Is it possible to be an eco-conscious cruiser?
The cruise industry has become a lightning rod for disquiet around the environmental impacts of travel. In 2020 Ocean Rebellion, a newly formed British activist group linked to climate campaigners XR, projected protest messages onto the hull of a cruise vessel in Falmouth, Cornwall, and plans for a new London cruise terminal at Greenwich, announced with great fanfare around the time of the 2012 London Olympics, were scrapped in 2019 due to locals protests about potential NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) emissions from cruise ships stacks. Cruise suffers in this respect as its so visible, says Dr Alexis Papathanassis, professor of Cruise Management at Bremerhaven University in Germany. You cant miss a massive white cruise ship with its smoke stack on a city waterway. This obscures the fact that, compared to trading and merchant ships, cruise is leading the way in reducing its environmental impact.  The pandemics forced pause of sailing has also given the industry an opportunity to follow through on its promises when it comes to sewage, stack emissions and fleet efficiencies. With an estimated 30 older and smaller-tonnage ships taken out of service in 2020, around a tenth of the global fleet, cruise companies are reemerging with leaner, cleaner vessels as the pandemic is also accelerating an overdue move, in ocean-going cruises, to larger and more environmentally-friendly cruise ships. Partly this is down to growing customer demand. In a 2019 keynote speech to the industry, Adam Goldstein, then chair of Cruise Lines International Association, noted that operators needed to raise their game as customers became less forgiving of pollution scandals such Norwegian Cruise Lines violations of Alaskas air emissions regulations, for which the line was fined by the State of Alaska in 2015, and Carnivals multiple infringements of regulations on dumping plastic and liquid waste at sea. With this in view, cruise lines including Carnival and Royal Caribbean are better communicating their compliance to tightened International Maritime Organisation (IMO) regulations around stack emissions (2020), sewage (2021) and ballast waters (2021). With the latter the waters are taken up and expelled to lift and lower the height of a ship which can, if untreated, transfer invasive species from one ocean to another. With IMO regulations patchily enforced by the countries whose flags the ships bear (often flags of convenience such as Panamas), company and consumer enthusiasm is key to wider industry greening, says Donald Maier, dean at the School of Maritime Transportation at the University of California and a consultant for Carnival Corp, the worlds largest cruise company.