Our World and Everything in It

With the world’s largest cruise liner, the Queen Mary II, parked on our west coast, and our temperatures dipping to below zero, many of us are thinking sea, sand, islands or maybe a cruise. There are 230 cruise ships operating worldwide. All of them run along coastal waters somewhere. They can carry as many as 5,000 passengers although most carry around 3,000.

 
I’ve been on two. One was 17 years ago through the Caribbean all the way to South American. The other, in 2000, was a small cruise ship referred to as a ferry through the Greek Islands. It’s about the only way anyone can see a group of islands at once. Even if you fly to a central location, you’ll still end up ferrying to the outer islands. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you soon realize it is a small city. Somewhere along the line with all the people, all the food, all the drinks, you have to wonder where all the garbage goes. But after a few more cocktails you reassure yourself that there must be laws that hold all these ships accountable. And there is, well sort of.

 
We’ve seen investigations about people missing from cruise ships on TV lately, about viral outbreaks and the like. And we’ve witnessed very little accountability for those missing human beings, so garbage is a joke. Most of the ships are floating foreign countries. Making any of our laws stick requires the ship be at our shoreline, otherwise, oh well.

 
According to  http://www.surfrider.org/a-z/cruise.asp, “a 3,000-passenger cruise ship generates the following amounts of waste on a typical one-week voyage:

• 1 million gallons of “gray water” (from showers, sink, laundries).
  
• 210,000 gallons of sewage (black water).
  
• 25,000 gallons of oily bilge water
  
• Over 100 gallons of hazardous or toxic waste (film processing, paint, varnish)
  
• 50 tons of garbage and solid waste (food, packaging, plastic)
  
• Diesel exhaust emissions equivalent to thousands of automobiles
  

These ships take in large quantities of ballast water also, which is seawater pumped into the hulls of ships to ensure stability. This water is typically taken in at one port and then discharged at the ship’s destination, which can introduce invasive species (ZEBRA MUSSELS) and serious diseases into U.S. waters. A typical release of ballast water amounts to 1,000 metric tons.”
 
Ships have marine sanitation devices to prevent raw sewage from release. Sewage is supposed to be treated first and cannot be dumped within 3 miles of a shoreline. Much of the other garbage is incinerated. The rule for dumping any garbage is 3 to 25 miles from shore not to include plastics, or hazardous waste. Everything is supposed to be recorded in a Garbage Record Book.
 
So far, Royal Caribbean was fined $33.5 million for bypassing the sanitation devices and dumping toxic waste.
Carnival was fined $18 million for repeated dumping and put on probation
Norwegian Cruise lines was fined $1 million and another $500,000 to environmental orgs. for falsifying records for dumping oily, toxic waste near Florida.
Carnival, Princess, Royal Caribbean, and Holland America were fined for discharge of ballast water at the shoreline of San Diego.
 
None of the above were fines for a one-time incident but multiple abuses over a course of years. The sad thing is it’s all preventable. The laws exist, the technology is there, but enforcement is weak. Whistleblowers have come forward in most of these cases. I think all of this can be rectified with bigger fines to be given to environmental organizations, and demand. The cruise industry is growing by 8% a year. Hit the cruise lines with a 2-month moratorium and watch them pay attention. Accountability lies in the demand/power of the people most of the time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 5:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.