Europe's busiest port is also one of the most automated in the world.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

U.S. ports could be facing down another strike as a January 15th deadline looms to settle a union contract for 45,000 dock workers on the East and Gulf Coast.

A major sticking point has been automation. Proponents claim technology can make ports cleaner and more efficient. Critics point to lost jobs, high costs, and mixed results for productivity.

While the cost-benefit analysis of port automation is complicated, there are examples in the world where the model appears to be

succeeding, like Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The BBC's Matthew Kenyon has more on how it

actually works. I'm standing at the entrance to Europe's biggest port, Rotterdam, in the Netherlands.

Behind me, the mouth of the river Mars,

which sees tens of thousands of ships arriving every year,

bringing hundreds of millions of tons of cargo.

In front of me, the destination for the biggest of those ships,

the container terminals, which have transformed the way this port operates.

Albert Feinstra is Professor of Trade and Logistics at the Rotterdam School of Management.

I think you can safely say that the growth of the port of Rotterdam to, for a while,

the biggest port in the world, is largely due to the adoption of technology

and the improvement of productivity and the increase of efficiency.

That is why we have been able to grab all this cargo that was available.

Built on reclaimed land in the decade since the 1990s,

these terminals feature huge automatic cranes and battery-powered autonomous vehicles

which deliver the containers to the stack.

They're some of the most advanced port operations in the world,

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