Welcome to the Gearbulk Sustainability Report for 2020

2020 will forever be known as the year of the pandemic.

The extraordinary situation which began to unfold in February of 2020 presented new challenges for humankind and business and Gearbulk was affected as much as everyone else.

Travel restrictions and quarantines for employees on board and ashore was our biggest challenge, whilst keeping everybody safe and healthy was our top priority. Despite the challenges, we saw an improved safety performance, ran successful Health and Wellbeing campaigns, and found new methods of training our employees.

Business

The digitalization of Gearbulk accelerated in 2020, much due to local regulations forcing people to work from home throughout most of the year. The Digital Roadmap established in 2019 continued to be our guidance for the future, but it also underwent changes as new technology and ways of working became apparent. Operational data analysis and reporting continued its development to cover important business areas for Gearbulk, including Safety, 3rd party inspections and OPEX dashboards.

Environmental

Gearbulk maintained its ISO 14001:2015 certificate for the core fleet in 2020, demonstrating the Company’s dedicated focus on and commitment to reducing our environmental impact.

The whole fleet was ready and commenced using VLSFO at the beginning of the year in accordance with the new regulations. A significant drop in the emissions of Sulphur, SOx and NOx was achieved.

As the reduction of plastic use is a target area for Gearbulk, we introduced trials to replace bottled water with high quality freshwater mineralizer on the ships.

Ballast Water Treatment systems were retrofitted on a number of vessels, reducing the risk of contaminating local areas with foreign species through ballast water.

Gearbulk’s environmental footprint continues to drop, and we have seen improvements in a number of KPI’s.

People

Good safety culture has a very strong focus in Gearbulk; we therefore put our officers through a Safety Leadership Training Program and all crew members through a Reflective Learning Program. These training programmes were developed into remote sessions as a result of Covid.

The Kristian Gerhard Jebsen Foundation continues to support a number of social projects, mostly in health and education.

Kristian Jebsen

Chairman