Along with the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United States Maritime Administration has developed its own ballast water management legislation under the dual authority of the US Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency. The IMO and US ballast water management regulations are globally recognized as the most significant and influential regimes. Complexity and certain regulatory differences pose considerable concern amongst all stakeholders in the shipping industry, predominantly ship owners and ship operators. This paper presents a conceptual study which overviews, emphasises, and compares key provisions of these two sets of regulations by targeting and unveiling significant points from their perspective since they represent the largest group of stakeholders. Therefore, the paper aims to support shipowners and operators in better understanding the Ballast Water Management regulations and their differences. In addition, the study may benefit in choosing an adequate ballast water treatment system to be installed onboard ships, considering the sea areas where ships intend to operate. Finally, the paper can also help policy makers understand those differences that could present a major barrier in the efficient and smooth ballast water management implementation.

Maritime transport is the backbone of international trade of goods. Therefore, seaports are of great importance for maritime transport. Container transport plays an important role in maritime transport and is increasing year by year. Containers transported to a container terminal are stored in container yards side by side and on top of each other, forming blocks. If a container that is not on top of the block has to be retrieved, the containers that are above the required container must be relocated before the required container is retrieved. These additional container relocations, which block the retrieval of the required container, slow down the entire retrieval process. The container relocation problem, also known as the block relocation problem, is an optimization problem that involves finding an optimal sequence of operations for retrieving blocks (containers) from a container yard in a given order, minimizing additional relocations of blocking containers. In this paper, the focus is on the two-dimensional, static, offline and the restricted container relocation problem of real-size yard container bays. A new method for resolving the container relocation problem that uses a genetic algorithm is proposed to minimize the number of relocations within the bay. The method is evaluated on well-known test instances, and the obtained results are compared with the results of various relevant models for resolving the container relocation problem. The results show that the proposed method achieves the best or the second-best result for each test instance within the test set.

Shipping is a high-risk industry and prone to accidents. A near-miss management system is an important aspect of the safety performance in shipping because the causes are the same for near-misses and accidents. Reporting, analyzing, and learning from near-misses can prevent the recurrence of accidents and thus improve safety on ships. This paper addresses near-miss management systems in shipping and provides insights into the quality of the implementation of these systems, with an emphasis on the importance of reporting. Research data were derived from two surveys and supported by data gained from near-miss reports and existing literature reviews. Professional seafarers of various ranks, ages, nationalities, and experiences, serving on tankers, cruise ships, bulk carriers, and container ships, voluntarily participated in these surveys. The first survey comprised 223 participants, and the second survey involved 22 participants. The research results indicate that near-miss reporting is inadequate, and several barriers limit appropriate near-miss reporting. The difficulty of seafarers in identifying near-miss events was found to be one of the major barriers to near-miss reporting at sea. Based on this research, a conceptual model of a near-miss management system was developed, and measures that can be applied to overcome barriers and increase reporting are proposed.

The paper examines the sampling effectiveness of seabin devices and the composition of floating marine litter in port areas. Sampling was carried out from May to September 2021 in Port of Cristo and Port of Colonia de Sant Jordi on Mallorca Island, Spain. This is the first study of the composition of floating marine litter in the ports of Mallorca collected by seabin devices. During the study, 15,899 items and 336 kg of litter were collected and analyzed. The results indicate that seabin effectively collects floating litter from sea surfaces different in size (2 mm to 40 cm). Microplastics (60.8%) were the most commonly found litter, followed by soft plastic items > 5 mm (11.6%) and unidentified hard plastic items > 5 mm (9.6%). Significantly more marine litter was collected in the Port of Cristo (78.6%), compared to the collection of one device in the Port of Colonia de Sant Jordi (21.4%). Time series analysis showed that the average seasonal component was highest in May (68% above baseline). The linear time trend with an R2 of 52.25% indicated the acceptable significance of the model.