Ocean activists target Royal Caribbean’s “sludge boats”
by Michael Collins
Ventura County Reporter – December 3, 2003
They are called “cities on the sea,” ocean liners carrying up to 5,000 travelers on the cruise vacation of a lifetime. Pampered by gobs of buffet grub, restaurants, casinos, nightclubs and every imaginable kind of trendy shop, passengers enjoy a luxurious journey plying apparently pristine waters as they head for exotic ports o’ call. But according to ocean-ecology activists, they might as well be dubbed floating port-a-potties, ships spewing tons of pollutants into the high seas and into the air.
That’s what brought together nearly two dozen folks, sporting “Potty Train Royal Caribbean” badges, to the Santa Monica Pier November 19 as an airplane circled overhead towing a banner that read “Got Sewage? Royal Caribbean Dumps Daily.” The rally was part of a year-old campaign, sponsored by the Washington D.C.-based environmental group Oceana, to stop the massive cruise line company from dumping tons of human and man-made waste into the ocean everyday. “Santa Monica has made extraordinary efforts to avoid urban discharges into our ocean,” said Kevin McKeown, mayor pro tem of Santa Monica. “It’s galling to know these cruise ships are dumping offshore.”
By all accounts, the scale of the problem is immense. A cruise ship can discharge 30,000 gallons of sewage, called “black water,” into the sea every day. Up to 255,000 gallons of “gray water,” generated by dishwater, laundries, showers and sinks, adds to the mix according to Oceana, which was founded in 2001. Adding to the muck of cruise liner releases are 7,000 gallons of oily bilge water, 265,000 gallons of ballast water that includes non-native aquatic animals and plants from faraway tourist destinations, and seven tons of solid waste and garbage. The group also reports that the 26 ships in Royal Caribbean’s International and Celebrity Lines release emissions from its smokestacks and exhaust systems equivalent to the pollutants caused by 12,000 cars daily.
Oceana has targeted Royal Caribbean, undertaking a pledge drive to force the company to clean up its act, because they claim to be an eco-friendly cruise line. The organization has leafleted cruise ship ports including Boston, Seattle, New York, Vancouver, San Diego, Long Beach, Los Angeles and Miami, where Royal Caribbean is based. According to the International Council of Cruise Lines, 538,000 boats embarked last year from the port of Los Angeles, the state’s largest cruise port. “We’ve targeted Royal Caribbean because they’ve touted themselves as an environmental leader in the crise industry,” says Sam Haswell, spokesman for Oceana. “I think the record shows this not to be the case…. Being one of the largest cruise companies, they could set a great example for the rest of the industry.”
Oceana has already collected 4,000 new pledges from Californians to not patronize Royal Caribbean in a drive to acquire 100,000 pledges nationwide. In October, nearly 250 USC students protested the company’s practices. “Californians care deeply about the seas, and they have been a driving force in this campaign,” states Dana DuBose, Oceana’s cruise pollution campaign director, in a November 19 press release. “We want to focus their anger and show Royal Caribbean that they will not continue to get away with harming the very oceans on which their profits depend.”
Naturally, Royal Caribbean disputes Ocean’s contentions. “We believe Oceana has seriously misrepresented Royal Caribbean’s environmental practices,” says Michael J. Sheehan in a written statement sent to the Reporter. “We have met with representatives of the group and tried to educate them about our policies and procedures, but have been frustrated by these discussions. We would like to resolve our differences, and look forward to future opportunities to discuss these issues.”
Cruise liners enjoy a unique situation when it comes to pollution emissions. They are exempt from the nation’s water pollution control law, the Clean Water Act. They are only required to treat human waste with a Marine Sanitation Device (MSD) and gray water can be discharged anywhere without treatment, according to Oceana. In a recent survey of black water sewage treated by MSDs, 68 out of 70 samples failed to meet federal water quality criteria. More than 70 percent of gray water samples exceeded federal limits, with some of the goo exceeding standards by as much as 50,000 times.
