Sustainable Maritime Interiors
The maritime interiors community is uniting in action for a better future together – dedicated to designing, building and maintaining more sustainable maritime interiors.
335The passenger shipping industry is making giant strides towards greater sustainability, with big wins recorded for fuel, emissions, energy efficiency and other projects. Until now, there has been no coordinated cross-industry action plan for ship interiors, with progress in this field made primarily from isolated islands of activity.
There are a significant number of passionate interior designers, specifiers, outfitters, suppliers and others who are individually taking steps to improve the sustainability of their professional output, sometimes alone but often with the support of their business. However, there has been little industry-wide guidance or regulation to direct priorities. Future shipping passengers and crew must be assured that the maritime interiors they inhabit are built to impeccably high environmental standards. We have a commitment to them, a duty to ourselves and an obligation to the planet.
Now, with the launch of the Sustainable Maritime Interiors initiative, we can look forward to industry-specific guidance, focus and collaboration on a sustainable future. This new initiative is spearheaded by a group of like-minded designers, specifiers and other maritime experts, and is based around a declaration of advocacy and action for the environment.
The Sustainable Maritime Interiors declaration was conceived while conducting the research for the Sustainable Maritime Interiors report, published in June 2022, and was inspired by the Montreal Design Declaration and Our Common Future. It will not solve the challenges that we face but it will give us a starting point from which to move forward more positively. It will guide owners, designers and specifiers and it will inspire other stakeholders to contribute the missing elements that are needed to build and maintain more sustainable ship interior life cycles.
The declaration aims to make a meaningful contribution to sustainability performance improvement throughout the ship interior life cycle via informed stakeholder guidance and in full support of the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact. The environmental sustainability focus of the declaration is necessarily considerate of other sustainability objectives and is intended to work in unison with corporate commitments to the social and economic sustainability pillars.
This is just the beginning – the Sustainable Maritime Interiors initiative will grow, and others will join our cause to advance the sustainability of maritime interiors through associated guidance, best practice and, ultimately, through a formal framework. We welcome your support!