The Sustainable Ocean Symposium is an annual international event gathering leaders of the ”Blue Economy” for 3 days workshops and plenary sessions on sustainable development challenges and goals.
This year the event took place in Paris, on November 20 to 23. The title of the year “Investing in Ocean futures: financing and innovation” gathered some 250 participants. All continents and almost all maritime domains were represented by high level speakers.
Euroshore and the project Blue Ports organized a special workshop entitled ”Port Reception Facilities: Economically viable port waste disposal for ballast water, hydrocarbons and other ship based waste streams”.
Nuno Matos, director of Eco-Oil, honorary President of Euroshore and member of Blue Ports, chaired the session. He presented first Euroshore international to the audience, as an introduction to the following presentations dealing with the circular economy of oiled effluents, the treatment of ballast water as a new service requirement induced by the IMO BWMC, the collection of plastic wastes.
The session created awareness on the lack of financial and regulatory support instruments, despite the obvious necessity to provide attractive port facilities and services to avoid voluntary discharge of effluents and waste at sea.
The dialog initiated with the IMO representatives will be pursued during 2020 in synergy between Euroshore and the consortium “Blue Ports” which address the technical, regulatory, financial and operational issues related to Port Reception Facilities for oil, ballast water and scrubbers.
Panelists of the session were Fabienne Vallée, General Manager, President of the Board, SeaTopic; Manager, “Blue Ports” Project (Coordinator, Port of Brest), John Alonso, Project Technical Analyst, GEF-UNDP-IMO GloFouling Partnerships, Marine Environment Division, International Maritime Organization (IMO), Vincent Favier, CEO, Ecoslops, David Turton, CFO and Company Director, SeaBin.