Biggest polluter of our seas

zoidberg

zoidberg

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Merchant ships. Thousands and thousands of them. Fitted with 'Open Loop Scubbers'. Breaching the international agreements of ocean pollution, systematically and massively....

Seea here: shipping-pollution-sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment
......And that includes the hundreds of cruise liners, which operate in mostly pristine environments.

Perhaps Sir David Attenborough might 'get hot under the collar' by this huge environmental crime....


( edited to emphasize the link, which is worth a peek. )
 
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zoidberg said:
Merchant ships. Thousands and thousands of them. Fitted with 'Open Loop Scubbers'. Breaching the international agreements of ocean pollution, systematically and massively....

Seea here: shipping-pollution-sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment And that includes the hundreds of cruise liners, which operate in mostly pristine environments.

Perhaps Sir David Attenborough might 'get hot under the collar' by this huge environmental crime....
Click to expand...

Hold your horses.

Open loop scrubbers are fitted to rather few ships. They are a device to reduce sulphur oxide emissions when operating with residual fuel oil (the stuff that refineries have left after they have taken everything else out of crude oil) which typically has a sulphur content of around 3%. A good number of shipowners have fitted them but there is no need to cut SO emissions before 1/1/20 when the legislation cutting SOx emissions comes into effect.

Other owners have fitted closed loop scrubbers and others, like my lot, will be buying 0.5% sulphur fuel oil. I have been against open loop scrubbers from the outset.

Open loop scrubbers are banned on the coasts of the USA, Northern Europe and China, so far. This list will get longer soon.

see eg here:

https://www.egcsa.com/map-regulations/
 
And now I am going to tell you what I really think.

Shipping is not, and never has been "the biggest polluter". Human beings on shore are the biggest polluter. Where the expleteive deleted do you suppose all that plastic in the seas comes from? Not from ships.

IT COMES FROM YOU.

You sort out your garbage as your local council tells you to and the council collects it and...

... sends it "for recycling" to third world countries where it is sold to factories who pick out what they can use and dump the rest into the local watercourse. It's not "their" filth; IT'S OURS

Shipping emissions are relatively tiny. That cxxp about one ship doing more damage than some fabulous number of cars is just that - cxxp. I don't know many professional seamen who are not concerned to keep the oceans decent. I and many others like me have been concerned for several years to clean up shipping and we have got a very long way. It hasn't been easy. Just a couple of years ago the head of the German shipowners association was stalking me on the Internet and writing to my employers to get them to fire me. Nice. But I'm still here.

read these:

https://splash247.com/author/andrewcb/

and read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78

So cut out the lying clickbait.

And yes, I am bloody angry.
 
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According to a news item today regarding a remote island somewhere the vast majority of plastic pollution comes from China. Millions of plastic bottles washed up at a point where currents apparently collide. Sorry, I think it was in the Atlantic but was not concentrating at the time. I have read in the past that Nigeria and China between them contribute the major proportion of worldwide pollution.
 
Minn said:
And now I am going to tell you what I really think.

Shipping is not, and never has been "the biggest polluter". Human beings on shore are the biggest polluter. Where the expleteive deleted do you suppose all that plastic in the seas comes from? Not from ships.

IT COMES FROM YOU.

You sort out your garbage as your local council tells you to and the council collects it and...

... sends it "for recycling" to third world countries where it is sold to factories who pick out what they can use and dump the rest into the local watercourse. It's not "their" filth; IT'S OURS

Shipping emissions are relatively tiny. That cxxp about one ship doing more damage than some fabulous number of cars is just that - cxxp. I don't know many professional seamen who are not concerned to keep the oceans decent. I and many others like me have been concerned for several years to clean up shipping and we have got a very long way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78

So cut out the lying clickbait.
Click to expand...

Well said! However, I don't think these third world countries can avoid criticism for letting their people throw plastics (ours or theirs) into their waters.
 
Test results. Without data this is just noise. But it may be important.

I'm guessing the largest components are CO2 and SO4-2. Aside from pH impact, these are not actually regulated pollutants anywhere, since the ocean is loaded with both.

But I could be wrong. Data.
 
zoidberg said:
Merchant ships. Thousands and thousands of them. Fitted with 'Open Loop Scubbers'. Breaching the international agreements of ocean pollution, systematically and massively....

Seea here: shipping-pollution-sea-open-loop-scrubber-carbon-dioxide-environment And that includes the hundreds of cruise liners, which operate in mostly pristine environments.

Perhaps Sir David Attenborough might 'get hot under the collar' by this huge environmental crime....
Click to expand...

That's a load of tosh. I would love like to see the source of this fake news.
 
vyv_cox said:
According to a news item today regarding a remote island somewhere the vast majority of plastic pollution comes from China. Millions of plastic bottles washed up at a point where currents apparently collide. Sorry, I think it was in the Atlantic but was not concentrating at the time. I have read in the past that Nigeria and China between them contribute the major proportion of worldwide pollution.
Click to expand...

I feel like China gets the blame but remember most of EU/US plastic is shipped to China/East-Asia for 'reprocessing' in empty shipping containers (see trade deficit!) but most of it is condemned and ends up in landfill/the ocean. China recently banned this, which meant it has ended up in other developing countries where environmental protections are lax.

