Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
NORFOLK – The business of moving cargo by ship, crane, truck and trains is vital to the Hampton Roads economy and the nation.
Each year, the Port of Virginia handles about 2,100 cargo ships and a million of containers that are loaded up and leave the port on 18-wheelers.
It's the seventh largest port in the United States and ranks third on the East Coast.
The Authority has worked hard over the past decade to minimize the environmental impacts on the neighboring community.
It started with treating water runoff into the Elizabeth River.
"Underneath the deck platform that those cranes sit on is what we call an underwharf detention basin that treats the storm runoff from the entire south end of the terminal," explains Heather Mantz, the authority’s environmental director.
The filter system cleans the runoff 30 percent beyond state regulations before releasing it into the river.
The attention then shifted to cut down on air pollution.
When they replaced fleet equipment on the marine terminal, officials told the manufacturer they wanted the cleanest burning engines available.
Cargo straddlers used to run only on diesel. Now, diesel engines move them around, but they have electric cranes to raise and lower cargo.
By voluntarily switching to ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel for all their cargo handling equipment, the Port of Virginia dramatically cut down the soot polluting the air.
Even business operations have changed to minimize air pollution...
Thanks to a new universal chassis pool program. Instead of changing chassis three or four times a day, a truck now uses one from a shared pool of chassis for all his hauls.
This saves 1.5 million gallons of fuel and eliminates 1,500 tons of greenhouse gases each year.
And there are plans to do more.
Gone will be the old diesel engines that have been in operation since the mid-1970s. They'll be replaced with new, low-emission diesels and a new hybrid that will help move cargo around here at the port.
Over the past 5 years, while business has increased more than 50 percent, the Port of Virginia has reduced total cargo handling emissions by 30 percent.
