For many, going on a cruise is one of the most exotic and romantic things they can do, but environmentalists draw attention to the fact that all wastes produced on cruise ships are evacuated in the oceans. Modern ships can carry thousands of passengers and numerous crew members, and so it stands to reason that large amounts of wastes are being produced all the time.
Getting rid of them is problematic. Companies operating such cruise ships around the world generally agree that dumping human wastes into the ocean is a bad thing, but make a good point themselves.
They explain that very few ports have the facilities required to ensure waste disposal. The
World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recently conducted an investigation of cruise ships in the Baltic Sea, and came up with worrying results.
More than half of all vessels passing through this region dump their waste loads into the waters, even if the EEC – an association of cruise ship operators – agreed not to do this anymore back in May 2009.
However, the EEC did mention that this practice will stop only “when certain conditions were met.” Their conditions included having port facilities available at no extra charge.
At this point, two major ports at the Baltic Sea have such installations – Stockholm and Helsinki. The ports of St Petersburg, Tallinn, Riga, Klaipeda, Gdansk, Rostock and Copenhagen still lack such facilities.
According to statistics secured by the WWF, it would appear that the port of Stockholm received 240 cruise ship visits in this season. About 115 of the ships used the waste-disposal facilities.
However, of the vessels that did so, most only dropped small amounts of wastes, which would seem to suggest that most of their loads were dropped in the open oceans.
“The problem is that there are no laws regulating this. Anything like this would have been absolutely unthinkable on land, but just because it is out of sight for most of us, we still let it happen,” explains WWF expert Mattias Rust.
“The cruise companies as well as the cities that receive the ships are making millions on this industry. They both share the responsibility to solve the waste water problem,” he goes on to say.
Ahead of next week's meeting of the International Maritime Organization, which will take place in London, the WWF has released a call that asks for the ban on waste dumping in the open ocean.
The document asks nations participating at the meeting to agree to “ban discharge of sewage from passenger ships and ferries in the Baltic Sea unless it has been sufficiently treated to remove nutrients or delivered to port reception facilities.”
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