As for the shipping - yes another dirty trick to get past environmental legislation! These companies are basically profiting by externalising costs onto the environmental and thus onto us all. From the Independent, my bold:

More than $12 billion has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel oil. This means the vessels meet standards demanded by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) that kick in on January 1st. However, the sulphur emitted by the ships is simply re-routed from the exhaust and expelled into the water around the ships, which not only greatly increases the volume of pollutants being pumped into the sea, but also increases carbon dioxide emissions

A total of 3,756 ships, both in operation and under order, have already had scrubbers installed according to DNV GL, the world's largest ship classification company. Only 23 of these vessels have had closed-loop scrubbers installed, a version of the device that does not discharge into the sea and stores the extracted sulphur in tanks before discharging it at a safe disposal facility in a port. The Exhaust Gas Cleaning System Association has estimated that 4,000 ships will be operating with scrubbers by the time the legislation is enforced, up from fewer than a hundred in 2013. For every ton of fuel burned, ships using open-loop scrubbers emit approximately 45 tons of warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non-profit organization that provides scientific analysis to environmental regulators.
Click to expand...
 
vyv_cox said:
According to a news item today regarding a remote island somewhere the vast majority of plastic pollution comes from China. Millions of plastic bottles washed up at a point where currents apparently collide. Sorry, I think it was in the Atlantic but was not concentrating at the time. I have read in the past that Nigeria and China between them contribute the major proportion of worldwide pollution.
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The spot where a few million tons have accumulated is the Pacific Gyre.

There are various studies of what comes down rivers; one that I have seen showed China, Indonesia, and the Philippines as the three leading culprits. This may be changing a little as China has now stopped importing waste.

Incidentally, Britain's biggest export by volume is - yes - domestic rubbish.
 
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ross84 said:
I feel like China gets the blame but remember most of EU/US plastic is shipped to China/East-Asia for 'reprocessing' in empty shipping containers (see trade deficit!) but most of it is condemned and ends up in landfill/the ocean. China recently banned this, which meant it has ended up in other developing countries where environmental protections are lax.

As for the shipping - yes another dirty trick to get past environmental legislation! These companies are basically profiting by externalising costs onto the environmental and thus onto us all. From the Independent, my bold:
Click to expand...

On a point of information, very few nations have spent money on reception arrangements for scrubber sludge. That would involve land based tax payers actually doing something. Which is why most shipowners will be going with low sulphur fuel oil.

And what will happen to the high sulphur fuel oil? It will get burned in power stations, instead.
 
Understand and totally agree with all the stuff about plastic rubbish. OK.

But back to the OP. Just because some other form of pollution is worse, why shouldnt marine engine pollution be put on the front page too?

I spent many years sailing in the Straits of Gibraltar and Im sure we all know the concentration of shipping operating there. Whenever the wind drops, fortunately not too often, the air quality is shocking. You can taste it as well as see it. So it goes on all the time but mostly gets blown away. Brown, noxious layer. Yuk.

Im fairly certain the worst polluters are the ferries, both high speed and traditional that mebbe do in total more than 100 movements across the Straits every day. The evidence is there for all to see. And smell.....
 
capnsensible said:
Understand and totally agree with all the stuff about plastic rubbish. OK.

But back to the OP. Just because some other form of pollution is worse, why shouldnt marine engine pollution be put on the front page too?

I spent many years sailing in the Straits of Gibraltar and Im sure we all know the concentration of shipping operating there. Whenever the wind drops, fortunately not too often, the air quality is shocking. You can taste it as well as see it. So it goes on all the time but mostly gets blown away. Brown, noxious layer. Yuk.

Im fairly certain the worst polluters are the ferries, both high speed and traditional that mebbe do in total more than 100 movements across the Straits every day. The evidence is there for all to see. And smell.....
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Because something is being done about it.
 
Minn said:
Because something is being done about it.
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Is this true?

For every ton of fuel burned, ships using open-loop scrubbers emit approximately 45 tons of warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non-profit organisation that provides scientific analysis to environmental regulators.

Not picking a fight here, but I want to understand it.
 
capnsensible said:
Is this true?

For every ton of fuel burned, ships using open-loop scrubbers emit approximately 45 tons of warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non-profit organisation that provides scientific analysis to environmental regulators.

Not picking a fight here, but I want to understand it.
Click to expand...

I posted links to a whole series of articles, written by me, earlier in this thread.

Open loop scrubbers were developed as a response to “IMO 20/20” Happy Googling.
 
For every ton of fuel burned, ships using open-loop scrubbers emit approximately 45 tons of warm, acidic, contaminated washwater containing carcinogens including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non-profit organisation that provides scientific analysis to environmental regulators.

This seems to me a classic piece of sensationalism.
What it really means is for every ton of oil burnt the exhaust is washed with 45 tons of clean sea water. When that is discharged it will still be sea water but with the addition of the contaminants. It probably still isn't a good idea but lets get the facts right first. You can't make 45 tons from 1 ton
 
Of cause none of this sort of thing is new. I used to run one of the last carburetted Range Rovers. To comply with emission regulations they bled fresh air into the exhaust pipe (know as pulse air) It did nothing about making the engine run cleaner but the percentage of dirt bits in the exhaust was lower so they past the limits ok. BMW did the same with the last of the "air head" flat twin motorcycles.
 
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