Identifying Green Assessment Criteria for Shipping Industries

This study empirically identifies critical assessment criteria used by tramp shipowners and container shipowners in Taiwan, and how they perceived the importance of the criteria to their operations. Through an extensive literatures review, twelve green performance indicators are categorized into four underlying assessment criteria, namely shipowners’ green policy, cooperation between green shipping stakeholders, reverse logistics management, and green design and promise. An Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) approach was employed to pairwisely compare the degree of importance of these major green assessment criteria and used by the shipping industry. Further analysis by ranking the weight of each of the four major criteria indicated that shipowners’ green design and promise is the most important criteria in the shipowners’ context, followed by, shipowners’ green policy, cooperation among shipping stakeholders, and reverse logistics management. Differences between container shipowners’ and tramp shipowners’ perceptions on the importance level of the twelve green performance indicators are found. This study advances knowledge by empirically and theoretically validates the degree of importance of green shipping assessment criteria. Institutional theory has greater importance on shipowners’ green practices than the stakeholders theory does.