In August, the company broke off negotiations with Oceana after a seven-month dialogue with the group. Oceana wanted an end to dumping raw sewage, albeit legally, more than three miles offshore, and for the company to install modern wastewater systems on its ships over a multi-year period. The company does have state-of-the-art waste systems on three of its ships that service Alaska, due to that state’s rigorous requirements—in force partly because of the Exxon Valdez disaster. The company seems to believe that it will be spared the negative publicity concerning its pollution practices, a view not shared by some industry analysts. “Shareholder value could be hurt by the perception that Royal Caribbean pollutes the seas,” stated Reed Bolton Byrum, president of the Public Relations Society of America and a leading governance authority, in an Oceana press release following the collapse of the talks. “As Warren Buffet said, ‘If you lose dollars for the firm, I will be understanding. If you lose reputation for the firm, I will be ruthless.’ Royal Caribbean’s reputation is on the line.”
What puzzles activists is that the cost of updating the ships’ waste systems is relatively low.. According to Royal Caribbean and its technology subcontractor, it would cost about $2 million per ship. To retrofit its entire fleet, Royal Caribbean would be out the price of a can of soda per passenger per day over half a decade.
Plus, as Oceana points out, the company would avoid the bad press and fines it has incurred over its pollution practices. Royal Caribbean has been fined over $30 million for the illegal dumping of wastewater, garbage and oil since 1993. This pollution adds to the fouling of beach water, human illness and disease and death in marine populations. Such sewage leads to shellfish bed closures, coral reef devastation and “dead zones,” where the lack of oxygen annihilates marine ecosystems.
This would seem to be a relatively small expense for a company flush with profits. In 2002, Royal Caribbean earned $3.4 billion—a 9.2 percent increase over the previous year. Its net income was $351.3 million, an increase of 38 percent over 2001’s net. The publicly traded cruise line spent $167.4 million in advertising last year, which is over $3 million per each ship in its fleet. These figures are hardly surprising: the cruise industry has had an average growth of 8.4 percent per year over the last two decades.
The Cruise Lines Industry Association reported that more than two million Americans cruised in the third quarter of 2002, nearly a 17 percent increase from the year before. The nation’s ports processed 5.9 million cruise embarkations in 2001, up 11 percent from the year before. Approximately 82 percent of the global cruising public are U.S. residents, with 43 percent of those coming from the East Coast and 21 percent from Midwest states.
The average passenger is 49 years old and has a household income of $79,000. With an almost even split between genders, 76 percent are married. And, according to Oceana, they care about cruise ship pollution. In a recent national poll conducted by the organization, 90 percent of the passengers surveyed believed that the liners should upgrade their waste treatment systems to more efficiently treat sewage before it is dumped into the ocean. Nearly 75 percent of those polled don’t want cruise ships to dump waste anywhere on the high seas.
“While cruise lines such as Royal Caribbean may contribute in some measure to local economic growth, we also need to be conscious of the costs to our cities and coastal waters,” says DuBose. “Economic growth should not be achieved at the expense of public health and environment.”
They’re big and friendly
But they might need to have their heads examined
Last May, the cruise ship Seven Seas Mariner, owned by Radisson, stopped in at Port Hueneme for the day, disgorging over 200 day-trippers, most of whom got on a bus and went to visit the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. The stop was an experiment of sorts, to gauge whether or not Ventura County, with its deep-water port, might become a viable cruise ship stop, or even a point of embarkation—a quiet, sophisticated alternative to the more industrial setting of San Pedro.
If that is ever to be the case, it would seem prudent that part of the permitting process might include a plumbing inspection to make sure our large overnight guests’ vessels have their (marine) heads screwed on straight.
Whether they stop off or no, cruise ships regularly traverse the shipping lanes that run up and down the Santa Barbara Channel, passing three miles off the coast of Ventura County.
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