Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that have been trashed and have little chance of recovery. He has watched as centuries-old
historic sites are now threatened by regular visits of “managed congestion” of tour buses
from cruise ships that are making billions of dollars of business.
“Since when is it elitist to show respect for a beautiful square or beach and for the
people who live there and want to protect the beauty that brought the tourists in the first
place,” he asked.
• • •
Cruise ships do pollute the ocean.
Human activity has damaged the seas by overfishing, polluting, dumping garbage and
sewage, spilling oil. The huge maritime transport industry—oil tankers, fishing fleets and
recreational vessels, including cruise ships—are some of the culprits. Popular and scientif-
ic reports have chronicled the drastic reduction of the fish, shellfish and marine mammal
populations. Underwater habitats and coastal vegetation are under stress or are disappear-
ing altogether. The pollution has created dead zones in oceans around the world. Global
warming has added the
coup de grâce
by raising water temperatures that bleach coral reefs
and force species to seek new feeding grounds.
Against this bleak picture, cruise ships could seem insignificant; there are some four
hundred cruise ships, compared to a global fleet of tens of thousands of commercial ves-
sels. And these few cruise ships sail across vast oceans. Yet their contribution to the fouling
of the seas is considerable. While the oceans are large, these cruise ships stick to a stand-
ard path whether in the Caribbean or the Baltic, disposing of their considerable waste at
roughly the same stretch at the same time, year in and year out.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in the course of one day the aver-
age cruise ship produces: 21,000 gallons of human sewage, one ton of solid waste garbage,
170,000 gallons of wastewater from showers, sinks and laundry, 6,400 gallons of oily bilge
water from the massive engines, 25 pounds of batteries, fluorescent lights, medical wastes
and expired chemicals, and 8,500 plastic bottles.
Multiply this by those 400 ships cruising year-round and you have a sense of the mag-
nitude of the problem. But there are no accurate studies of how well that waste is disposed
of because the ships are not required to follow any state or national laws once in interna-
tional waters.
Cruise companies won an exemption from the Clean Water Act's requirement for waste
disposal discharge permits that apply to the resorts and hotels. Waste disposal discharge
permits are given out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which decides what waste
they can discharge and the sewage treatment required to limit and reduce the damage of
pollution to water. That permit information for each hotel and resort is public, so any new
pollution in a stream or coastline can be traced to the offender.
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