2 The Global Goods Movement System

A Doll’s Journey¹

Everyday products, whether an Apple computer or an iPhone, a cotton shirt or denim jeans, a clove of garlic or a bottle of wine, dog food or toothpaste, or a doll for the holiday season, are today produced, transported, and sold through an intricate weave of producers, suppliers, shippers, trucks, trains, warehouses, and retail outlets. At each stage of the journey of these products, the different components of a goods movement system has taken root. The major players shaping the economics and structure of a system that connects Los Angeles with Hong Kong and China are led by the ship owners (who transport the goods across borders and oceans) and the large end users (who sell the goods). They have developed a strategic connection to the producers (those who make the goods), the port owners and managers (who bring in and send out the goods), the rail, truck, and warehouse companies (who take the goods to and from the ports, repackage them, and send them to their retail destination), and the consumers who have long been hooked on high-turnover, cheap goods for sale. Hong Kong export trading executive Victor Fung has called the front end of this journey “dispersed [and borderless] manufacturing,” while community and environmental groups at the back end see it as creating environmental sacrifice zones.²

A China–Hong Kong–Los Angeles nexus has come to play an outsized role in this goods movement system. Take a doll’s journey, which is emblematic of how the system operates. It may begin at a factory in Shenzhen where different parts have been assembled from other factories and subcontractors in Guangdong Province in southern China (where 70 percent of all dolls in the world are produced) or from other countries in Asia with even lower labor and manufacturing costs. The factories producing the dolls may be owned or financed by Hong Kong investors or entrepreneurs, such as Early Light Industrial Co., Ltd., controlled by the politically well-connected manufacturer and real estate developer, Hong Kong billionaire Francis Choi, who has called himself “the toy king.”³

Once assembled, the doll continues its journey from the manufacturing facility to the ports, perhaps by truck or barge to Shenzhen, the third largest container port in the world, or to Hong Kong, the fifth largest in the world. Packed in twenty-foot containers, the dolls, along with the computers, iPads, T-shirts, and hundreds of other goods, are loaded onto giant container vessels—some even four football fields in length—owned by some of the largest ocean vessel companies in the world. Most of the ships still run on bunker fuel, the grade of fuel lower than diesel and more polluting, although some companies like Maersk, signatories to the Fair Winds Charter, have switched to a cleaner-burning fuel since 2011 while berthing in Hong Kong. The doll may take up to a few days to arrive at the ships from the manufacturing plant, depending on the plant’s location and the domestic transport or feeder shipping method. Loading and unloading all the containers for the ships that leave Shenzhen, Hong Kong, or Shanghai could then take another couple of days, depending on the sailing schedule for arrival at either the Port of Los Angeles or the adjacent Port of Long Beach. More than 86 percent of all the toys entering the US ports come from China and Hong Kong, with the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports serving as the dominant gateway for the nearly $10 billion worth of toy imports that are then transported throughout the United States.⁴

The unloading process involves a crane that lifts each container off the ship, placing it onto the chassis of a truck. The truck may haul the container (with the dolls inside it) to a rail facility where it is reloaded onto a train, powered by two to four diesel-fueled locomotives. The container from the train may then be moved to a truck that takes it to a huge distribution center where it may be further reloaded to the truck that eventually departs for the big box store where it will be sold.

The retailers, such as Walmart, are key players in the goods movement/supply chain system. They are deeply connected to the manufacturing and supply chain relationships in China, working with global brands (such as Mattel, in the case of the dolls) and operating through subcontractors and various other Chinese (and Hong Kong) suppliers and middle men. The retailers and brand-name companies have fueled the massive consumption patterns (and continuing search for cheap goods) in the Los Angeles region and throughout the United States that have in turn transformed the United States into a consuming rather than a producing country. The retailers also operate their own fleets of trucks and have relationships, primarily through subcontractors, with the massive warehouses in the inland port areas.

Thousands of trucks, barges, or rail lines now operate along this supply chain from manufacturer to ports and to retail stores and consumers. The huge international container ships, some reaching more than 400 meters long and 54 meters wide, can now carry upward of 19,000 TEUs (the twenty-foot equivalent units), with plans to increase that capacity to 21,000 TEUs in the near future. Warehouses which receive and then reload containers may themselves be as large as two million square feet. Environmental, public health, workplace, and community impacts arise along each of these pathways. Public health concerns arise primarily from the diesel pollution as well as other environmental, community, and labor impacts resulting from this system of producing, moving, and consuming goods along the entire supply chain.

Recognition of these impacts and concerns have led to more than a decade of research, voluntary agreements, regulatory and policy action, and community and environmental mobilization in the Hong Kong, southern China, and Los Angeles regions. These have resulted in some important changes, including new regulatory and policy requirements, legal action, and community agreements. Defenders of the system, such as the shipping lines, manufacturers, port operators, railroad and trucking firms, and the big retailers, have disregarded or minimized its impacts. They have argued that the goods movement system provides multiple advantages: job creation, regional and global economic development, and an expanding flow of inexpensive goods for consumers—such as this doll, another new model for the holiday season, which may sell briskly because of its low price. These differing perspectives have resulted in numerous protracted battles, with some important environmental victories contending with plans for expansion that create further health and environmental impacts.

Even as awareness of the impacts of the goods movement system increases, the expansion continues apace. According to Los Angeles port officials, for example, international trade increased nearly thirty times at US West Coast ports since 1970, with Los Angeles and Long Beach ports far outpacing any US counterpart.⁵ At the same time, ports in Hong Kong and China have until recently witnessed phenomenal growth to become among the largest ports in the world. These global trade and goods movement connections have become a crucial part of regional and global economies and a major source of regional—and global—pollution. In the twenty-first century, the links between Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China have made earlier dreams of establishing a Pacific littoral that stretches from LA to Asia more of a reality, while also providing the basis for “a maritime world economy.”⁶ With those global connections have also come the challenges to local communities, regions, public health, and the environment that had neither been anticipated nor incorporated into the planning process for global trade and goods movement.

Figure 2.1 Cranes and containers at the Port of Los Angeles. Source: THE Impact Project.

The Goods Movement System

Hong Kong

In Chinese, Hong Kong means “fragrant harbor.” Today, the port of Hong Kong is one of the busiest in the world, with more than 30,000 oceangoing vessel calls and about 160,000 river vessel calls each year.⁷ Hong Kong handles over 22 million container boxes each year, and 90 percent of Hong Kong’s cargo is handled through the port.⁸ In terms of their contribution to its economy, the port and related sectors account for about 2.3 percent of Hong Kong’s gross domestic product and 2.7 percent of its total workforce.⁹ The shipping and port industry has always been regarded as one of the key pillars of Hong Kong’s economy. Since its inception as a British colony, the city and its harbor have been seen as indivisible and symbiotic.

From a relatively isolated small fishing village and a refuge for pirates in southern China, Hong Kong emerged as a valuable trade outpost with China after it became a British colony in 1842.¹⁰ Hong Kong’s only natural endowment has been its deepwater harbor. Entrepôt trade blossomed due to the harbor and Hong Kong’s strategic location. Until the end of the nineteenth century, trade mainly consisted of British exports to China passing through Hong Kong, such as textiles from Britain, cotton from India, and pepper from the Straits. In return, Chinese goods such as tea, silk, and porcelain were shipped out.¹¹ Trade activities also included what came to be known as the coolie trade, “a traffic in human labor that resembled a commodity trade,” as David Meyer put it in his book on the global metropolis. As Meyer noted, huge numbers of coolies went abroad (or came back) through Hong Kong, with the United States, including California, the largest destination. Hong Kong firms in turn became the primary supplier of Chinese goods to the coolie migrants and their families.¹²

By the twentieth century, British dominance in trade began to be gradually reduced, and Hong Kong’s entrepôt trade partners became more diversified.¹³ Nevertheless, entrepôt trade remained the bloodstream of Hong Kong’s economy up to World War II, and Hong Kong reliance on China’s trade continued to remain very strong. After World War II, Hong Kong was in an even better position to handle China’s trade with other countries, as it became the only remaining foreign concession in China. Postwar recovery was subsequently disrupted by China’s entry into the Korean War in the early 1950s as well as a series of trade embargoes and retaliation between China and the western world.¹⁴ But as entrepôt trade declined, Hong Kong sought to expand its domestic industrial base. The foundation for this change had already been laid by the entrepôt economy, including the commercial and financial framework as well as the shipping network and port facilities which allowed Hong Kong to quickly adapt in order to support its domestic industries. The shift to local manufacturing, such as textiles and garments, plastic products, toys, electronics, and watches and clocks, also led to a change in Hong Kong’s trade patterns. As trade with China declined during this period, a new “seaward hinterland” identity emerged through new trade partnerships and shipping routes.¹⁵ Export-driven external trade in the 1960s and 1970s clearly replaced reexport as the driver of growth and modernization of the port of Hong Kong.¹⁶

This same period also marked another phase of port expansion and improvement. Apart from the government adding deepwater mooring buoys and private companies adding their berthing and warehousing facilities, British Colony Governor David Trench appointed a Container Committee in 1966 to consider the need for container handling facilities in Hong Kong. The committee’s recommendations were positive, and eventually Kwai Chung was chosen as the site to develop the terminal. The first berth of the Kwai Chung Container Terminals was opened for operation in 1972. By 1976, the six-berth terminal had an annual capacity of up to 1.5 million TEUs. Although a relative latecomer (globally) to containerization, by 1979, 54 percent of the general cargo handled at the port of Hong Kong was containerized.¹⁷

Hong Kong’s port expansion was facilitated by a combination of government subsidies and private investment. The government held title to the land where the different port facilities were developed, and leased the land to various private interests. These private entities in turn came to own the ports and establish the linkages with the shippers and the goods manufacturers and also participated in the management structures that provided oversight of the port operations. The largest of the port operators, Hutchison Port Holdings Limited (HPHL), itself a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa controlled by Hong Kong’s richest investor, Li Ka-shing, emerged as a port power broker in Hong Kong; it also came to play a major investor role in the eventual development of Shenzhen and several other China ports as well as ports in the Americas, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, and Africa. HPHL further established multiple relationships and partnerships with both private and state-owned port companies in China, and by the 1990s had secured its role as the largest port operator in the world.¹⁸

