The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved a new rule banning ships from discharging their sewage into the sea within 3 miles of the California coast this week, beginning a prohibition that will begin next month. Cruise and cargo ships will no longer be able to discharge treated , untreated or gray water anywhere along the coast, a practice that regulators blame for spreading bacteria and disease in marine mammals, fish and people.
“This is a problem that has been going on from the time boats first started coming” to California, said Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA’s regional administrator reports sfgate. “What we are really doing is creating a coastal zone that recognizes the importance of our beaches, surfing, swimming and the reason people come to our iconic coastline.”
The new rule creates the largest coastal no-sewage zone in the nation and is expected to prevent the dumping of 22.5 million gallons annually of ship waste.
The U.S. Coast Guard will enforce the rule, state regulators will also have authority to enforce the rules and the EPA can impose stiff fines and penalties on offenders.
“What California has done is unprecedented and we really hope this will push other places to consider it,” said Marcie Keever, the oceans and vessels project director for Friends of the Earth. It means “cruise lines and the shipping industry can no longer use California’s valuable coastal and bay waters as their toilet.”
The photo shown here is from an article about Korea’s garbage and sewage disposal system and has nothing to do with major cruise line ships that sail the coastal United States. Korea has a problem. Major cruise lines already treat sewage and have a dedicated environmental officer in charge of the system they use that does not discharge any sewage and leaves no negative impact on the oceans they do business in.
We learned while on Princess Cruises Coral Princess that although guidelines and regulations permit discharge of waste materials at certain distances from shore, that Princess Cruises does not discharge at all, “zero discharge”, we were told by the ship’s environmental officer. Aluminum cans are compacted and donated to Alaska Boy Scouts for fundraising, byproducts of photo printing are captured and taken off the ship for recycling. In the ship’s engine room we learned that the ships plug in to clean electric power when docking in Alaska and other ports, including California ports, eliminating completely any discharge from the burning of fuel.
Related articles
- EPA bans ships from dumping waste off state coast (sfgate.com)
- Feds Approve California Sewage Ban and Create Largest Coastal No-Discharge Zone in the Nation (yubanet.com)
- Strict New California Coast Sewage Rules Enacted For Cruise Ships (sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com)
- EPA finalizes ban on cruise ships dumping sewage in California’s ocean waters (mercurynews.com)
- EPA: Cruise Ship Sewage Discharge Banned (huffingtonpost.com)
