Environmental management in shipping companies and the ISM Code

Kostaras, Ioannis
Ioannis Kostaras has graduated from Informatics Department of University of Athens. He also holds a Master of Science in Telecommunications from the Electronics Systems Engineering department and a Master of Arts in Management Studies both from Essex University. He is working as a software architect in a big organisation.

Pollution has been the price to pay for progress which has led our ecosystem to a biological corruption and decline. For a sustainable change to more ecological strategies, governments must intervene to reform business practice through legislation. The International Safety Management (ISM) Code is the first international legislation, dealing with pollution prevention, applied to a specific industry, that of shipping. This book studies initial experiences and effects of the ISM Code in the shipping industry and evaluation of the changes it introduces. It examines the degree that shipping companies' members have developed an environmental conscience and the contribution, if any, of the ISM Code in this and whether a 'sustainable transport' is indeed possible in shipping or not. The book uses a Habermasian model of organisation change to find out how this change has been taken over by the shipping companies as well as how "green" the shipping companies are.