It was China’s shift to a market-oriented economy in the late 1970s and the establishment of special economic zones in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian that created another shift in Hong Kong’s economic orientation and inevitably affected the fortune of the port sector. The special economic zones set up next door were able to attract foreign investment and establish new bases for industrial production with abundant land and labor and other types of preferential treatment. Hong Kong’s proximity to southern China and its already established linkages placed it in a favorable position to support the modernization drive in southern China and to trigger its own economic restructuring, from a manufacturing to a service economy. Spatial relocation of Hong Kong’s domestic industries into Guangdong got under way in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the turn of the century there were already over 50,000 Hong Kong-owned factories in Guangdong (a number that continued to increase into the twenty-first century). Despite the relocation, most of the finished or semifinished products made in Guangdong were shipped back to Hong Kong via land-based or river-based transportation for final processing, labeling, packaging, and ultimately for export. Cross-border container trucking was at its peak during the 1990s, with drivers dashing between factory locations in different parts of Guangdong and Hong Kong on a daily basis. Traditional border checkpoints at Man Kam To and Sha Tau Kok were congested all the time, and a new checkpoint at Lok Ma Chau was opened to ease the traffic.¹⁹

The growth in cross-border road freight traffic was expected, not only because these products were connected with Hong Kong-based investment, but also because there was a lack of port infrastructure and capacity in Guangdong to handle the shipments at that time. During the first two decades of economic liberalization in southern China, the port of Hong Kong was the best choice in the region, given the number of shipping routes available, the frequency of shipping services, the efficient turnaround time at the terminal and even at midstream, and its highly developed ancillary services. Its efficient performance explained a period of high growth in port traffic and throughput in Hong Kong. During the eighteen years from 1987 to 2004, Hong Kong was crowned the busiest container port in the world on fifteen occasions. To handle additional throughput, the Kwai Chung Container Terminals expanded into nearby areas in Tsing Yi and Stonecutters Island. At present, the entire terminal complex has nine container terminals operated by five private companies, with twenty-four berths of about 7,700 meters of deepwater frontage. It covers a total area of about 279 hectares, including container yards and container freight stations, with a total handling capacity of over 20 million TEUs a year.²⁰

However, with the construction and expansion of container port facilities in Shenzhen (both in Yantian and Shekou), Guangzhou (including Huangpu and Nansha), Zhuhai (including Gaolan), and other smaller ports in the last fifteen to twenty years, Hong Kong’s position as the hub port in southern China has been strongly challenged. Finished products can be easily shipped to Yantian or Shekou via road or rail, and often at a lower terminal handling charge relative to that at Hong Kong. As a consequence, cross-border road freightage and the value of domestic exports (i.e., finished products made in Hong Kong) have declined significantly. Moreover, since 2013, Shenzhen has surpassed Hong Kong in terms of annual container throughput, and in 2015, Hong Kong was also overtaken by Ningbo-Zhoushan, another Chinese port, and dropped to fifth place among the world’s largest ports.²¹

Despite the rise of the Chinese ports, Hong Kong continues to be a major global port operator. It has transitioned from a gateway to a transshipment port and now faces challenges as it has inadequate facilities to accommodate the new generation of megaships. The 1997 transition to the one country, two systems framework failed to undercut Hong Kong’s historic role due in part to a provision included in the Basic Law that allowed Hong Kong to remain an independent customs territory, underlining its importance to China. In the last few years, with China’s own lower rate of growth, Hong Kong’s shipment of exportable goods and container throughput have declined as well. Despite its challenges, Hong Kong nevertheless remains a major player in the global goods movement system.²²

Figure 2.2 Hong Kong’s Kwai Chung Container Terminals with residential buildings in the background. Source: Civic Exchange.

Los Angeles

Today, the Port of Los Angeles remains the busiest container port in the United States, with its neighbor just to its south, the Port of Long Beach, the nation’s second busiest. Together the two ports make up the largest port facility complex in the country. In 2015 about 37 percent of the nation’s imports came through these two ports, making Los Angeles and Long Beach critical to the system of trade and goods movement traffic in the United States. The ports are also the primary destination of the goods that come from China and Hong Kong into the United States, establishing a new version of the old Pacific trade routes.

The Port of Los Angeles encompasses 7,500 acres along forty-three miles of waterfront, including twenty-seven passenger and cargo terminals, on-dock intermodal facilities, and railyards. The Port of Long Beach resides on 3,200 acres, and comprises twenty-two terminals, ten piers, and eighty cargo berths that handle nearly 5,000 vessel calls a year, as well as on-dock rail facilities, with more than six million TEUs passing through the port. Plans to accommodate the huge megaships are now in place at both ports, with the first of the megaships, one that carried 19,000 TEUs, having arrived at the Port of Los Angeles in December 2015. These huge ships have become partly responsible for increased congestion and long delays that take place at each of the ports’ operations. Port officials anticipate that the megaships will continue to increase in size, as shipping companies consolidate and look for greater efficiencies in scale. Those trends represent numerous challenges for port operations, which already include massive tie-ups from unloading to greater environmental and labor impacts at the ports and additional community impacts along the supply chain.²³

A focus on the Pacific has long been a dominant interest of the various advocates and boosters of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, even in their earliest years as the two port developments took shape. For example, in a 1935 book published by the LA Chamber of Commerce about the history of the Port of Los Angeles, the long-term head of the Los Angeles Harbor Department, Clarence Matson, spoke of the “westward march of empire and civilization which is now reaching its climax on the eastern shores of the Pacific with Los Angeles as its apex.”²⁴

The development of the Port of Los Angeles was first proposed in the 1890s. It proceeded at a modest pace until new oil fields were discovered in the region in the 1920s. After the Panama Canal had opened in 1914, the port was able to expand by shipping the oil through the canal to East Coast refineries, a necessity since Los Angeles lacked oil storage and refining capacity.²⁵ Increased agricultural production, including citrus products, also led to the increased movement of goods through the port. But it was after the introduction and widespread adoption of containerization in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports began to position themselves as major destination points for international shippers. A greater number of imports could be taken by truck and rail to locations throughout the United States, a process also made possible with the development of the US interstate highway system.²⁶

After World War II, US businesses’ and government officials’ interest in new global trade opportunities and investments, sparked by talk of a new Pacific Rim constellation of players and by US economic and political influences, led to renewed focus on Pacific trade. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, delegations from Los Angeles would continually travel to various Asian destinations, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Manila, Tokyo, and Singapore, to explore increasing their port’s capacity for imports and to look for new trade opportunities for US exports. By that point, the Panama Canal’s channels were already too small to handle the larger ships that had been built thanks to the revolution in containerization. The Panama Canal’s limitations had helped fuel subsequent expansions to the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports in the 1980s and 1990s, which enabled the two ports to accommodate larger ships and increased traffic. As the ports expanded, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley boasted that Los Angeles was becoming the “gateway city for the Pacific Rim.”²⁷

This growth in international trade from the Pacific exploded even further in the new century with the huge volume of exports entering the United States from China. In response, both the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports embarked on massive expansions of their own facilities. Alongside their continuing competition, the ports began to cooperate in anticipation of the increased trade and the need to accommodate the largest container ships that had to bypass the Panama Canal trade routes due to their size.²⁸ Periodic efforts were made to anticipate future growth, leading to further changes in port operations and facility developments, with the hope that Los Angeles could become “the trading center of the world,” as one official put it.²⁹

During this period, new terminals were built on existing vacant land and existing container terminals were redeveloped and expanded. Waterside berths were also deepened and a bridge replacement was built to accommodate more goods movement traffic. To further accommodate the growth of the Port of Los Angeles, the Alameda rail corridor was constructed. This $2.4 billion, twenty-mile rail link, which opened in 2002, went from the port to the huge railyards and intermodal facilities situated in the low-income communities to the south and east of downtown Los Angeles. Plans were also made to expand the Interstate 710 (I-710) freeway, the primary route for the thousands of trucks driving to and from both ports, which passes through the same neighborhoods located next to the large intermodal facilities. At the eastern edge of the Southern California region, in an area known as the Inland Empire (or the Inland Valley, as some residents preferred to call it), massive new warehouses and intermodal facilities were constructed as inland ports where the goods could be repackaged and then transferred to their final destinations. The huge retailers like Walmart, working in tandem with the major rail companies such as BNSF and establishing supplier relationships with the warehouse operators, further extended the goods movement system in Southern California and around the United States, where other inland ports took root. “This is a big-box market,” one inland port official characterized the rise of the inland ports.³⁰

These developments led policymakers to talk of a logistics industry revolution in the Los Angeles region, while its land use and environmental impacts were largely ignored. Supporters of this goods movement sector characterized it as a win-win for the region—good for the ports and the logistics industries such as warehousing, trucking, and the railroads; good for certain sectors of the Los Angeles regional economy and for the global economy; good for consumers seeking cheap imported products; good for a US economy relying on imports to fuel consumer spending; and good for US exporters that could ship their goods to overseas markets. It was seen as beneficial for Hong Kong and China as well, for both applauded the journey of goods across the Pacific. In an interesting 2007 presentation at Occidental College on the benefits of global trade, a visiting delegation from China’s Anhui Province responded to an overview of the system’s environmental and community impacts by saying that the students should focus instead on how China’s export industries serve as a major benefit for US consumers. “Your shoppers will want these goods; we can make them more cheaply, which is what your consumer wants,” the delegation leader asserted—a comment often repeated in both China and the United States.³¹

If the boosters of Los Angeles’s goods movement had concerns, these had more to do with competition from the newly expanding ports in the southern and eastern United States that eagerly awaited a new enlargement of the Panama Canal’s capacity. With the Panama Canal’s projected expansion to accommodate larger ships and the anticipation of reduced shipping costs that would result, a frenzy of new port expansion occurred in eastern US seaboard places such as Jacksonville, Savannah, Miami, and Gulfport, Mississippi, and even in older port complexes like New York and New Jersey. In addition, the Panama Canal expansion was seen as a major boost for the export of natural gas from the United States, which had seen huge increases in production due to advanced technologies such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.³²

Even before the Panama Canal expansion could be completed, there were already concerns, expressed primarily by China, that it would not be big enough to accommodate the ultralarge crude carriers and even the largest gas carriers, among the massive new ships that had entered the global goods movement system. In response to such concerns, in June 2013 the Nicaraguan Congress granted the HKND (Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development) Corporation, a Chinese investment company based in Hong Kong, exclusive rights to construct a huge canal project in Nicaragua; according to the investors, the canal would accommodate those largest ships and help further China’s quest for new sources for its huge energy needs, including, potentially, US gas exports. While the HKND investors claimed that the Nicaragua Canal project was ready to break ground (with an anticipated completion date in 2020), industry analysts were skeptical whether the project would ever be completed, given its enormous community dislocations and environmental impacts (for example, threatening Lake Nicaragua’s ecosystem that the project needed to pass through) and its huge price tag ($50 billion, nearly five times Nicaragua’s own annual economic output).³³

Aside from the murky Nicaragua Canal prospects, the Panama Canal expansion seemed more pressing to the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. As a result, the focus of the LA port boosters became “Beat the Canal.” While there were hopes that the “greening” of the LA/Long Beach ports (forced in part by environmental advocacy and policy mandates) could help modernize and meet regulatory barriers, the greater concern was that greening the port operations would slow down port expansion and reduce their competitive edge threatened by the enlarged Panama Canal, which finally opened in 2016, and (the elusive) Nicaragua Canal expansion.³⁴

Even as the Los Angeles and Long Beach port officials worried about shipper opposition and the costs associated with the new greening policies, the community and environmental groups who had been the key backers of greening the ports argued that greener ports could potentially become the trend around the world. Prospective greening initiatives at the Port of Hong Kong, influenced by the changes in Los Angeles, could inspire changes at Shenzhen, Shanghai, and other Chinese ports and help create further momentum for a more expansive greening strategy on both sides of the Pacific. Despite these breakthroughs, it remained to be seen whether the negative environmental and community impacts of the global trade and goods movement system would remain deeply embedded in that system’s very nature and operations. New research only reinforced those concerns, as the question of the environment and of community health, far from disappearing or becoming marginalized, emerged at the heart of the debates about the system’s future.

