With this in mind, some of the industry's leading companies formed the Sustainable Shipping Initiative in September.
"Continuing to meet and share experiences even in tough times can inspire and encourage businesses to keep working towards their goals," said Alastair Fischbacher, chief executive, Sustainable Shipping Initiative.
Along with two other research centers, the Golden Bear Facility in California and the Great Ships Initiative in the Great Lakes Dr. Tamburri and his colleagues at MERC are seeking o figure out the best ballast-sterilizing techniques.
If we take the Sustainable Shipping Initiative as an example, it took three years to find the right people in the right organisations and form this coalition through envisioning and developing innovation work-streams.
The coalition is backed by a further 19 companies in the the Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI) which last week also urged the IMO to reflect the Paris agreement's objective of keeping global warming below 2C.
"I'm feeling positive about this," says Allegra Cangelosi, principal investigator for the Northeast-Midwest Institute's Great Ships Initiative, which is working to reduce aquatic invasions in the Great Lakes.
The critique is rejected by Allegra Cangelosi, president of the Northeast-Midwest Institute in Washington D.C., a nonprofit group that helps test ballast water treatment systems as part of the Great Ships Initiative.
But green shipping initiatives are saving fuel through improved hull design, breakthrough propellers, and simply slowing down ships.
A spokesman for Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department, Felix Leung, said by e-mail that the government welcomed the shipping companies' initiative to switch to low-sulphur fuel.
In Hull, a city once reliant on fishing and shipping, the Green Port Hull initiative will host a £310m Siemens offshore wind turbine manufacturing facility.
