions at the expense of low-income communities in California.

Those residents, she added, "cannot continue to subsidize industry with their health."

But getting industry to change isn't easy. The international shipping industry is a combination of national interests and private owners and wants an international standard, said Doug Webster, spokesman for the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo.

It's a fiercely competitive industry where a few cents extras in fees could send millions of containers north to, say, Seattle. Which is why local or even state efforts to tack a few extra bucks onto the containers invariably fail, Webster added.

"Everybody wants to add their $10, $15, $100," he said.

"And there are powerful interests -- Sears, J.C. Penney, Wal-Mart -- that don't want to pay for that."

Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com or at 510-208-6425