Impacts

Hong Kong

Compared to Los Angeles, Hong Kong’s goods movement system is relatively simple. International movement of freight is mostly carried by water (over 90 percent in tonnage in 2014, including via ocean and river), with only a small fraction moved by road (less than 7 percent).³⁵ Rail freight across the border with Guangdong had never been of any significance in the past, and the service was terminated after June 2010. Internally, most freight is distributed by trucks, and there are also barges that operate as feeders as an alternative for moving cargo inside the harbor area, especially between cargo working areas, wharves, and terminal facilities. As such, most environmental impacts are associated with ship and port operations as well as road freightage.

However, compared to Los Angeles, Hong Kong has experienced less of a government policy focus or public awareness of the environmental impacts of its goods movement system, even as it has expanded in scale as a result of economic growth and burgeoning external trade. Construction and operation of the infrastructure and the moving components, including port and terminal facilities, oceangoing vessels, harbor craft, and the trucking industry, are major economic drivers for Hong Kong, and any adverse impact on the environment is usually accepted as an inconvenient consequence of trade and economic development. Identifying a connection between environmental impact and health outcomes is almost nonexistent in this context. For example, when cross-border road freight was flourishing in the 1990s and early 2000s due to growing economic ties with Guangdong, the main issue that concerned people was traffic congestion at the border checkpoints, which caused delivery delays and economic problems related to the traffic. The air pollution and noise at the border area and along major trucking corridors was perceived at most as a secondary concern.³⁶ During that period, government projections of cargo movements were optimistic based on past trends, and the idea of building a Port Rail Line (PRL) connecting the Kwai Chung Container Terminals with the rail network in mainland China was rekindled in 2000.³⁷ About the same time, the Port and Maritime Board commissioned a consultancy study to look into ways to make Hong Kong the preferred logistics hub in southern China.³⁸ These projections and studies demonstrated the government’s desire to strengthen Hong Kong’s role as a transshipment center in the region. Yet the assumptions behind these projections began to be questioned, and the need for a thorough assessment of the economic benefits and environmental costs of moving increasing amounts of freight through Hong Kong was also raised.³⁹

These questions led various groups such as Civic Exchange to inquire about the contribution of ship and port operations to Hong Kong’s serious air pollution problems, given its position as a leading seaport in the world and the intensity of shipping activities in the port area. Although air pollution was getting worse, public perception, backed up by government figures, suggested that power plants were a main source of local air pollution, followed by the road transport sector. The contribution from ships and port activities was considered insignificant, while power generation and roadside emissions were higher on the government’s policy agenda. It was in this context that Civic Exchange completed its first background paper on ship emissions in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta in 2006, including a review of international regulations and best practices in ship and port emissions control.⁴⁰ Their review included the research, community action, and policy initiatives taking place in Los Angeles during this period which demonstrated the importance and feasibility of port and ship emission reduction initiatives. Recognition of these efforts in Los Angeles helped strengthen the emerging arguments in Hong Kong about the importance of focusing on air pollution from ships and the port sector; in turn, the Los Angeles approach provided a potential model for the research and policy analysis then being conducted in Hong Kong.⁴¹

Background research findings were shared with the shipping industry and agents in other related sectors, such as container terminal operators, truck owners and drivers, shippers and logistics companies, as well as government officials representing the Environmental Protection Department and the Marine Department. This led to a multiyear engagement process that was launched in 2008, with regular roundtable discussions and meetings set up with different stakeholders. These sessions led the government in 2008 to commission a study to compile an emission inventory for marine vessels operating in Hong Kong waters. The study was completed in 2012.

With updated assumptions and a new, activity-based methodology, the new marine vessels emission inventory showed that the contribution of ships to air pollution was higher than previously estimated. By 2013, ships were identified as contributing 50 percent of SO₂, 31 percent of NO_x, and 36 percent of PM₁₀ emissions in Hong Kong. It was estimated that almost 70 percent of ship emissions were contributed by oceangoing vessels, and among those, container vessels were major emitters, with 80 percent. It was also found that 30 to 40 percent of oceangoing vessel emissions were produced while the vessels were hoteling at berth or anchorage. As would be expected, Kwai Chung Container Terminals and other major berthing locations were identified as emission hotspots.⁴²

In another 2012 Civic Exchange report that calculated ship emissions in the Pearl River Delta region, the impact of these emissions on public health was also assessed. It was estimated that ship emissions of SO₂ alone (hence providing a conservative estimate, as other pollutants were not included) accounted for 519 cases of premature deaths each year in the PRD. Four control scenarios were assessed, and the report concluded that establishing an emission control area in the PRD would bring about a 91 percent reduction in premature deaths.⁴³

Research on port and ship emissions led the Hong Kong government to begin to identify whether and how new policies could be established to reduce the air pollution impacts from the ships entering, docking at, and leaving its ports. But even as those efforts began to be explored, Hong Kong’s port traffic, along with that at several other ports in China including neighboring Shenzhen, continued to be identified as serious polluters, representing what one journal article characterized as “the Dirty Ten.” These were the ports whose ships still utilized the most polluting heavy fuel oil and were responsible for the elevated levels of such pollutants as PM_2.5. As more studies continued to be published, they further expanded on the link between ship emissions and air pollution and heightened the concerns of the public health and environmental groups, and, increasingly, of policy officials as well.⁴⁴

Los Angeles

During the first years of the twenty-first century, the question of the health and environmental impacts from the expansion of global trade and the goods movement system began to more urgently enter the debates in Southern California. As identified in the doll’s journey, this included emissions from the ships (as they entered the ports and idled, awaiting unloading); emissions from the cranes that took containers from the ships onto the trucks; emissions from the trucks and railroads transporting the goods; emissions and the “around-the-clock” bright lights, noise pollution, and extended use of land in the heart of dense urban communities by the intermodal railyards; emissions from the highways and high-traffic roadways used for freight transport; and emissions and land use impacts at the inland port warehouses.

Community, health, and environmental concerns have especially focused on the diesel emissions that occur along each of these pathways. This concern has led some community residents to describe their neighborhoods adjacent to the goods movement operations as “diesel death zones.” The concerns are warranted. Diesel is considered a mobile source air toxic (MSAT) by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In California, it is regulated as a toxic air contaminant (TAC). The TAC designation for diesel was made in 1998, based on more than thirty studies showing that worker exposure to diesel exhaust is linked to lung cancer and other health effects. In 2012, pointing to cumulative research, the International Agency for Cancer Research, a part of the World Health Organization, identified diesel as carcinogenic to humans (Group 1), changing its earlier 1988 classification of diesel as a probable carcinogen (Group 2A) based on sufficient evidence that exposure is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer. Research studies have also identified such diesel-related health impacts as asthma, reduced lung development in children, cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, and premature death, among numerous other community and health impacts.⁴⁵

The plans to expand the I-710 freeway as the primary goods movement corridor for trucks illustrate the environmental and public health battles that are being waged. Leaving the ports traveling on the I-710 in a car is a frightening experience. The roadway is almost entirely filled with trucks throughout the day. As many as 43,000 truck trips to and from the ports occur daily, with estimates suggesting that the number could increase to 80,000 truck trips per day by the year 2035. Serious accidents happen periodically; the roads are severely congested, which only increases emissions; the roadways are subject to major wear and tear, which is an expense for the truckers as well as a public expense; and serious impacts from emissions are a constant problem.⁴⁶

The trucking industry, the transportation agencies, and various regional bodies such as the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) have concluded that the way to address these issues is to expand an eighteen-mile stretch of the I-710. At one point, that included the possibility of constructing a multibillion-dollar second level to the freeway. This double decker of exposures and pollutant impacts was promoted by goods movement interests as a way to limit exposures by adding lanes to reduce traffic congestion, despite the anticipated increase in truck traffic. Community and environmental critics countered that a tripling of the freeway’s capacities could enormously increase emissions, pointing to research studies that identified how increased capacity generates “induced traffic”; that is, if they built it, more traffic would come, negating any lessening of congestion. Alternatives that have been identified by the community groups include expanding public transit, mandating the use of zero-emission technologies, providing community benefits such as pedestrian and bike improvements, and establishing green belts, open space, and trail improvements along the LA River which abuts the I-710 corridor.⁴⁷

Contentious debates about the community and environmental impacts from air, noise, and light pollution have also centered on rail transport, including the rail corridors, the huge railyards, and the intermodal facilities. Some of the largest railroad companies such as the Union Pacific and BNSF Railway have sought to significantly increase their own freight traffic capacities to coincide with the flow of goods coming from China and other Asian countries and ports. The first major expansion of the rail freight system in Southern California involved the construction in the 1980s and 1990s of the Alameda Corridor, designed to overcome right-of-way bottlenecks and speed the rail traffic coming out of the port. Linked to this opportunity for faster rail freight, the Union Pacific and BNSF developed ambitious plans to increase their role. A proposed expansion to more than double the size of an intermodal facility (the Intermodal Container Transfer Facility, or ICTF) was developed, as well as the Southern California International Gateway (SCIG) facility, the proposed new railyards next to the ICTF. The expanded ICTF and SCIG facilities were designed to handle as many as three million containers a year. These “off-dock” facilities are directly across from an elementary school, a park, residential homes, and other community places.⁴⁸

Figure 2.3 Trucks leaving the Port of Los Angeles across from a neighboring park. Source: UEPI.

