Friends of the Earth is exposing and fighting pollution and exploitation of our ecosystems. Our Clean Vessels campaign is cleaning up the cruise industry, protecting marine sanctuaries, and reducing air pollution from ocean-going vessels. The environment is for everyone, and a healthy and just world requires clean air and water.
Read the latest news and updates from our Air and Water campaigns:
This Monday, June 8 is World Oceans Day! After many years and much effort on the part of oceans advocates, the United Nations declared June 8, 2009 as the first official World Oceans Day.
World Oceans Day provides us with an opportunity to recognize why the oceans matter to us. Unless we spend a lot of time in or near the ocean, it can be easy to think of the ocean as a vast blue “other” that has nothing to do with our daily existence.
Right now, cruise ships and other large ocean going vessels are getting a free pass because the standards for dumping their sewage are over 30 years old! We recently submitted a petition to the U.S. EPA urging it to bring large ship sewage dumping standards into the 21st century. The EPA’s standards were set in 1976, based on pollution treatment technology available at the time. More than 30 years later, those standards have yet to be updated to take into account modern technology.
April 28, 2009 – Friends of the Earth issued a petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today urging the EPA to update standards governing sewage dumping from large ships. These outdated standards, adopted in 1976, allow the use of 30-year-old treatment technology and fail to protect water quality. Far better treatment technology exists and has been in use in some cruise ships for years.
We recently passed the the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. And what is there to remember from such an awful environmental disaster? Maybe the thousands of gallons of crude oil still polluting Alaska, the almost assured extinction of an orca pod, the collapse of the Prince William Sound herring stock, or the paltry amount Alaskan fishermen were finally paid by Exxon, which will never make up for ruined lives and ruined livelihoods.
Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA) and Senator John Kerry (D-MA) today introduced the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2009, which would protect cruise ship passengers against violent crimes, better inform passengers about crime rates aboard cruise ships, and authorize the Coast Guard to dispatch personnel to monitor cruise ship waste discharges.
Cruise ships generate hundreds of thousands of gallons of human sewage and offer a host of amenities that create pollutants, including dry-cleaning, pools, hair salons, restaurants, photo processing, and spas.
In one week alone, a large cruise ship generates approximately:
In January of 2007, the United States Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling requiring limits on the amount of pollution allowed in the Anacostia river each day. Earthjustice on behalf of Friends of the Earth obtained a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals last year requiring EPA to set the daily pollution caps, and today’s high Court action rejected an attempt by the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority to overturn the Court of Appeals’ decision. The Anacostia runs through the heart of our nation’s capital and has been described as one of the dirtiest rivers in the country.
In September, the Port of Seattle adopted Friends of the Earth's proposal to dispose of 20,000 cubic yards of PCB-tainted sediment dredged from Puget Sound into a waste management facility (the alternative was to dump it back into the Sound). This decision is a victory for chinook salmon, killer whales, and the people of Puget Sound, as the salmon have the highest levels of toxic PCB of any salmon on the west coast, and killer whales have the 2nd highest PCB levels of any whales in the world.
Friends of the Earth strongly welcomed the IMO’s formal adoption of revisions to MARPOL Annex VI last Thursday, which will bring about a substantial reduction in air pollution from ships. Currently, the average sulfur content of ship fuel is 2.4 percent, with a maximum allowable limit of 4.5 percent. Under the revisions approved last week, ocean-going ships will be required to use marine distillate fuel with no more than 0.5 percent sulfur content (5,000 parts per million) starting in 2020 or 2025 – depending on the results of a fuel availability study. This fuel requirement signifies the phase-out of extremely polluting bunker fuel, which literally comes from the bottom of the oil barrel and is more than 1,500 times dirtier than the diesel fuel used in trucks and buses.
Friends of the Earth and Friends of the Earth International have been working tirelessly with the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to revise an international agreement that would strengthen ship emissions standards and allow countries to apply for Emission Control Area (ECA) expansions along their coastlines. This work is about to pay off!
