Environment and ecosystems

As a global logistics company operating across air, land and sea, we recognize our responsibility to manage impacts from our daily activities in terms of pollution, waste and ecosystem health and biodiversity.

• Maersk strives to protect habitats and biodiversity and actively participates in restoring ocean and land health in critical habitats.
• Waste management focuses on the need to reduce our waste footprint across our operations and contribute to a circular economy.
• We also see growing expectations from customers and port authorities for zero spills into the marine environment.

Maersk’s comprehensive Environment & Ecosystems Policy Architecture, informed by our LEAP groundwork, provides a unified framework with consistency across our operations to protect ecosystems and biodiversity. It includes strict guidelines for prevention and response across all land and sea operations with measures on air quality management, chemical handling protocols, spill prevention standards, and detailed emergency response procedures. In Maersk’s Ocean business, pollution is regulated through the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) and International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations.

Our Environment & Ecosystems Policy Architecture is further supported by specific policies to address ecosystem and biodiversity degradation risks:

• Zero-tolerance policy against the transportation of illegal wildlife and timber, we also prohibit the carriage of any shark or whale products
• Rigorous internal controls to prevent misdeclaration and unauthorized transboundary movement of hazardous waste including plastic scrap, battery waste, and industrial waste.
• Compliance with international conventions on vessel pest control to avoid the spread of invasive pests
• A Biofouling Management Plan to address the spread of species via biofouling, including regular vessel inspections and anti-fouling paint.

Maersk is committed to responsible ship recycling, ensuring all end-of-life vessels are dismantled safely, ethically, and with minimal environmental impact, protecting workers, supporting certified yards, and reducing harm.

With global ship recycling volumes predicted to double by 2028, and quadruple by 2033, urgent action is needed to ensure that ship recycling demand growth is met by suppliers with responsible practices. Currently, the majority of the world’s container vessels are not recycled responsibly and nearly 90% of recycled gross tonnage is handled in sub-standard health, safety and environmental conditions. Responsibly channeling these retired assets back into production also helps the shipping industry, including Maersk, to decarbonise the global steel value chain.

Maersk’s approach is anchored in our Responsible Ship Recycling Standard, which establishes comprehensive requirements to ensure that all ship recycling activities are carried out in a safe, ethical, and environmentally sound manner.

We work to use critical resources efficiently across our business, exploring impact reduction in the upstream supply chain, especially for critical materials like steel and fuels, which we depend on to serve our customers. While Maersk directly sources and uses steel in our own operations for container manufacturing, much of the equipment we use across our operations and broader value chain—including vessels, terminal cranes, warehouses, and trucks — also contains significant amounts of steel.

Maersk’s approach to sourcing steel and lower GHG emissions fuels (link to page) is governed by our Environment & Ecosystems Policy architecture, which outlines our sustainability requirements for lower GHG emissions fuels and our efforts to understand and mitigate negative impacts across fuel and steel value chains.

Maersk is working to increase the use of lower-GHG emissions steel through collaboration with key industry stakeholders, including our participation in the Climate Group’s SteelZero coalition – a global initiative bringing together leading value-chain stakeholders to speed up the transition to a net-zero steel industry.

To ensure that green fuels are sourced and assessed in an environmentally responsible manner, Maersk has requirements for biomass feedstocks and green fuels covering all uses across the company based on three pillars: certification, lifecycle GHG savings, and acceptable feedstocks.

New low emission fuels are assessed on a lifecycle analysis basis and in addition to climate change, we consider a broad range of environmental indicators such as biodiversity, ecosystems, resources and materials depletion, human health and ecotoxicity, air and water quality.

Our requirements for current and possible future green fuels for ocean shipping are outlined in three policies: