Cruise ship industry generates plenty of marine pollution, carbon emissions
By Frank Carini /
ecoRI News staff
In January, even as the cruise ship
industry promises to make zero-emission vessels widespread by 2030 and achieve
a goal of “net-zero carbon cruising” by 2050, one of the major cruise lines is
expected to unleash a 1,200-foot-long, 250,800-ton, fossil-fuel-powered
behemoth.
The Icon of the Sea
The Icon of the Seas (left),
soon-to-be the largest cruise ship in the world, is set to begin wreaking environmental
and climate havoc early next year. The ship can hold a maximum of 7,600
passengers, plus 2,350 crew members. It will feature a six-slide waterpark,
seven pools, nine whirlpools, and a 55-foot waterfall.
The monstrosity also features more than 40
entertainment venues, including bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, and a
casino, is 20 decks high, and is five times larger and heavier than the
Titanic. It has some 3,000 bathrooms.
The ship is powered by liquefied natural
gas, as “part of the company’s move to a clean-energy future,” according to
a story published in
June by CNN.
The current title holder of the world’s
largest cruise ship is the diesel-powered Wonder of the Seas, which
made its inaugural voyage in 2021 and is a slightly less obnoxious 1,188 feet
in length and 235,600 tons. It has a mere 18 decks.
Both sea serpents are part of the Royal
Caribbean International fleet.
In 1999, the Miami-based subsidiary of the
Royal Caribbean Group, which is incorporated in Liberia, was forced to pay $18
million in fines for 21 federal felonies due
to dumping hazardous chemicals and waste oil in coastal waters. Corporate
officials also lied to the Coast Guard and Department of Justice by falsifying
oil logs to cover up the crimes.
The Carnival Corporation is the largest cruise company in the world, just ahead of the Royal Caribbean Group. The British-American cruise operator features 92 vessels across 10 cruise line brands. It has a long history of violating environmental regulations and has paid tens of millions in fines.
In January 2022, Princess Cruise Lines,
owned by Carnival, was fined $1 million by
the Department of Justice after pleading guilty to violating, for a second
time, a five-year probation imposed in 2017 after it pleaded guilty to “felony
charges stemming from deliberate dumping of oil-contaminated waste from one of
its vessels, and intentional acts to cover it up.” The $40 million penalty in
2017 remains the largest fine for intentional pollution from a ship.
In 2019, a federal judge ordered Carnival to
pay $20 million in fines for dumping plastic waste into the ocean and other
environmental violations.
Carnival has also been charged with:
illegally releasing about 500,000 gallons of sewage and 11,000 gallons of food
waste globally; falsifying records of environmental compliance plans; illegally
dumping thousands of gallons of wastewater into Glacier Bay National Park in
Alaska; dumping food mixed with plastic waste in Bahamian waters; and illegally
discharging oily waste off the coast of England.
In July 2001, the carcass of a pregnant
humpback whale was found floating in Alaska’s Glacier Bay. An investigation
concluded the animal had died of massive trauma to its skull and cervical
vertebrae, consistent with a vessel collision. Princess Cruise Lines
eventually pleaded guilty to
failing to operate its vessel, the Dawn Princess, at a slow and safe speed
while near humpback whales. Passengers and crew had spotted humpbacks near the
ship, but the ship didn’t change course or speed.
Humpback whales are an endangered species
protected under both the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered
Species Act. Princess Cruise Lines paid a $750,000 fine.
Greenhouse gas emissions, wastewater discharges,
engine and propeller noise, incinerated trash, and vessel strikes have a
cumulative impact on the marine ecosystems these ships cruise through.
This year, between April and November,
nearly 100 cruise ships were scheduled to drop
anchor in Newport Harbor. September and October are the busiest months.
Among the cruise ships visiting Newport
this year include the Queen Mary 2, a 1,132-foot-long, 149,215-ton ship that is
part of the Carnival fleet. It can accommodate up to 2,695 passengers, and has
a total of 18 decks. It is powered primarily by four diesel engines, with two
additional gas turbines providing extra power when needed.
The larger cruise ships, such as the Queen
Mary 2, take anchorage in the waters just outside of Goat Island, while smaller
coastal cruisers utilize the pier at Fort Adams State Park.
For the larger boats, small tenders —
typically the ships’ lifeboats — transport passengers from the anchorage into
Perrotti Park, which helps to minimize congestion in the harbor, according to
Tom Shevlin, communications officer for the city of Newport.
“This is a pretty common setup for
destinations that lack the physical infrastructure or natural deep harbor
required to accommodate vessels the size of cruise ships,” he wrote in a recent
email.
ecoRI News reached out to the city of
Newport and the state Department of Environmental Management to see if either
has worked or is working with the industry about reducing its local footprint
or implementing initiatives that require visiting cruise ships to be more
environmentally aware.
Shevlin said cruise ships are assessed a $6
landing fee for each passenger who visits Newport. That money goes directly
into the city’s Maritime Fund, according to Shevlin, and has “helped us expand
our harbor infrastructure, building out facilities like pump-out stations,
dinghy docks, and the City’s Maritime Center, which provides boaters access to
amenities like restrooms, showers, free life jackets.”
