Ship owners must help cut pollution

Geoffrey Lee, Business Times 26 Mar 08;

THE sea evokes many different feelings and emotions in people. Adjectives that come to mind include majestic, tranquil, vengeful, beautiful, open, vast and endless.

Add polluted to that list.

From the United States to Singapore, along any major shipping lines and routes up the Atlantic or down the Pacific, tens of thousands of ships ply their trade every day.

And that in turn amounts to a great deal of garbage, ship waste and used oil that is dumped daily into the seas, as well as tonnes of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

Singapore pointed out at the 25th General Assembly of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) last November, 'shipping remains the most environmentally friendly mode of international transportation today', there being 'no viable alternative that can support the enormous movement of goods and resources between countries today with less impact on the environment'.

However, new research done by Intertanko, the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, suggests that much more work needs to be done.

In a confidential report produced for the IMO, it said that the impact of shipping on environmental pollution has been seriously underestimated, with the shipping industry actually emitting almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as the aviation industry.

Estimates suggest that the world's shipping uses between 350 and 410 million tonnes of fuel each year, which equates to up to 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Previous reports had put that figure at only 600 million tonnes.

In contrast, the aviation industry produces an estimated 650 million tonnes annually, according to the Intertanko report.

Traditionally though, the worst visible form of shipping pollution occurs when collisions or wreckage result in oil spills.

The last major oil spill happened in December when an oil tanker carrying more than 260,000 tonnes of crude oil collided with a barge just off the west coast of South Korea, with the resulting damage causing at least 10,500 tonnes of oil to leak into the sea.

As with all other oil spills, the incident deeply affected not just the surrounding local population, but also a vast extent of the marine ecosystem in and around the area.

Oil discharges

Though figures vary from year to year, oil spills generally account for about only 5 per cent of the total amount of oil pollution in the seas. It is oil discharges from operational and maintenance purposes (although hard to pin down exact figures due to the nature of occurrence) that contribute a substantially larger share of maritime oil pollution.

Ships travelling across oceans also introduce potentially harmful foreign elements to different marine environments. Ballast water discharge in particular results in the establishment of harmful aquatic organisms and pathogens which pose threats to indigenous human, animal and plant life, and the marine environment. Studies have shown that many species of bacteria, plants and animals survive in the ballast water and sediment carried in ships even after several months.

Another new concern is anthropogenic (human-generated) noise levels in the marine environment that cause serious harm to marine creatures like whales and dolphins. Studies show that such noise results in increased stress levels among these animals, and could be a factor in issues such as whale beaching.

Recently, cruise ships have also been blamed for an increase in waste that enters the seas. In addition to operational discharges, these ships would also dump a higher amount of dirty water from sinks, showers, laundries and galleys, sewage from toilets and solid wastes (plastic, paper, wood, cardboard, food waste, cans and glass).

The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) tries to regulate ship pollution. IMO has 167 member states which form almost the full body of shipping countries around the world.

The MARPOL (short for marine pollution) Convention is the main international convention covering prevention of pollution of the marine environment by ships from operational or accidental causes. It is a combination of two treaties adopted in 1973 and 1978 respectively and updated by amendments through the years.

The convention includes regulations aimed at preventing and minimising pollution from ships - both accidental pollution and that from routine operations - and currently includes six technical annexes, covering pollution issues.

While most of the convention puts the onus on maritime states to ensure the prevention of pollution, part of it is also voluntary.

This effectively means that the job of preventing or scaling down pollution ultimately rests - as it should - on the shoulders of shipping conglomerates and ship owners.

There are some positive signs going forward. Engineering firms like Greenship have come up with technologies like Sedinox and the Sedimentator, that resolves the ballast water problem in compliance with IMO guidelines.

Homegrown Viking Engineering manufactures an oil discharge monitor known as Marpoil that meets new criterion adopted by legislative bodies and also helps monitor oil-like noxious liquid substances.

Norwegian firms Yara International ASA and the Wilhelmsen Maritime Services (WMS) even created the Yarwil joint venture, aimed at launching environmental solutions for the maritime market.

Yara's solution can cut emissions such as nitrogen oxide, which are formed during the combustion of fossil fuels and are harmful to human health and the environment, by 95 per cent.

The process involves passing the hot exhaust fumes from the engine mixed with a urea solution through a catalytic converter where the nitrogen oxide is broken up into harmless nitrogen and water vapour.

New regulation

The shipping industry has grown exponentially in the last century, and is expected to continue growing. And so will pollution figures. Singapore is doing its part in this situation. The government has announced that from April this year, new harbour craft licences will only be issued to bunker tankers that comply with the limits on nitrogen oxide emission as set out under the IMO's MARPOL convention.

But the onus will still be on the owners of ships that continually flout IMO guidelines. They must care for the environment as much as they care for profit.