Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to measure a port's green
performance. The literature is reviewed and a survey is carried out to
identify major green port performance indicators and to evaluate three
major ports' overall green performance in Asia. Indicators located in
the critical quadrants with a high degree of importance and low degree
of performance are identified and resources are suggested that can be
employed to improve the ports' overall sustainability performance
effectively. Design/methodology/approach - Port performance indicators
are reviewed to select the green-related ones by a session of brain
storming with academicians from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the
shipping discipline. Selected indicators are used to design an analytic
hierarchy process (AHP) questionnaire. The weight and degree of
performance of each of the 17 green indicators among three major
container ports are calculated by the data obtained from the AHP round
survey respondents. Findings - Avoiding pollutants during cargo handling
and port maintenance, noise control, and sewage treatment were
perceived to be the three critical indicators by respondents in two of
the three ports investigated. Among the three investigated ports,
Shanghai port had the highest number of critical indicators to be
improved. Air pollutants avoidance, encouraging the use of low-sulphur
fuel, and using electrically powered equipment were three of the five
critical indicators found in Shanghai port, but not in the other two
investigated ports in this study. Originality/value - The theoretical
implications of this research are the development of a conceptual
framework to measure the degree of importance of a set of green port
performance indicators, and to provide a decision support system to help
port authorities to evaluate their performance regarding the 17 green
port performance indicators compared with that of other ports.