Grappling with health and environmental impacts of increased marine shipping in Boston Harbor, Massport is seeking $280 million in federal grants aimed at reducing emissions and expanding electrification at its container and cruise terminals.
The transportation agency — which controls more than three-fourths of maritime shipping in the harbor — told GBH News recently that if it wins the competitive grant from the U.S. Environmental and Protection Agency, it would also spend an additional $70 million from its own budget to decarbonize operations. This includes providing electric shore power for some ships while they’re idling through the offloading process, electric-powered forklifts and trucks, and a solar-paneled rooftop.
Massport submitted the application in the spring with a 63-page list of government, community and private supporters. The EPA is expected to announce grant winners later this month, part of $8 billion the federal government is pouring into electrifying and decarbonizing the nation’s ports.
“This project is extremely important to us and there is a terrific opportunity here. We are hopeful that the EPA will support our project,” Massport spokeswoman Jennifer Mehigan told GBH News on Tuesday. “When completed, the full project is estimated to reduce or avoid greenhouse emissions by more than 13,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.”
Massport expanded its South Boston container terminal in recent years to allow bigger cargo ships to offload and has pushed successfully this year to bring in 169 cruise ships, 20 more than last year.
Its bid for a share of the EPA’s Clean Ports Zero-Emission funding comes as port communities — from Chelsea and Providence, R.I., to Newark, N.J. — have pushed back against a highly polluting industry affecting local public health.
Numerous studies done by Yale University, the EPA and the World Health Organization have confirmed the link between exposure to diesel emissions near marine ports and poor health outcomes: respiratory illnesses, heart disease and cancer.
An EPA report last September stated that emissions from oceangoing vessels, “have the highest impact on the communities closest to the ports” — neighborhoods that often are low-income communities of color.
The report found the EPA needs to do a better job collecting air emission data near the nation’s ports. Massport said it has hired a consultant to conduct its first-ever emissions inventory of its marine operations in South Boston but did not specify a timeline.
Local environmental advocates say it is time for policymakers in Massachusetts to pay more attention to the shipping industry here.
“These are such high emitters that it’s definitely a mistake to not focus on them now,” said Kyle Murray, who directs state policy at the Acadia Center, an environmental and clean energy advocacy nonprofit based in Boston.
Four community groups around Massport’s main marine operation backed the agency’s grant application to the federal government while underscoring their worries about the existing health impacts on their neighborhoods, according to grant materials obtained by GBH News.
“We continue to be concerned with all aspects of shore operations that impact our neighborhood, including ship air pollution,” Tom Ready, a member of the Fort Point Neighborhood Association, wrote to the EPA. “Numerous studies ... have identified the continuous running of ships while in port as a key contributor to poor air quality and localized health impacts.”
Massport’s community advisory committee focused its letter to the EPA on efforts to create a shore power option at Massport’s Flynn Cruiseport, the city’s main port for all cruiseships.
“Visiting vessels will plug into shore-side electricity and switch off their fossil fuel-powered engines, producing tangible benefits for nearly 40,000 residents within the 1-mile radius of the facility,” wrote Aaron Toffler, the advisory committee’s executive director.
The EPA prioritizes grant applications with strong community engagement.
Community activists in other Northeast port communities have long pushed local government and port operators to listen to how port-related emissions impact their lives and health.
Newark port community fights for change
Consider the case of Kim Gaddy, who recently pulled her minivan to the curb on a four-lane road in Newark, N.J., and pointed to a line of trucks rumbling by in both directions.
Gaddy said the noise, the smell and emissions from the trucks — often hauling 40-foot long container boxes that arrived by sea — is a reality she and her neighbors are forced to live with. All her three children have suffered from asthma, and two of her relatives have died from the respiratory disease.
“People’s lives are being lost,” said Gaddy, who runs the South Ward Environmental Alliance in Newark. “We have high rates of premature heart attacks, and it is not by happenstance. It’s because we are the backyard of the third-largest port [in the United States].”
That’s why Gaddy and her group are also vying for a share of the same EPA funds, money that originates from the Biden administration’s Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts.
“If we’re successful in obtaining this money, we will be able to do so many things that we’ve been fighting for the last eight to 10 years in the South Ward of the city of Newark,” Gaddy said.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey oversees nearly all the shipping traffic in the area and is now on board with environmental justice groups like Gaddy’s. The agency recently hired a former aide to Sen. Cory Booker, Zach McCue, who has spent years fighting New Jersey pollution and knows the authority’s track record of not listening to the community.
“The idea that decisions are made with the community’s input and by the community is huge,” McCue told GBH News. ”For many, many years and decades, that has not always been the case.”
He said the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is seeking the highest level of federal funding allowed: about a half billion dollars for zero-emissions infrastructure and equipment.
McCue credited the EPA for its insistence that applicants like his local port authority must team up with community groups. It’s a potentially transformative moment, he said.
Melissa Miles, who directs the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, also emphasized the importance of community engagement.
“[Environmental justice] folks don’t tend to come into this through educational backgrounds. They come in because someone in our family got sick or we got sick. And we said, ‘OK, this has to stop,’” she said. “That’s why community organizations are important. We teach people to see what is around them and to think about and problematize the smokestack, the smell, the truck. Otherwise, it’s like, ‘Damn, this is just where I live.’”
Miles said if Newark sees a sizable EPA grant, even the nearly half billion it’s asking for, it won’t be enough money to fix all the problems — but, it could trigger more investments in a more healthy port community.
Out on the Newark docks last May, diesel still rules — helping power giant long-legged machines that look like Star Wars AT-AT walkers and glide back and forth from a massive container ship. Ships are offloaded and onloaded here nonstop.
“The ships, they cannot shut down,” said Regina Townes, a former longshorewoman from Newark. “They have to keep them running. So it was constant pollution coming from their smokestacks — constant.”
Townes worked those docks for 31 years and blames her high blood pressure on the job. She quit after deciding the good paycheck wasn’t worth her health.
“In the summer, you get all this black stuff on your skin from the machinery riding over, or just what’s flying in the air,” she said. “We’re breathing in it in. All these are silent killers.”
Townes now works alongside her friend Gaddy as an organizer. Both hope to emulate California ports, which have long required electric power. Industry and city leaders in Newark say solar power and alternative fuels could reduce emissions, too.
The tension is balancing calls for reducing pollution with the main job of the port: commerce, revenue and hundreds of thousands of local jobs.
Watching closely are labor unions like the International Longshoremen’s Association, who said America’s ports have lagged internationally on cutting dangerous diesel particulate matter. And residents near ports are tired of living in what they call a “diesel death zone.”
Eric Pennington, who oversees the city of Newark’s budget, said you can do both.
“The port itself is a driver of the economy here,” he said. “And we have an expectation that it will grow. And it will grow in an environmentally conscious way.”
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
