Clean trucks without Teamsters

In a little over three years, the Port of Long Beach’s landmark Clean Trucks Program has helped clean up the busiest drayage truck fleet in the country and cut related air pollution by 90 percent.

Much to the dismay of organized labor, the achievement was done with the full participation of independent owner-opoerators.

On January 1, the program will ban permanently the last remaining older, more polluting trucks from port terminals. The final ban will take 280 of the oldest container trucks off Port roads, and all 11,000 drayage trucks servicing the Port terminals will be 2007 or newer models. Another 800 older non-container trucks will be purged from the port’s drayage registry and barred from doing business at the Port.

Although the final ban starts in the New Year, significant reduction in truck related pollution was reached long ago. Today, 98 percent of trucked container moves at the port are done by rigs with 2007 or newer engines.