The industry needs to be cleaner and more sensitive to the places where it sails
John Gapper
This has not been a happy week for cruise operators. On Sunday morning, a large cruise ship collided with a dock in Venice, injuring four people. On Monday, a judge in Miami approved a $20m settlement with Carnival Corporation, the world’s biggest cruise operator, for repeatedly polluting oceans.
The footage of the out of control MSC Opera barging into a small pleasure cruiser in Venice, with tourists fleeing along the dockside by the Giudecca Canal, was an unfortunate image for the sector. It evoked the fear of many when cruise ships sail into historic ports — the tourist horde has arrived.
It is not just their thousands of passengers, but how the vessels operate. “If you all did not have the environment, you would have nothing to sell,” Judge Patricia Seitz observed sharply to Arnold Donald, chief executive of Carnival, in Miami. Carnival pleaded guilty to having dumped waste and oily water into the sea, despite a previous criminal conviction for the same offence.
Cruise operators need to clean up their act. They face protests at the most popular spots such as Venice, Dubrovnik and the Norwegian fjords for sailing behemoths there — the Opera looks big but is only half the size of MSC Cruises’ latest vessels, which can take 5,000 passengers. Now they are under scrutiny for their emissions and the waste they generate.
It is unfair in some ways. Cruising is a growing form of tourism but still tiny compared with the industry as a whole: 28m people took cruises last year out of about 1.4bn tourist arrivals in foreign countries. It suffers the curse of the visible — cruise ships, with what the Miami court settlement monitor called “all the myriad needs of a small free-floating city”, are hard to ignore.
Every tourist needs places to rest and eat, transport and facilities for waste; cruises merely bundle them together, mixing security with exoticism in a way that appeals to many. Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist, wrote that a tourist’s home “is part of the safety package, for the pleasure to be unclouded and truly engrossing”.
Adventure tourism such as white water rafting, trekking in the Himalayas, and mountain climbing sits at the other end of the scale. Yet even such adventures are packaged, and the deaths of 11 climbers on Everest in May is not the only form of destruction they can wreak. The Sagarmatha National Park around Everest suffers from erosion and dumping of waste.
“The more people cruise the world, the more the world becomes a better place,” Carnival claims in its 2017 sustainability report. There is something to that — McKinsey & Co estimates that travel and tourism generated $7.9tn, or 10 per cent of global gross domestic product, in 2017, and more than 1,000 crew can be employed on a cruise ship. But it is not unalloyed gain.
One problem is emissions. Cruise ships use heavy oil for fuel, like other commercial ships, and the shipping industry is estimated to create 13 per cent of sulphur dioxide emissions, causing 400,000 cases of premature death globally a year. There are sulphur control areas along coasts, yet one Carnival ship was found to have burnt oil inside Iceland’s protection zone.
Operators including Carnival use filters to curb emissions and some are turning to liquefied natural gas as a fuel — Carnival’s AIDAnova, a liner powered by LNG that can carry 6,600 passengers, went into service last year. But the sector as a whole remains a polluter.
A second problem is waste disposal. Carnival was originally fined $40m in 2017 after a whistleblower on a ship operated by Princess Cruise Lines, one of its subsidiaries, disclosed that its crew had secretly dumped oil-contaminated bilge water into the sea through a “magic pipe” since 2005. Cruise ships also collect a lot of “grey water” from showers and “black water” sewage.
No cruise ship is allowed to dump untreated waste into the sea, even beyond the 12-mile coastal zone imposed by maritime law, and modern ships have extensive treatment facilities. The Cruise Lines International Association estimates that ships recycle 60 per cent more waste per person than on land, but the Carnival case shows that breaches are common.
Compared with tourism as a whole, the cruise industry is a limited cause of ecological concern. But it is growing beyond the baby-boomer market in Germany and the UK, where the average passenger is 57. Virgin is launching a cruise ship next year aimed at a younger crowd, promising a “sailor experience that balances the duality of enjoying the earth and caring for it”.
This growth, and the fact that cruise ships are contained environments that could become leaders in sustainable tourism, make it vital to avoid repetitions of the Venice crash and the Carnival case. Taking them out of the Giudecca Canal, where they overshadow Venice, is a start, but other ports need to ask themselves how much they need sail-by visits from the giants.
Most of the environmental responsibility lies with the operators themselves, which have raised their standards but need to do more. It is tempting to behave badly at sea, when no one is watching, but it is ugly.
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