“DEM has a role in the regulation of the
cruise industry in Rhode Island, but it doesn’t relate to greening up the
practices of the ships that stop in Newport, and to be clear, we don’t have a
program or the budget for that purpose,” Michael Healey, the agency’s chief
public affairs officer, wrote in a recent email to ecoRI News. “Our focus
pertains to the harbor’s bacterial water quality.”
He noted all vessels in Ocean State waters,
including cruise ships, are bound by the state’s no discharge law, which
makes it illegal to pump marine sewage within 3 nautical miles of the Rhode
Island coast. He said DEM’s shellfish program fecal coliform monitoring data
hasn’t detected an increase in fecal coliforms when cruise ships are present in
the anchorage area to the west of Goat Island.
The work of two Newport-based nonprofits
founded to protect and restore ocean health, Sailors for the Sea Powered by
Oceana and 11th Hour Racing, doesn’t focus on this maritime industry.
Cruise ships are beyond the current scope
of Sailors for the Sea, which centers its work on individual boaters and
regattas/water-based events, according to a spokesperson. Oceana has, in the
past, campaigned for tighter environmental regulations on cruise ships.
While 11th Hour Racing engages with the
broader maritime industry and coastal communities through a variety of
projects, it has never engaged with the cruise ship industry directly,
according to a spokesperson.
The cruise ship industry, however, is on
the radar of other environmental groups, such as Friends of the Earth, whose
U.S. chapter produces an annual Cruise Ship Report Card that evaluates 18
cruise lines on four environmental factors: sewage treatment, air pollution
reduction, water quality compliance, and transparency. Both Royal Caribbean and
Carnival received an overall failing grade in 2022.
Royal Caribbean International has 26 ships
in its fleet, not including Icon of the Seas, and last year 18 received an F
for their environmental impacts. The other eight received grades of D+, D or
D-.
The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit notes
that 23 of Royal Caribbean’s cruise ships utilize scrubbers to get around
climate-harming emissions. The scrubbers are used to “clean” smokestacks and
reduce air pollution. But the scrubbers convert air pollution into water
pollution because the toxic byproducts from the scrubber systems are discharged
into the ocean, according to Friends of the Earth.
“Cruise ships are a catastrophe for the
environment — and that’s not an overstatement,” according to the lead in a
March 2022 blog post by Friends of the Earth. “They
dump toxic waste into our waters, fill the planet with carbon dioxide, and kill
marine wildlife. Cruise ships’ environmental impact is never ending, and they
continue to get bigger. They once were small ships, around 30,000 tons. Now,
corporations are building billion-dollar cruise ships to hold more than 9,000
people.”
The industry is poorly regulated, and few cruise
ships are registered in the United States, which largely exempts them from
federal taxes. A paper published in
December 2021 noted the “environmental and human health impacts of cruise
tourism are increasing.”
Another 2021 research paper noted
the “cruise ship industry should be subject to global monitoring and effective
legislation because of its continuous increasing impact on both the environment
and human health.”
The paper, published in the Marine
Pollution Bulletin, found that cruising is a major source of environmental
pollution and degradation, with air, water, soil, fragile habitats, and
wildlife negatively impacted.
Cruise ships, which are often more than
three football fields long, are among the largest vessels in the world, and it
takes plenty of fuel to keep them moving. The low cost of heavy fuel oil,
produced from leftovers of the refining process, has long made it the primary
fuel source for cruise ship propulsion.
Also called bunker fuel, there is
widespread concern about its continued use because of the damage it causes
through oil spills, the spewing of toxic compounds, and greenhouse gas
emissions. But the thick, tar-like fuel high in sulfur continues to be commonly
used in cruise ships today, often blended with diesel.
It’s no surprise then that cruise ships are
responsible for a significant amount of climate-changing emissions. Even while
at dock, they often run polluting diesel engines to provide electrical power to
crew and passengers and to keep the ice-skating rink from melting.
One of these ships can burn up to 250 tons
of fuel in a single day. Research has shown one
cruise ship produces about the same amount of carbon emissions as 12,000 cars.
Passengers on an Antarctic cruise can produce as much carbon dioxide emissions
on a seven-day trip as the average European in an entire year, according to the
study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.
Besides CO2, emissions from cruise ships
also include nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur oxides, and diesel
particulate matter, microscopic soot that is harmful to human health.
Each day an average cruise ship is at sea
it emits more sulfur oxides than 13 million cars and more soot than 1 million
cars, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA also has estimated that a
3,000-person cruise ship — small for today’s growing standards — generates
150,000 gallons of sewage a week — enough to fill 10 swimming pools. All of
this human waste adds up to more than a billion gallons of sewage a year for
the industry. Some of it is minimally treated before being dumped into marine
waters.
Discharges of gray water from cruise ship
baths/showers, sinks, washing machines, and dishwashers “can lead to oxygen
depletion, spread pathogenic bacteria and viruses and increase nutrient levels
in the surrounding ecosystem,” according to the Ocean Conservancy. “Higher
nutrient levels can lead to toxic blooms and dead zones that can cause harmful
disturbances throughout food chains.”
A 2007 study found the
total amount of trash produced by a cruise ship carrying 2,700 passengers can
exceed a ton a day. Today’s bigger ships have 30 or more kitchens and lots of
food waste, as passengers overload at the buffet. Much of it is incinerated or
dumped at sea.
No matter the size of a cruise ship, they
are all dependent on water bottles because they are not allowed to have water
fountains for health reasons.
As these leviathans continue to swell, so
to do their wakes.