Those charged with designing new cruise ships and skyscrapers share a common bond. Both will have a similar command ringing in their ears after their first meeting with the client: ”It must be the biggest the world has ever seen.”
This year will see the maiden voyage of the cruise industry’s latest record-breaker. At 158 000 tons, Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas will take the crown held for the past two years by Cunard’s Queen Mary II, which weighs 150 000 tons (the Titanic‘s tonnage was 46 328). She will carry 4 370 passengers and crew on week-long cruises out of Miami.
But the next world-beater is already being planned. Royal Caribbean, the world’s second-biggest cruising company, is keen to challenge Carnival (owner of Cunard) for the top market position with its Project Genesis.
With a planned launch in 2009 and built, like Freedom of the Seas, by Aker Yards in Finland, it will be five times heavier than the Titanic. There is even talk in the industry that the generation of cruise liners after Genesis could each carry up to 12 000 passengers.
The gigantism displayed by the cruise industry isn’t all about the CEOs shouting ”my boat’s bigger than yours” at each other. In large part, it is a reflection of the boom in cruising over the past decade. Simple economics dictates that it is more profitable to carry more passengers on fewer ships. And more people are choosing to cruise. Worldwide, 15-million passengers — 10-million from the United States alone — will travel by cruise ship this year. That compares to just half a million in 1970. There are about 300 liners sailing the world’s seas, with a further 23 ships scheduled to join the global fleet over the next four years.
But as passenger numbers grow, so, too, do concerns about cruising’s impact on the environment. Much of the protesting against the cruise industry originates in the US, the biggest market. Campaign groups such as Oceana and the Bluewater Network have been persistent in their attempts to get the industry to act more responsibly, in particular when it comes to waste emissions. The Bluewater Network, for example, claims that a typical cruise ship on a week-long voyage generates ”more than 50 tons of garbage, one million gallons of greywater (waste water from sinks, showers, galleys and laundry facilities), 210 000 gallons of sewage, and 35 000 gallons of oil-contaminated water”.
Most of this waste, it says, is dumped — some treated, some not — straight into the sea. The Hawaii-based campaign group Earthjustice claims that the average liner visiting the Pacific islands produces the equivalent air pollution of 12 240 cars.
Where jurisdiction allows, the US authorities have come down hard on cruise firms that have been found guilty of polluting. In 1999, the US Justice Department announced that Royal Caribbean had agreed to pay an $18-million criminal fine for dumping waste oil and hazardous chemicals in US waters and lying to the US coastguard. In 2002, Carnival was also fined 18-million for similar crimes and placed on five years’ probation.
The industry points to the fact that the situation is fast improving as environmental laws get tighter. It is true that since August last year the International Maritime Organisation, the United Nations body that sets shipping standards, has demanded through the Marpol Convention (initiated following the Torrey Canyon tanker spill off the south-western tip of the United Kingdom in 1967) that any new ship must not discharge ”comminuted and disinfected sewage” less than three nautical miles from shore, and untreated sewage must not be discharged less than 12 nautical miles from shore.
Existing ships have until 2010 to meet this standard and install treatment machines. However, it doesn’t absolve the firms of the fact that these ships are each still pumping thousands of gallons of waste liquid, treated or not, into the world’s oceans, often in sensitive marine environments, such as off the Antarctic coast.
But beyond the environmental concerns lies the issue of just how much a cruise ship truly benefits each port of call. After all, passengers typically have little meaningful interaction with each destination. An hour spent buying trinkets on the quayside before reboarding for the next meal is unlikely to inject many tourist dollars into the local economy. Earthjustice has campaigned for cruise ships to be banned from visiting Molokai, the fifth largest island in Hawaii, for this very reason. Others argue that cruise ships are the maritime version of gated communities — the world’s rich remaining safely fenced off from the poor, whose countries they none the less enjoy visiting, even if it is at an environmental cost. — Â