Okay, I’ll give you a hint. I weigh 160,000 tons (as much as 840 blue whales). I am worth 580 million US dollars (one-sixth of the annual GDP of St. Maarten, one of the islands I visit). Oh, and I’m responsible for beach closings and the dirtying of pristine ecosystems all over the world. What am I? A commercial cruise ship. And I’m polluting the oceans.
The cruise industry is no small affair. Despite the global economic crisis, cruise lines are projected to attract 13.5 million passengers this year—up 2 percent from 2008. There is no shortage of vacationers willing to forsake environmental awareness for a week of fun out on the Caribbean blue. And the cruise line industry deserves marketing props for roping evermore people into this category—I’ll admit that I’m one of them.
This March, I boarded the Royal Caribbean’s ‘Liberty of the Seas’ with a few girlfriends for a carefree spring break extravaganza. It wasn’t until I returned to land, and my wireless internet, that I realized how un-“carefree” my week had been for the environment. In one week, I alone left a carbon footprint (or rather a carbon stomp) of 1.2 tons of carbon dioxide. (The average yearly carbon footprint for an individual is 4 tons). That is, a medium size cruise liner such as the one I was on emits .43kg of carbon dioxide per passenger per mile. Multiply that by the some 5,000 passengers and crewmembers on my ship and it amounts to a grand total of 6000 tons.
That may be a relatively small drop in the overall pot of carbon emissions, but multiply that figure by several ships for multiple cruise lines for 52 weeks per year and it’s no insignificant number. I could’ve taken the same route by airplane, flying from Miami to San Juan to St. Maarten to Haiti to Miami, and, according to Climate Care’s carbon calculator, left a carbon footprint less than one half the size, at .49 tons of carbon dioxide.
However, when you’re floating luxuriously amidst infinite sapphire blue waves under a smog-free sky, it’s hard to imagine that the seemingly passive bulk below you is a waste-proliferating beast. Seven types of waste, in fact. There’s black water (human sewage), garbage waste, gray water (i.e. sink/bath/laundry runoff), ballast water, oily bilge (crude oil-derived bunker fuel), diesel exhaust, and hazardous waste.
And we aren’t talking superfluous amounts here. Let’s take black water, for example. The average passenger takes care of 8.4 gallons of business a day, which means that one week on the “Liberty of the Seas” racks up about 290,000 gallons of sewage. And there’s no handy pipeline from the ship’s hull to a sanitation center—it all either has to be lugged on shore and disposed of or dumped into the ocean blue. Although the United Nations International Maritime Organization outlawed the disposal of anything but food waste into the water in 1993, the ban has yet to be upheld in the Caribbean. Small, island countries simply don’t have the infrastructure to handle such huge influxes of external waste. Sadly, this can come back to bite them, since some of the improperly-disposed of waste eventually washes up on shore, dirtying those pristine, white sand beaches.
This isn’t to say that all cruise lines take advantage of the circumstances to dump their waste wherever they please. The twenty-one member companies of the Cruise Lines International Association are pledged to uphold fairly detailed disposal standards, including in the Caribbean. These include regulations like not discharging gray water within at least 4 nautical miles (7.4 km) from shore, processing all black water through a Marine Sanitation Device, and not discharging spent batteries in the ocean. Yet if, according to Cruisejunkie.com there are 12 wastewater violation fines still pending from 2008 against some of CLIA’s most prominent cruise lines, including Holland America and Princess Cruises, in the strictly regulated Alaskan waters, one can only imagine the amount of unreported violations that have taken place in the Caribbean.
Furthermore, as cruise lines make waves towards eco friendliness, they also continue to build more and more extravagant ships to push this goal farther out of reach. In December 2009, Royal Caribbean will launch its newest conception, Oasis of the Seas, into Caribbean waters. With a record occupancy of 5,400 passengers and a gross tonnage of 220,000, the ship will boast a fully functional, open air “Central Park” and a full-sized carousel in the Entertainment Place. Also factor in that to accommodate the gargantuan size of such ships requires the dredging of some local ports, disrupting the local ecosystems and habitats. There’s already controversy over the dredging of the St. Thomas port in the Virgin Islands, where Oasis of the Seas plans to make a main stop.
On the other hand, the ship is expected to be 25 percent more fuel-efficient than any of Royal Caribbean’s other ships and will be outfitted with green amenities such as something called the Hydroxl Advanced Water Purification System, which has a multi-step waste removal process. Yet—as much as cruise lines seem willing to make an environmental effort on paper, their actions in the water tell a different story.
-By Allison Malecha
Tags: Climate Change, cruise liners
I just wanted to thank you very much for this illuminating article. I have already bookmarked your site, when I have more free time I am going to have to do some further reading. Well back to my dreaming of Panama or back to the books – I wonder which one is going to win out.