The intermodal railyards in the city of Commerce southeast of downtown Los Angeles, which include four railyards and high-traffic corridors within a small community of working-class immigrants, as well as another huge rail facility at the eastern end of the region in San Bernardino have also become flashpoints for concern over community, health, and environmental impacts. These intermodal rail facilities generate substantial sources of diesel exposure from the trains, trucks, and cargo-handling equipment and off-road equipment that moves the bulk cargo. Health risk assessments of the facilities in Commerce and San Bernardino by the California Air Resources Board have found extremely high cancer risks (as much as 1,000 times higher than what is often identified as a threshold for cancer risk), with elevated cancer risks extending as far as eight miles from the yards.⁴⁹

Beyond air quality concerns, light and noise pollution from the intermodal rail facilities and the trucks are a constant factor affecting the health and quality of life of nearby residents, primarily in low-income communities. The bright lights, often resembling stadium lights, remain on twenty-four hours a day, which can cause sleep disorders and sexual dysfunction. The noise levels are also constant, causing major health impacts such as psychological effects (e.g., elevated stress levels), physiological effects (e.g., hearing loss and increase in blood pressure), and mental health effects (e.g., increased anxiety). In Commerce, the railyards are adjacent to several freeways (including I-710) and other heavy-traffic roadways that overwhelm the community with emissions and the stress from the noise and traffic.⁵⁰

Figure 2.4 Line of trucks along a main boulevard in the city of Commerce. Source: East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Meanwhile, the San Bernardino railyards and the huge warehouses that have sprung up in the inland counties of Riverside and San Bernardino have generated substantial pollution and land use impacts. Along with the intermodal yards, warehousing is an integral link in the goods movement chain. Approximately a quarter of the thirteen to fifteen million shipping containers entering the region’s ports each year are transloaded in warehouse storage facilities before leaving greater Los Angeles. The LA region has approximately 700 to 800 million square feet of warehouse facilities of which about 25 percent are port-related—with future port-related warehouse development plans poised to significantly expand those numbers.⁵¹ As close as one can come to “sprawl in a box,” these structures are spartanly built, lined with dozens of truck bays. Warehouse operations are connected to distant locations—factories in China, railyards near the port, Walmarts in Illinois—rather than connected to the fabric of life in the communities in which they are located. Walmart alone has 160 distribution centers, including 42 regional centers around the United States that are larger than one million square feet each.⁵²

The fastest growing cluster of warehouses serving the goods movement and logistics industry are in the Inland Valley. In 2013, 23.3 million square feet of industrial space was picked up for warehouse and logistics industry purposes in the Inland Empire, while the next year as much as 22 million square feet of warehouse space was leased.⁵³ The unchecked growth of warehouses and the roads and railyards that serve them has dramatically transformed the landscape of the area and the health of its residents. Farmland has been converted to immense, windowless warehouses surrounded by asphalt and chain link fencing—and some of the worst air pollution in the nation has been measured there. Mira Loma Village, a low-income Latino community in Riverside County, which is surrounded by warehouses and distribution centers, has been identified as having some of the highest levels of particulate pollution in the nation, while Mira Loma children have the slowest lung growth and weakest lung capacity of all children studied in southern California.⁵⁴

Due to this web of impacts caused by the goods movement system, opposition emerged at the ports and along the regional goods movement corridor in the Los Angeles region. Such opposition has since spread to other port and goods movement communities and regions across the United States, and connections have formed with environmental critics and researchers in Hong Kong and China as well as other places throughout the world. Community, health, and environmental advocates, along with new research and policy initiatives, have forced a shift in how the system is characterized and have helped change the debate to what has been causing those impacts and how they can best be addressed.

The Connection to China

The contemporary rise of China’s ports and shipping industry coincides with China’s post-Maoist evolution into a globally oriented market economy. In 1978, the total value of China’s imports and exports was US $20.6 billion (or 35.5 billion yuan). It ranked thirty-second in world trade and accounted for less than 1 percent of the world’s total trade volume. Although Hong Kong had ranked among the top two or three largest port cities in the world, China’s ports—even its largest and historically rooted ports in Shanghai and Guangzhou—were small in relation to its Asian counterparts such as Singapore and Hong Kong. However, with the shift toward export production and its role as the world’s factory, China’s ports grew rapidly, particularly after the mid-1980s when China initiated negotiations with the World Trade Organization (WTO). The mainland government made huge investments in port infrastructures, and over the next twenty years those investments surpassed all the other investments in the world combined. By 2001 when China formally entered the WTO as its 143rd member, its total value of imports and exports had jumped to US $509.6 billion (4,218.3 billion yuan) and then grew again in the next dozen years to US $4,158.99 billion.⁵⁵

The trade in goods through seaports has had a long and complex history in China. Shipping to and from Guangzhou (formerly Canton) can be traced back to the Eastern Han period around the first century AD, when merchants from the Roman Empire explored opportunities for obtaining goods through sea transport via a marine Silk Road that stretched from Canton to the European coastal cities. The development of the treaty ports in the nineteenth century, including Canton, created strong negative associations about imperial control and the carving up of port territories, concessions, and enclaves as places reserved for foreigners. By the Maoist period, those historically rooted negative associations about the global designs of foreign powers as reflected in global trade lasted well into the mid-1980s even as China began to construct its export-based manufacturing and transport infrastructure to accommodate its own global trade designs.

The negotiations to incorporate China into global trade systems (initially as part of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and subsequently with its successor, the WTO) changed that dynamic from one of mistrust of foreign manipulation to expectations of expanded trade as an economic driver. When an agreement was reached in December 2001 for China to join the WTO, China’s role in global trade became even more explosive. From 2000 to 2009, the average annual increase in growth rates of China’s exports and imports reached 17 percent and 15 percent, respectively; figures much higher than the 3 percent annual growth rate of world trade as a whole. At the same time, foreign direct investment, including in China’s export industries and its ports, grew enormously as well.⁵⁶

The tenth anniversary of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2011 became an occasion to celebrate China’s new global role. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao enthusiastically characterized this change as “a momentous event in China’s opening-up to the outside world.” New private investors, including from Hong Kong, became major international port operators, and, since 2012, as many as six Chinese ports (in addition to Hong Kong) have continued to be listed among the ten largest container port operations in the world. State-run and financed companies have either joined or established partnerships with huge private (and global) operators such as HPHL to undertake the rapid expansion of port operations in China and subsequently to expand investments in port operations around the world.⁵⁷

The rush to expand was influenced in part by local governments seeking an economic bonanza with the development of their new megaports, not unlike the rush to develop other huge transportation projects in China’s cities. As a result, new problems of overcapacity emerged due to a more chaotic development process. Those problems were reinforced by the global economic slowdown of 2008–2009, increased labor costs due in part to protest actions, the rise of the megaships (which also experienced their own overcapacity problems), and eventually, recognition of the environmental problems associated with the port developments. The rate of increase in the value of imports and exports in China peaked in 2002 and began to slow by 2009; the total value declined over the next three years. The mainland government sought to address some of these trends by pushing for consolidation among the largest Chinese shipping companies (for example, combining the state-owned China Shipping with another huge state-run shipping firm) and by developing a more robust “hub and spoke” framework that favored key regions such as the Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas. This shift was part of the government’s emerging strategy to increase domestic consumption of goods and to reduce the economy’s long-standing reliance on export production. Slogans that were introduced, such as “Go West” (into the interior) and “Strategy for developing the Yangtze River” (establishing a goods movement link, for example, between Shanghai and Chongqing), typified the new focus on domestic goods movement.⁵⁸

Missing in this change in orientation until recently has been an environmental focus. While Hong Kong began to conduct research and take action to reduce and control ship emissions in the last few years, the focus in China remained on port capacities and cargo throughputs, whether domestic or foreign. Private investors looked at environmental questions from a bottom-line perspective while government agencies, increasingly absorbed by issues like air pollution, looked more toward problems related to power generation, industrial production, urbanization, and motorization.

One impetus for change in China has been Hong Kong’s own experience in ship emissions control. This has led to some pressures on Guangdong, especially on Shenzhen, given the recognition that Guangdong’s ship- and port-related emissions have impacted both China and Hong Kong through cross-border pollution. Those pollution sources cause government intervention in Hong Kong to become less effective when the neighboring ports in Shenzhen fail to take similar actions. As a result, the Hong Kong government began to seek more regional collaboration with Guangdong and Shenzhen in such areas as air pollution monitoring and ship emission controls. At the same time, once Hong Kong sought to move toward a regulatory approach, the shipping industry began to lobby for a uniform standard within the region to reduce the difficulties of compliance and to establish a level playing field within the sector. Each of these pressures eventually translated into a modest but important regulatory approach for Shenzhen and Guangdong. Constructive dialogue and information sharing also occurred between the governments of Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Shenzhen and, at the nongovernment level, at academic conferences and technical exchanges between research institutes and universities.

Beyond the pressures coming from Hong Kong, the growing concerns about air pollution in mainland China have established some momentum to move toward tighter air quality standards and comprehensive air pollution control strategies. Among other areas, controlling ship emissions has begun to be identified as one of the means to help reduce air pollution. New information from a 2013 assessment provided by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, for example, identified the shipping sector as responsible for 8.4 percent of China’s SO_x and 11.3 percent of its NO_x emissions. Until 2015, China’s ports, including its six largest, had not been required to meet the air pollution standards mandated in a number of port communities around the world, including Los Angeles and Hong Kong. In June 2015, the Chinese government initiated a public consultation on new requirements on ship emissions. Six months later, a series of plans were put in place, including requirements for the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, and the northeastern Bohai Bay rim, as designated domestic emission control areas, to use fuel with a sulfur content of no more than 0.5 percent starting in January 2016, first on a voluntary basis and subsequently as a mandatory requirement. In April 2016, Shanghai moved nine months ahead of schedule with other key ports in Yangtze River Delta by making the 0.5 percent sulfur fuel rule mandatory.⁵⁹ According to China’s Ministry of Transport, the new rules are focused on reducing SO₂’s contribution to acid rain as well as its major health impacts such as respiratory conditions and premature death.⁶⁰

As these regulations have begun to be put in place, the impacts of ship emissions on public health for China have been highlighted, given the size of its major port clusters in the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Bohai area, all situated in the most populated coastal regions in China. The evidence from Los Angeles and Hong Kong has also made it clear that emission control and pollution prevention measures for ships and goods movement are both doable and could lead to major health and environmental improvement. The question remains whether the rapidity with which China has increased its economic development, whether in relation to its ports, global trade, or overall push for industrial and urban development, will either continue to overwhelm any environmental initiative or will instead elevate the types of environmental approaches needed to address the impacts already identified from those developments.

Strategies for Change

In Hong Kong, on the morning of July 9, 2010, a meeting took place on the thirty-ninth floor of a commercial building typical of the Hong Kong skyline. It was the Hong Kong head office of Maersk Line, the largest container shipping company in the world. The meeting was attended by representatives from Maersk Line, the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department, and Civic Exchange. The meeting, which included Tim Smith, chief executive of the North Asia business of Maersk Line and an active player in the Hong Kong Liner Shipping Association (HKLSA), Billy Cheung and Tony Lee of the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department, and Simon Ng of Civic Exchange, covered issues like fuel switching and the additional cost that would be incurred by the shipping companies, the viability of voluntary action, and whether it could lead to a pathway to future regulation, and the need for communications and collaboration with Guangdong authorities. It was hoped that a new initiative could be forged involving the shippers, the government, and civil society groups.

