4th Technical Committee Meeting on Waterborne Transport and Multimodality 2022

From 14 to 16 December 2022, took place in Port of Antwerp-Bruges the 4th Technical Committee Meeting on Waterborne Transport and Multimodality.

Representatives from TCT Permanent Secretariat, Belgium and European Commission welcomed the participants on the first day, followed by presentations about the TCT Secretariat’s activities.

Interesting reflections were held about the multimodality activities by the European Commission, with Mircea Ionescu and Roberto Ferravante from DG MOVE focusing on the Transport of Dangerous Goods and Villu Varjas (DG MOVE) on Electronic Freight Transport Information (eFTI) implementation and the latest developments.

Nico Suys (PoAB) discussed the cross-sectoral issues related to the Transport of Dangerous Goods (TDG), IWW and Maritime digitalisation.

During the afternoon, two separate technical committee meetings were held. The TDG committee discussed the challenges in implementing Directive 2008/68/EC by the Regional Partners and the multimodal issues in TDG.

The Waterborne committee presented the activities on maritime and IWW of the Regional Partners. Maik Schmahl (DG MOVE) discussed the Port Reception facilities and the Green Agenda. During this meeting, the PIONEERS project coordinator, Inge de Wolf (PoAB), presented the PIONEERS project and the challenges of EU Ports under the European Green Agenda.

On the second day, participants had the opportunity to visit Katoen Natie Port Operations and Combinant, both located in the Port of Antwerp-Bruges. Katoen Natie owns and operates two deep-sea terminals at berth 1227 and berth 345 and 1 barge terminal (berth 1510) on the right and left banks of the river Scheld. The Combinant (Combined Terminal Antwerp) is an open-access rail terminal for intermodal transportation.

On the last day, all the participants reflected on the lessons learnt, main takeaways and next steps for Waterborne Transport and Multimodality.