Preceding this meeting had been a workshop organized by Civic Exchange in mid-June 2010, one of a series of stakeholder engagement activities since 2008 on the topic of ship emissions and the need for prevention and control measures. Shipping lines, container terminal operators, fuel suppliers, government representatives, and academics were present for the June workshop, which highlighted fuel switching as a potential option in Hong Kong for reducing ship emissions. After a number of presentations and group deliberations, major shipping lines attending the workshop verbally agreed to draft a voluntary agreement that ships berthing in Hong Kong waters would use distillate fuel instead of bunker fuel, and that they would be willing to take the proposal back to their members for internal discussion. This proposal was particularly championed by Maersk Line and a few other key members of the HKLSA, as well as the Hong Kong Shipowners Association. The workshop participants recognized that these types of changes had already been instituted in a few other port communities around the world, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, thus putting additional pressures on the ship owners. After the workshop, everyone agreed to reconvene after summer vacation, since it was not clear whether the other HKLSA members would be willing to switch to the more expensive distillate fuel.⁶¹

As these internal discussions were taking place, preliminary findings of a marine vessels emission inventory commissioned by the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department were being shared with members of the HKLSA in another meeting held on August 18, 2010. The inventory demonstrated that container vessels contributed a substantial share of emissions, especially when the vessels were at berth or anchorage. Switching to clean distillate fuel, particularly with fuel sulfur content of 0.5 percent or lower, would potentially reduce emissions of SO₂ and PM₁₀ by roughly 70 to 80 percent at the berthing locations. After this meeting, the language for the Fair Winds Charter was discussed and finalized in early September 2010. Maersk Line then took the lead by switching its fuel that month, followed by American President Line (APL) in October. The Fair Winds Charter officially started on January 1, 2011, for a two-year period, with seventeen shipping lines signing on to the agreement.

Figure 2.5 Fair Winds Charter. Source: Civic Exchange.

In Los Angeles, in 2001, scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) hosted a conference on air pollution and invited a number of environmental justice groups, including those located in heavily impacted neighborhoods adjacent to goods movement corridors, to hear their findings. The USC scientists were in the midst of a longitudinal study of air pollution and had begun to map air pollution hot spots. During the discussion of exposure to particulate matter and diesel exhaust, several community members who lived adjacent to the ports, truck routes, or the railyards spoke of the health and environmental issues in their neighborhoods.

Toward the end of the conference, Jesse Marquez, a resident of the low-income community of Wilmington adjacent to the Port of Los Angeles, rattled off a series of anecdotes about people in his neighborhood with serious health problems. “The ships at the port are not even regulated for their impacts, yet we face the consequences every day,” Marquez told the assembled scientists. “Of course they are regulated,” the scientists replied, less knowledgeable about how the goods movement system operated. The scientists soon discovered that Marquez was accurate, suggesting that community experiences and knowledge were also critical factors in helping frame the research. The combination of research, community action, and litigation would soon begin to change the policy landscape.⁶²

Six years after the USC conference, a new network of community groups, policy researchers, and scientists that called itself THE (Trade, Health, and Environment) Impact project hosted their own conference on the goods movement system and its impacts in Southern California. THE Impact Project community groups were linked to an evolving environmental justice framework. Based in low-income, predominantly Latino and immigrant neighborhoods, the focus on goods movement represented not just the classic environmental justice argument about the toxic burdens in such communities, but a strong desire among residents to create more livable places, underlining the environmental justice argument that environmental advocacy needs to focus on the places where people live, work, play, eat, and go to school. What became especially compelling about this place-based focus was the understanding that the goods movement system connected the places at the local and the regional level as well as within a national and global context where the system operates.⁶³

The development of these community-based environmental justice groups, along with other academic/research, health, environmental, and labor networks, has played a role in some important policy changes, community benefit agreements, and environmental changes at the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach and throughout the goods movement system. While these changes have been substantial—and have been considered a model for other port and goods movement communities throughout the United States as well as in Hong Kong and China—they have also continued to be challenged and at times undermined by the shippers, big-box retailers, and railroad and trucking companies. Along with the development of such policies and new greening initiatives, the question of implementation has been critical.

In China, in the port city of Tianjin, in August 2015 two huge blasts decimated a warehouse as well as the adjoining neighborhood in the industrial Binhai New Area. The explosions killed 173 people and injured many more, although it took several months to identify the number of victims, which included workers, residents, firefighters, and police. A large number of buildings, apartments, vehicles, and other infrastructure were burned or destroyed. The state media reported that a shipment of explosive materials had ignited at a port warehouse run by Tianjin Dongjiang Port Ruihai International Logistics, which stores such substances as sodium cyanide and the toxic substance toluene diisocyanate. The two explosions occurred within seconds of each other. The National Earthquake Bureau said the first blast’s strength was equivalent to three tons of TNT and the second was the equivalent of twenty-one tons.⁶⁴

A week after the blast, the Chinese news agency Xinhua published an investigative report that quoted company executives who had been detained by the police as saying they had “good connections with government officials.” The article was surprising since Xinhua had not been known for aggressive reporting on major accidents in China. The top party leaders, including President Xi Jinping, criticized the way Tianjin officials, including those at the port, had addressed the causes and consequences of the explosions. Ultimately several officials were arrested, including those at the Ministry of Transport, Tianjin’s municipal government, and its port authority. The Work Safety Bureau of Tianjin’s Binhai New Area where several port-related warehouses and chemical plants were located, some of them next to new residential developments, was instructed to review the conditions at 583 chemical companies in the area. Their review found problems at eighty-five of them. Ten of those plants were subsequently ordered to relocate because they were seen to be too close to residential areas.⁶⁵

The Tianjin events occurred at a time when port and goods movement issues had begun to receive attention in China, as its December 2015 policy on fuel oil demonstrated. Moreover, one possible outcome of the Tianjin explosions was an immediate drop in throughput numbers at Chinese ports. While such a drop was thought to be temporary and not necessarily directly connected to the Tianjin situation, it likely contributed to China’s broader assessment of its goods movement system. That same assessment was taking place in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, where regulating the port and shipping sector’s environmental and health impacts was now on policy agendas, including whether and how the implementation of such policies would take place.⁶⁶

Comparing the policy changes in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China reveals that some of the more extensive changes have taken place in Los Angeles. One of the first policy changes was a 2003 settlement agreement on plans for a major Chinese state-run shipping company to occupy a $650 million, 174-acre terminal to be built by the Port of Los Angeles. Two wharves would be built at this terminal, larger than any other at the time, to house as many as 200 to 300 container vessels a year per wharf for the China Shipping Holding Company (China Shipping). The terminal would also include ten massive cranes, up to sixteen stories high, that would unload the containers. Yet the site was also just 500 feet from residential homes and would involve new roads to accommodate the anticipated huge increase in truck traffic.⁶⁷

These plans immediately generated community opposition. The ships docked at the port were likely to keep their engines running, potentially days at a time, until containers could be unloaded. Dockside diesel-related emissions for just a single vessel at berth could include as much as one ton of NO_x and nearly 100 pounds of particulates each day before the unloading took place. A lawsuit against the port was filed to stop the completion of the new terminal until an agreement could be reached with the community groups. After losing in district court, opponents of the China Shipping plans achieved a major victory at the appellate court level. As a result, the port (and the City of Los Angeles) decided to settle in order to avoid an additional lengthy court battle whose outcome was not assured.⁶⁸

The results of the agreement were impressive. China Shipping agreed that its ships would use “cold ironing,” a long-standing technology used by naval vessels and ferries but never before by container ships. Identified by the port as an “alternative power source for oceangoing vessels,” cold ironing allowed the ships to plug into an electric source while at berth. Such a shift represented an expected elimination of more than three tons of nitrogen oxides (NO_x) and 350 pounds of diesel particulate matter for each ship that plugged in.⁶⁹ The settlement also called for other environmental changes at the terminal, including the use of dock tractors to run on alternative fuels instead of diesel, shorter cranes, and a shift toward cleaner marine fuels once their feasibility had been evaluated. A community mitigation fund was also established, including incentives to replace diesel-powered trucks, air quality mitigation measures, and community improvements.⁷⁰

The China Shipping agreement turned out to be the opening effort in Los Angeles for addressing future expansion plans and producing environmental changes related to port operations. In 2007, a new proposal was introduced to expand the TraPac facilities from 176 to 243 acres and to reconfigure roadways to accommodate the anticipated increase in traffic. Once again a lawsuit was filed and a settlement was reached out of court the next year. The settlement included a $50 million Port Community Mitigation Fund to be run by a nonprofit and administered by a community and environmental board; $3.5 million for parks and open space; installation of air purification and sound proofing in the nearby public elementary schools and residents’ homes; new health services resources and research on health and land use impacts; and potential wetlands restoration projects in the Wilmington and San Pedro areas that neighbored the port.⁷¹

The TraPac dispute was taking place just prior to a lengthy and contentious policy process that resulted in the San Pedro Bay Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP), adopted in 2006, and a subsequent Clean Trucks Plan the next year. The two ports signed on, although the Long Beach port eliminated one key provision of the truck plan. In many ways, the CAAP and the Clean Trucks Plan provided the most substantial changes up to that point of any port in the United States and for many ports worldwide. The CAAP set significant emission reduction targets by the end of 2011 from the baseline year of 2007—a 45 percent emissions reduction in diesel particulate matter (DPM), nitrogen oxides (NO_x), and sulfur oxides (SO_x). That goal was achieved and even exceeded, in part due to reduced ship traffic related to the Great Recession of 2008–2009. Other changes that had predated the adoption of the CAAP or were put in place subsequently included a ship speed reduction plan, the change to electric shore power, a shift to alternative fuels for cargo equipment including the cranes, and future changes in the fuel sources for the incoming ships. In addition, the state of California began to require oceangoing vessels to use lower sulfur fuels, slow down as they approached shore, and turn off their engines for shore power (or adopt equivalent controls) when docked.⁷²

Perhaps the most contentious of the changes involved the transition toward replacing dirty diesel trucks with less polluting trucks at the port. Among other goals, this Clean Trucks Plan included replacing and retrofitting approximately 16,000 trucks in order to meet federal EPA emissions standards by 2012. To achieve these goals, the program featured a $1.6 billion concessionaire model that would require trucking companies that serviced the port to hire truck drivers as employees in return for securing transport contracts with the port. These new employees would replace the heavily exploited system of independent contractors, or tranqueros, who resided at the economic margins and would find the truck replacement costs nearly impossible to meet.⁷³

Aside from the economic squeeze, the immigration status of the individual trucker contractors further reinforced the potential for exploitation. Immigration issues were a major factor for the port trucking and goods movement sector. For example, on May 1, 2006, a year prior to the Clean Trucks Plan agreement, 90 percent of all the truck drivers serving the Port of Los Angeles refused to make or pick up their deliveries, in solidarity with the massive Immigration Rights rally taking place that day. Participation in this labor action was significantly influenced by an immigration raid at the port two weeks prior that had targeted the immigrant truck drivers and had caused several drivers to be hauled out of their trucks and detained, with their trucks towed away.⁷⁴

The Clean Trucks Plan was immediately met with opposition from the American Trucking Association as well as by other players in the goods movement system industry, including multinational retail companies such as Walmart and Target which filed an injunction blocking the implementation of the employee concession element of the program from moving forward. A series of court battles subsequently ensued which eventually gutted the concessionaire model (which the Long Beach port had already abandoned) but kept the policy of truck replacement and retrofit. Many of the older diesel trucks were replaced and emissions were further reduced. But the vulnerabilities and poor working conditions for the independent truckers, the tranqueros, still largely remained, even as a few victories subsequently took place after the truckers mobilized and a handful of companies changed their status from contractors to employees, as had been required in the concessionaire agreement.

Other changes also failed to proceed smoothly. In September 2015, the Port of Los Angeles revealed that about 20 percent of the environmental mitigation measures for the groundbreaking China Shipping agreement had not been implemented. Moreover, when port officials had provided an additional $5 million to equip its vessels with the technology to meet the shore power rules, those funds were also used for some of China Shipping’s fleet even though those ships had abandoned the China to LA route and been substituted with ones that were not all equipped to meet the rules. Port officials blamed these problems and the lack of implementation on inadequate technologies and on the Great Recession, which they felt had warranted a more lax approach. But China Shipping’s motivation to escape any additional costs arising from complying with the mitigation measures could also be seen in the context of its own problems of overcapacity, declining freight rates, and higher operating costs, which had factored into the push for a merger by the Chinese government with one of China Shipping’s main state-run Chinese shipping rivals.⁷⁵

The community groups that had long been engaged in the issue of pollution at the port were outraged that information had been withheld about these implementation failures and that the port had allowed China Shipping to violate a key statewide rule on the dockside use of shore power. To make matters worse, a few months after the China Shipping implementation problems became public, a second revelation was made that the TraPac terminal agreement had identified only a 50 percent compliance rate instead of the mandated 80 percent use of shore power.⁷⁶

Despite these implementation problems, the community groups and their environmental allies were able to score a major victory in the courts when a Superior Court judge ruled that the proposed SCIG facility, a primary battleground over port expansion in an area already experiencing severe pollution impacts, failed to meet the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). “Let this victory be a message to the polluters and the policymakers that perpetuate environmental racism,” organizer Angelo Logan told the Los Angeles Times. Logan continued that the community groups “look forward to working with the Port of Los Angeles to develop a long-range plan that puts people’s health at the center.” Logan’s comment—citing opposition to particular plans that increased health impacts while working with policy officials to develop long-range greening and health-related change—was emblematic of the Los Angeles experience. The changes that had taken place in LA in turn represented a starting point for its counterparts in Hong Kong and China.⁷⁷

In Hong Kong, the long-standing resistance by the government and its various business sectors to regulatory mechanisms often meant more limited change without the power of regulatory enforcement. But when policies were adopted and regulations instituted, the potential for environmental change was substantial. This had been the case with the 2011 Fair Winds Charter agreement.

The Fair Winds Charter had been perhaps the first industry-led, voluntary initiative in the world to seek to reduce ship emissions. One of the charter’s strengths had been the buy-in of Maersk Line and some other shipping lines not just to agree to voluntary measures but also to push for government regulation in two years’ time in order to create a level playing field within the industry. The Fair Winds Charter participants argued that it was unfair to penalize those who were beginning to meet environmental goals and paying the extra fuel cost to cut emissions through a voluntary scheme. The participants were also conscious that an agreement in Hong Kong alone was not sufficient, and that such an agreement needed to be extended to Guangdong, including the port of Shenzhen. Bucking the trend toward a minimal government role, the Fair Winds Charter further called for the Hong Kong government to actively work for an agreement with Guangdong so that in the long run regional standards could be created on controlling ship emissions in line with international requirements.

While Hong Kong government officials had been part of the Fair Winds Charter discussions and had endorsed the voluntary agreement, the government had initially been a reluctant participant. If the Fair Winds Charter had had to rely on an exclusively voluntary approach, it would never have changed fuel sources and achieved other environmental measures. Arthur Bowring, the managing director of the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, pointed out that the shipping companies were initially concerned that if they publicly supported and followed through with the Fair Winds Charter, “then other places might well demand they do the same thing, and that could really affect their bottom line tremendously.”⁷⁸

New research identifying shipping as a primary source for several pollutants, as well as other long-standing air pollution problems related to road vehicles and power plants, led to renewed pressure to address port-related emissions. The government finally interceded with the development of the Clean Air Plan in Hong Kong in 2013. The plan, which laid out a trajectory for various control measures, including direct regulatory mechanisms, to reduce emissions from different sources, became the blueprint of air quality management in Hong Kong. In July 2015, the Hong Kong government moved ahead by mandating all oceangoing vessels at it berths to burn marine fuel with 0.5 percent or less sulfur content, or other compliant fuel like liquefied natural gas (LNG). The government’s earlier market-based incentive program, initiated in September 2012 for a three-year period to facilitate ships’ switching to low-sulfur fuels, had come up short, with only 12 percent of the ships registered at the port making the switch. The July 2015 regulation would now make the switch mandatory—and in accord with regulations at Los Angeles and several other international ports.

In China, the rollout of new air pollution policies combined with the growing collaboration with Hong Kong and California ports, including Los Angeles and Oakland, has led to policy statements about the need to reduce emissions. The arrangement with Los Angeles included a September 2015 memorandum of understanding that was signed during the US-China Climate Leadership Summit to “share best practices and lessons learned in reducing emissions.” The memorandum of understanding also focused on reducing the emissions from vessels “visiting their major respective ports.”⁷⁹

By 2016, the greening of the ports had thus made headway in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China in important ways. Policies were established to ensure the use of lower-emission technologies and cleaner fuels. Broad air quality plans for particular ports and their regional impacts have been developed and have begun to be implemented. Greater awareness of the community, health, and environmental risks at each stage of the goods movement system has been strengthened due to science-based research, more comprehensive monitoring, and community action. The concept of a “green” (or at least a greener) port and goods movement system has been embraced, or at least referenced.

But despite these changes, the need for environmental change is still at an early stage. Port and goods movement expansion projects continue to be promoted and then challenged through new research on health impacts, new policy initiatives, community mobilizations, legal actions, and the continuing push for less polluting and even zero emission technologies. Beyond the specific battles resides an implicit—and at times explicit—push for a more fundamental change that would also require a rethinking of a global trade system that has only just begun to address the impacts that are integral to how the system functions.

Notes

1. The idea of the doll’s journey as representative of the goods movement system was first introduced by Andrea Hricko from the University of Southern California in 2005 and has subsequently been used by community activists and researchers as a way to characterize its components and its impacts. See Paul Welitzkin, “China’s Toy Story,” China Daily Asia, March 11–13, 2016; see also Rone Tempest, “Barbie and the World Economy,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1996, http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-22/news/mn-46610_1_hong-kong.

2. Joan Magretta, “Fast, Global, and Entrepreneurial: Supply Chain Management, Hong Kong Style: An Interview with Victor Fung,” Harvard Business Review (September-October 1998), 103–114, http://hbr.org/1998/09/fast-global-and-entrepreneurial-supply-chain-management-hong-kong-style/ar/1.

3. Choi’s toy manufacturing business was one of the first Hong Kong companies to relocate to Guangdong and establish a system of small subcontractors feeding its large manufacturing facilities. The company took a hit when one of its subcontractors was found responsible in 1978 for using lead paint on one of the toy products earmarked for Mattel. But Choi escaped any serious impact when he laid plans to establish his own factory to handle some of his supplier needs. See Shu-Ching Jean Chen, “Choi’s Toys,” Forbes, January 18, 2008, http://www.forbes.com/global/2008/0128/026.html. See also “Hong Kong’s 50 Richest: #13 Francis Choi,” Forbes (as of January 2014), http://www.forbes.com/profile/francis-choi/. Early Light Industrial Co., Ltd., is a subsidiary of Early Light International (Holdings) Ltd.; see the company website at http://www.earlylight.com.hk/en/manufacturing.html; and Daniel Poon, “Toy Industry in Hong Kong,” HKTDC [Hong Kong Trade Development Council] Research, February 10, 2014, http://hong-kong-economy-research.hktdc.com/business-news/article/Hong-Kong-Industry-Profiles/Toy-Industry-in-Hong-Kong/hkip/en/1/1X000000/1X001DGH.htm.

4. Andrea Hricko, “Ships, Trucks and Trains: Effects of Goods Movement on Environmental Health,” Environmental Health Perspectives 114, no. 4 (April 2006), A204–A205; Ferdinando Guerra, “Growing Together: China and Los Angeles County,” Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, June 2014, http://laedc.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/2014-Growing-Together-China-and-LA-County.pdf; Joseph Bonney, “Port Woes Threaten Toy Importers with Unhappy Holidays,” Journal of Commerce, October 21, 2014, http://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-los-angeles/port-woes-threaten-toy-importers-unhappy-holidays_20141021.html.

5. Testimony of Dr. Geraldine Knatz, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, regarding “The Marine Vessel Emissions Reduction Act of 2007,” before the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, August 9, 2007.

6. On the “maritime world economy,” see Carolyn Cartier, “Cosmopolitics and the Maritime World City,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (April 1999), 278–289.

7. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Marine Department, “Port of Hong Kong Statistical Tables,” 2015, http://www.mardep.gov.hk/en/publication/pdf/portstat_ast_2014.pdf.

8. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong Annual Digest of Statistics (2015).

9. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, “The Port of Hong Kong—Today and Tomorrow,” press release, August 21, 2012, http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201208/21/P201208210154.htm.

10. According to a dispatch from Lord Stanley, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, to Sir Henry Pottinger, governor of Hong Kong (June 1843–May 1844), dated June 3, 1843, Hong Kong was occupied “for diplomatic, commercial and military purposes.” Quoted in George B. Endacott, A History of Hong Kong, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 255.

11. Ibid., 194.

12. David R. Meyer, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115–116.

13. Endacott, A History of Hong Kong, 253.

14. Hong Kong Government Information Services, Hong Kong 1957 (1958), 7.

15. Baruch Boxer, “Ocean Shipping in the Evolution of Hong Kong,” research paper no. 72, University of Chicago, Department of Geography, 1961, 61.

16. Ross Robinson, “Size of Vessels and Turn-around Time: Further Evidence from the Port of Hong Kong,” Journal of Transport, Economics, and Policy 12, no. 2 (May 1978), 161–178, http://www.bath.ac.uk/e-journals/jtep/pdf/Volume_X11_No_2_161-178.pdf.

17. Hugh Farmer, “The Development of Containerization at the Port of Hong Kong,” Industrial History of Hong Kong Group, June 30, 2014, http://industrialhistoryhk.org/development-containerization-port-hong-kong/; Tzu-nang Chiu, The Port of Hong Kong: A Survey of Its Development (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1973).

18. Dong-Wook Song, “Regional Port Competition and Cooperation: The Case of Hong Kong and South China,” Journal of Transport Geography 10 (2002), 99–110; Alexander McKinnon, “Hong Kong and Shenzhen Ports: Challenges, Opportunities, and Global Competitiveness,” Hong Kong Centre for Maritime and Transportation Law, City University of Hong Kong, Working Paper Series, 2011, http://www.cityu.edu.hk/slw/HKCMT/Doc/Working_Paper_3_-_Shenzhen_-_Final_(v6).pdf; Hutchison Port Holdings Limited website, accessed June 27, 2016, https://www.hph.com/en/globalbusiness/gbpage-1.html#.

19. Richard C. M. Yam and Esther P. Y. Tang, “Transportation Systems in Hong Kong and Southern China: A Manufacturing Industries Perspective,” International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management 26, no. 10 (1996), 46–59, http://202.116.197.15/cadalcanton/Fulltext/20977_2014318_11419_6.pdf.

20. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Information Services Department, “The Port,” Hong Kong fact sheet, 2015, http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/factsheets/docs/port.pdf.

21. World Shipping Council, “Top 50 World Container Ports” (2011–2014 numbers), accessed June 27, 2016, http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/global-trade/top-50-world-container-ports; Joanne Chiu, “Hong Kong’s Port Is Caught in a Storm,” Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-ports-steady-drop-persists-1455654601.

22. Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Census and Statistics Department, “Hong Kong Merchandise Trade Statistics—Domestic Exports and Re-Exports: Table 1: Annual Value of Merchandise Trade,” December 2015, 17, http://www.statistics.gov.hk/pub/B10200032015MM12B0100.pdf.

23. Port of Los Angeles, “About the Port,” accessed June 27, 2016, http://www.portoflosangeles.org/idx_about.asp; Port of Long Beach, “Facts at a Glance,” accessed June 27, 2016, http://www.polb.com/about/facts.asp; Grace M. Lavigne, “Port Congestion Worse at LB than LA, CargoSmart Says,” Journal of Commerce, November 4, 2014, http://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-los-angeles/port-congestion-worse-lb-la-cargosmart-says_20141104.html; Bill Mongelluzzo, “Mega-ships Dealing Worst Congestion Hand to LA-LB, NY-NJ,” Journal of Commerce, July 1, 2015, http://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-new-york-and-new-jersey/mega-ships-dealing-worst-congestion-hand-la-lb-ny-nj_20150701.html; Chris Kirkham and Andrew Khouri, “Bigger Ships, Bigger Problems,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-big-ships-ports-20150602-story.html.

24. Clarence Matson, “The Port of Los Angeles: Historical,” in The Story of Los Angeles Harbor: Its History, Development, and Growth of Its Commerce (Los Angeles: Department of Foreign Commerce and Shipping, Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 1935), 1.

25. Ibid., 10.

26. Marc Levinson, in his history of containerization, argues that containers essentially turned ports into “mere ‘load centers,’ places through which large amounts of cargo flowed with hardly a break.” Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 236.

27. Tom Bradley’s comment is in Steven Erie, Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 92.

28. Dan Weikel, “Freighters Enter the Age of the Mega-ship,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1999.

29. The “trading center of the world” comment was made by Mark Pisano of the Southern California Association of Governments in 1998, based on anticipated infrastructure development. Dan Weikel, “L.A., Long Beach Ports Will See More Cargo Volume,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/dec/18/business/fi-55161.

30. Bill Mongelluzzo, “The Port Moves Inland,” Journal of Commerce, September 13, 2010; Chris Kirkham, “Inland Empire Sees Surge in Warehouse Jobs, but Many Are Low-Pay, Temporary,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-inland-empire-warehouses-20150419-story.html#page=1.

31. Remarks by Zhou Wong of the Anhui Leadership Delegation at Occidental College, September 17, 2007.

32. United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Marketing Service, “Impact of Panama Canal Expansion on the U.S. Intermodal System,” January 2010, https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Impact%20of%20Panama%20Canal%20Expansion%20on%20the%20U.S.%20Intermodal%20System.pdf; Natalie Kittroeff, “L.A. Ports Face a Sea of Rivals,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2016; Martha Matsuoka et al., “Global Trade Impacts: Addressing the Health, Social, and Environmental Consequences of Moving Freight through Our Communities,” Occidental College and University of Southern California, March 2011, http://scholar.oxy.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1410&context=uep_faculty.

33. HKND is wholly owned by a young Chinese telecom industry billionaire named Wang Jing, who had also invested in Nicaragua’s telecom infrastructure. Wei Tian, “Logistics Project of the Century,” China Daily, July 5, 2013, http://africa.chinadaily.com.cn/weekly/2013-07/05/content_16735118.htm; Tim Maverick, “Nicaragua Canal: China’s Boondoggle or Brilliant Strategy,” Wall Street Daily, January 24, 2015, http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2015/01/24/nicaragua-canal/; Michael D. McDonald, “China’s Building a Huge Canal in Nicaragua, but We Couldn’t Find It,” Bloomberg Business, August 19, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-19/china-s-building-a-huge-canal-in-nicaragua-but-we-couldn-t-it; “China Eyes Cheniere’s LNG,” Oil and Gas 360, May 22, 2015, http://www.oilandgas360.com/china-eyes-chenieres-lng/.

34. A number of the ships that had used the Panama Canal (known as Panamax ships), were also being scrapped in favor of a new generation of post- or “neo-Panamax” ships, which increased capacity from 4,500 to 13,200 containers and measured 1,400 feet in length. Despite delays in expanding the Panama Canal, the southern and East Coast US ports still moved aggressively to expand their own port capacity, with ten of the ports prepared to spend more than $11 billion to deepen dredging, build much higher cranes, and upgrade their terminals. Dan Molinski, “Ports, Shipping Companies Retool before Panama Canal Expansion,” Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2014; see also Walt Bogdanich et al., “The New Panama Canal: A Risky Bet,” New York Times, June 22, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/22/world/americas/panama-canal.html?_r=0. Andrea Hricko, “Progress and Pollution: Port Cities Prepare for the Panama Canal Expansion,” Environmental Health Perspectives (December 2012), 470–473, http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/120-a470/.

35. Hong Kong Annual Digest of Statistics (2015), 315.

36. The number of container trucks crossing the border increased almost fourfold between 1991 and 2001. To give a sense of the traffic volume, there were about 12,100 container trucks and some 13,000 other goods vehicles passing the border checkpoints every day in 2001. Data gathered from Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Transport Department, Monthly Traffic and Transport Digest, December 2001, http://www.td.gov.hk/en/transport_in_hong_kong/transport_figures/monthly_traffic_and_transport_digest/200112/index.html.

37. The idea of a Port Rail Line was first suggested in a Freight Transport Study published by the Transport Department in 1994. It was mentioned again in the Second Rail Development Strategy, published in 2000 by the Transport Bureau.

38. This is known as the McClier Report, published in 2001 by a team led by the Chicago-based McClier Corporation. See Port and Maritime Board, “Competitive Strategy and Master Plan to Strengthen Hong Kong’s Role as the Preferred International and Regional Transport and Logistics Hub,” 2001, http://www.logisticshk.gov.hk/board/bes.pdf.

39. Bill Barron, Simon Ng, Christine Loh, and Richard Gilbert, “Sustainable Transport in Hong Kong: Directions and Opportunities,” Civic Exchange, Hong Kong, 2002.

40. Caitlin Gall and Marcos Van Rafelghem, “Marine Emission Reduction Options for Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region,” Civic Exchange, Hong Kong, 2006.

41. A special feature of the San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan was covered in another Civic Exchange publication: Marcos Van Rafelghem and Rob Modini, “Lessons for Hong Kong: Air Quality Management in London and Los Angeles,” Civic Exchange, Hong Kong, 2007. See also Simon K. W. Ng et al., “Marine Vessel Smoke Emissions in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta,” final report, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Atmospheric Research Center, March 2012.

42. Simon Ng et al., “Study on Marine Vessels Emission Inventory,” Institute for the Environment, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, final report submitted to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Environmental Protection Department, February 2012; Grigory Kravtsov, “Ship Emissions Blamed for Worsening Pollution in Hong Kong,” CNN, December 20, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/19/world/asia/hong-kongs-worsening-ship-pollution/.

43. Mike Kilburn, Simon Ng, et al., “A Price Worth Paying: The Case for Controlling Marine Emissions in the Pearl River Delta,” Civic Exchange, September 2012. See also Hak-Kan Lai et al., “Health Impact Assessment of Measures to Reduce Marine Shipping Emissions,” final report, University of Hong Kong, Department of Community Medicine, School of Public Health, July 2012.

44. Zheng Wan et al., “Pollution: Three Steps to a Green Shipping Industry,” Nature 530, no. 7590 (February 17, 2016), http://www.nature.com/news/pollution-three-steps-to-a-green-shipping-industry-1.19369; Veronica Booth and Christine Loh, “Reducing Vessel Emissions: Science, Policy and Engagement in the Hong Kong–Pearl River Delta Region,” Civic Exchange, Hong Kong, April 2012.

45. International Agency for Research on Cancer, “Diesel Engine Exhaust Carcinogenic,” June 12, 2012, http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2012/pdfs/pr213_E.pdf; T. Tran Hein et al., “Methodology for Estimating Premature Deaths Associated with Long-Term Exposure to Fine Airborne Particulate Matter in California: Staff Report,” California Environmental Protection Agency Air Resources Board, December 7, 2009, http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/health/pm-mort/pm-mortdraft.pdf.

46. Estimates about increases in truck traffic have varied considerably, and partly reflect economic conditions in China and the US, as well as the political maneuvering by goods movement advocates about the need to expand I-710’s capacity. California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), “Technical Memorandum: I-710 Corridor Project EIR/EIS Travel Demand Modeling Methodology,” February 26, 2010, http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist07/resources/envdocs/docs/710corridor/docs/I-710_Travel%20Demand%20Modeling_Report_Revise_Feb262010_FINAL.pdf; Dan Weikel, “Two Options Considered for Reconstructing Part of Congested 710 Freeway,” Los Angeles Times, March 17, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-commute-20150317-story.html.

47. East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, “I-710 Corridor Project: Community Alternative 7 (CA 7),” accessed June 27, 2016, http://eycej.org/campaigns/i-710/. For a discussion of highway expansion and increased rather than reduced congestion, see for example the US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, “Induced Traffic: Frequently Asked Questions,” accessed June 27, 2016, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/itfaq.cfm#q3.

48. See the Final Environmental Impact Report, Southern California International Gateway Project, accessed June 27, 2016, http://www.portoflosangeles.org/EIR/SCIG/FEIR/feir_scig.asp; and the Intermodal Container Transfer Facility (ICTF) Joint Powers Authority website at http://www.ictf-jpa.org/; Ryan Zummallen, “A Call for Zero Emissions as Railroads Seek to Expand,” Long Beach Post, January 26, 2011, http://lbpost.com/news/11004-a-call-for-zero-emissions-as-railyards-seek-to-expand.

49. California Air Resources Board, “ARB Health Risk Assessment Guidance for Rail Yard and Intermodal Facilities,” 2006, http://www.arb.ca.gov/railyard/hra/1107hra_guideline.pdf; Andrea Hricko et al., “Global Trade, Local Impacts: Lessons from California on Health Impacts and Environmental Justice Concerns for Residents Living near Freight Yards,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 11 (2014), 1914–1941.

50. Wolfgang Babisch, “Transportation Noise and Cardiovascular Risk: Updated Review and Synthesis of Epidemiological Studies Indicate that the Evidence Has Increased,” Noise and Health 8, no. 30 (2006), 1–29; P. Lercher et al., “Ambient Neighborhood Noise and Children’s Mental Health,” Occupational and Environmental Medicine 59, no. 6 (June 2002), 380–386, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1740306/; M. Sorensen et al., “Road Traffic Noise and Stroke: A Prospective Cohort Study,” European Heart Journal 32, no. 6 (March 2011), 737–744.

51. Jim Steinberg. “2015 a Big Year for Warehouse Development in the Inland Empire,” San Bernardino Sun, June 6, 2015, http://www.sbsun.com/business/20150606/2015-a-big-year-for-warehouse-development-in-the-inland-empire. See also Jones Lang Lasalle, “Perspectives on the Global Supply Chain: The Emergence of the Inland Port,” Spring 2011, http://www.us.jll.com/united-states/en-us/Research/The%20emergence%20of%20the%20Inland%20Port.pdf; Penny Newman, “Inland Ports of Southern California: Warehouses, Distribution Centers, Intermodal Facilities, Impacts, Costs and Trends,” Jurupa Valley, CA; Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, 2012, http://caseygrants.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Inland+Ports+of+Southern+California+-+Wareshouses+Distribution+Centers+and+Intermodal+Facilities+-+Impacts+Costs+and+Trends.pdf.

52. See the Walmart website, http://careers.walmart.com/career-areas/transportation-logistics-group/distribution-center/, accessed July 29, 2016.

53. Jim Steinberg, “2015 a Big Year for Warehouse Development in the Inland Empire,” San Bernardino Sun, June 6, 2015, http://www.sbsun.com/business/20150606/2015-a-big-year-for-warehouse-development-in-the-inland-empire; Erica E. Phillips, “Developers Dig into Distribution: Southern California’s Inland Empire Illustrates Speculative Building Surge of Warehouse Hubs,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323446404579010853015245422; Randall A. Bluffstone and Brad Ouderkirk, “Warehouses, Trucks, and PM_2.5: Human Health and Logistics Industry Growth in the Eastern Inland Empire,” Contemporary Economic Policy, January 1, 2007.

54. South Coast Air Quality Management District, “Multiple Air Toxics Exposure Study in the South Coast Air Basin” (MATES II Study), March 2000; James W. Gau­derman et al., “Association between Air Pollution and Lung Function Growth in Southern California Children,” American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 166, no. 1 (2002), 76–84.

55. National Bureau of Statistics of China, “China Statistical Yearbook 2014, Section 11-2 Total Value of Imports and Exports of Goods,” 2014, http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2014/indexeh.htm.

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57. There are a number of sources that annually identify the largest container ports in the world and that have listed the six China ports and the Hong Kong ports among the top ten since 2012. See, for example, “Top Fifty World Container Ports,” World Shipping Council, 2016, http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/global-trade/top-50-world-container-ports; and Wen Jiabao’s tenth anniversary talk in People’s Republic of China, Permanent Mission of China to the WTO, “China in the WTO: Past, Present and Future: The Tenth Anniversary of China’s Accession to the WTO, December 2001 to December 2011,” accessed June 27, 2016, https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/s7lu_e.pdf.

58. Yuohong Wang et al., “The Role of Feeder Shipping in Chinese Container Port Development,” Transportation Journal 53, no. 2 (Spring 2014), 253–267.

59. Simon Ng, “Lower Sulphur Fuel Puts HK on Top in Asia Ship Emission Control,” Voice of Hong Kong, July 3, 2016, http://www.vohk.hk/2016/07/03/lower-sulphur-fuel-puts-hk-on-top-in-asia-ship-emission-control/.

60. Turloch Mooney, “China Regulates Sulfur Emissions from Ships,” Journal of Commerce, December 11, 2015, http://www.joc.com/regulation-policy/transportation-regulations/international-transportation-regulations/china-regulates-sulphur-emissions-ships_20151211.html; “China Comes to Grips with Emissions from Ships,” World Maritime News, June 9, 2015, http://worldmaritimenews.com/archives/163212/china-comes-to-grips-with-emissions-from-ships/.

61. Information about the Fair Winds Charter discussions is from Simon Ng’s notes. See also Maersk Line, “Skies Clearing in Hong Kong,” January 31, 2013, http://www.maerskline.com/en-us/countries/int/news/news-articles/2013/01/skies-clearing.

62. Robert Gottlieb’s personal communication with Jesse Marquez and Andrea Hricko, July 2010.

63. Analilia Garcia et al., “THE (Trade, Health, Environment) Impact Project: A Community Based Participatory Research Environmental Justice Case Study,” Environmental Justice 6, no. 1 (2013), 17–26, http://lbaca.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LBACA-Trade-Health-Environment-Impact-Project.pdf; Lydia DePillis, “Ports Are the New Power Plants—at Least in Terms of Pollution,” Washington Post, November 24, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/24/ports-are-the-new-power-plants-at-least-in-terms-of-pollution/.

64. Keia Lu Huang and Nectar Gan, “China’s Leadership ‘Infuriated by Tianjin Government’s Attempts to Underplay Death Toll of Blasts,’” South China Morning Post, August 27, 2015, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1852945/tianjin-government-officials-detained-prosecutors-over.

65. “Deadly Tianjin Warehouse Explosion: Review Leads to China Moving Ten Chemical Plants,” South China Morning Post, February 15, 2016, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1913250/deadly-tianjin-warehouse-explosion-review-leads-china.

66. “Deadly Tianjin Blasts Weigh on China’s Shipments as Imports and Exports Fall amid Weakening Demand,” South China Morning Post, September 8, 2015, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1856249/deadly-tianjin-blasts-weigh-chinas-shipments-exports.

67. Scott Cummings, “Preemptive Strike: Law in the Campaign for Clean Trucks,” UCI Law Review 4 (2014), 939–1065, http://www.law.uci.edu/lawreview/vol4/no3/Cummings.pdf; Louis Sahagun, “Lawsuit Seeks to Block Shipping Terminal Plan,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jun/15/local/me-10836.

68. Deborah Schoch, “Port Project Suit Settled,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/06/local/me-port6.

69. Port of Los Angeles, “Alternative Marine Power,” https://www.portoflosangeles.org/environment/amp.asp. Accessed July 29, 2016.

70. Deborah Schoch, “Accord Clears Way for ’03 Plan to Clean Up Air at Port,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/mar/12/local/me-china12.

71. Harbor Community Benefit Foundation, “Our Roots: History of the Port Community Mitigation Trust Fund,” accessed June 27, 2016, http://hcbf.org/about/.

72. California Environmental Protection Agency Air Resources Board, “Commercial Marine Vessels,” last modified October 28, 2015, http://www.arb.ca.gov/ports/marinevess/marinevess.htm.

73. San Pedro Bay Ports Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP), accessed July 29, 2016, https://www.portoflosangeles.org/environment/caap.asp. See also “Port of Los Angeles Clean Truck Program,” accessed July 29, 2016, https://www.portoflosangeles.org/ctp/idx_ctp.asp; David Bensman, “Port Trucking Down the Low Road: A Sad Story of Deregulation,” Demos 3, 2009, http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Port%20Trucking%20Down%20the%20Low%20Road.pdf; Kristen Monaco, “Incentivizing Truck Retrofitting in Port Drayage: A Study of Drivers at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach,” Final Report, Metrans Project 06-02, February 2008, https://www.metrans.org/sites/default/files/research-project/06-02%20Final%20Report_0_0.pdf; Scott L. Cummings, “Preemptive Strike: Law in the Campaign for Clean Trucks,” UCLA School of Law, 2014.

74. Ronald D. White, “Immigration Rallies Fuel Resolve of Port Truckers,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/may/04/business/fi-truckers4; see also Chris Kutalik, “As Immigrants Strike, Truckers Shut Down Nation’s Largest Port,” Labor Notes, September 28, 2006, http://labornotes.org/2006/09/immigrants-strike-truckers-shut-down-nation%E2%80%99s-largest-port.

75. Jack Dolan and Tony Barboza, “Port of L.A.’s Bad Bet,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 2016.

76. Tony Barboza and Jack Dolan, “Port of L.A. Terminal Fails to Comply with Pollution-Reduction Measures,” Los Angeles Times, February 2, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0202-port-pollution-20160202-story.html; Tony Barboza, “The Port of L.A. Rolled Back Measures to Cut Pollution—During Its ‘Green’ Expansion,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-port-pollution-20151215-story.html; Bill Mongelluzzo, “LA Reviewing Environmental Impact of China Shipping Terminal,” Journal of Commerce, October 15, 2015, http://www.joc.com/port-news/us-ports/port-los-angeles/la-reviewing-environmental-impact-china-shipping-terminal_20151015.html.

77. Dan Weikel, “Judge Tosses Environmental Report on L.A. Port Rail Yard,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2016.

78. Wendy Laursen, “The Demise of the Fair Winds Charter,” The Maritime Executive, January 5, 2015, http://www.maritime-executive.com/features/the-demise-of-the-fair-winds-charter; “Hong Kong Wants Ship Emission Standards Now,” The Maritime Executive, March 19, 2015, http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/hong-kong-wants-ship-emission-standards-now.

79. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Fact Sheet: U.S.–China Climate Leaders Summit,” September 15, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/15/fact-sheet-us-%E2%80%93-china-climate-leaders-summit.