In June, an inspector with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation was on board a cruise ship at port in Ketchikan when he noticed something strange on the starboard side of the vessel — a cloudy discharge that left a shimmery film on the surface of the water.
The inspector’s report called it an “apparent pollution incident” from the ship’s exhaust gas cleaning system, also known as the scrubber.
“We find violations very frequently on scrubbers,” said the department’s Cruise Ship Program Manager Ben Eisenstein.
Scrubbers are technology that uses water to flush out harmful chemicals, especially sulfur, from a ship’s exhaust. Eisenstein says the use of scrubbers on cruise ships has skyrocketed in recent years, because in 2020 regulators with the International Martime Organization implemented new rules requiring ships to burn cleaner low-sulfur fuel, except for vessels with an exhaust gas cleaning technology.
“When that came into effect, a lot of these vessels, instead of choosing to be compliant with that fuel, you know, were spending all this money on this technology to keep them to burn that dirty fuel,” Eisenstein said. “Because it’s kind of a newer technology, that’s how it’s kind of snuck through the cracks.”
Most cruise ships that visit Alaska today have scrubbers, and the majority are open-loop systems that mix seawater with exhaust gas, filter it, then dump the remaining wastewater overboard. The state’s rules for cruise ship wastewater discharge date back to a permit from 2013, and most pertain to gray and blackwater. They don’t include any rules about about scrubbers.
Now, more than three dozen entities — including Pacific Environment, the Ocean Conservancy and the nonprofit Friends of the Earth — have called on the Biden Administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban the use of scrubbers at the national level.
Marcie Keever is the director of Friends of the Earth’s Oceans and Vessels program. While scrubbers may prevent harmful pollutants from escaping into the air, Keever said those chemicals just end up in the ocean instead.
“That water pulls all those dirty petroleum pollutants out of the smokestack and converts it into wastewater — into water pollution,” she said.
Though the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation still monitors cruise ships, the independent Ocean Rangers inspection program ended in 2019. And Keeever said scrubber pollution today goes largely unnoticed by the public and unchecked by regulators.
“Many of the discharges happen beyond the horizon, and so I think that’s just in general a problem with enforcing against the shipping industry and the cruise industry,” Keever said. “We just have no eyes on the behavior, and the federal agency that’s tasked with enforcing it isn’t doing it.”
The state of Alaska lost much of its authority to crack down on scrubber pollution through an act of Congress known as the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act, passed in 2018. That act also requires the EPA to update national standards for scrubber discharge. Keever said the federal agency has been slow to do so.
In an email to KTOO, an EPA spokesperson declined to comment except to say the agency is in the process of finalizing those updates.
Eisenstein said federal authorities rarely step in, despite many state reports of scrubber pollution. When cruise ship companies are punished, he said the fines are too low. For instance, the EPA found that ships with Carnival Corporation made hundreds of scrubber discharges in Alaska waters that violated Clean Water Act standards back in 2016. In the end, the company was fined a civil penalty of just $14,500.
“Which is just not enough,” Eisenstein said. “It’s not enough to change that behavior. It’s not enough to balance out the gain that they’re getting by being non-compliant.”
Cruise Lines International Association Alaska, a trade group representing the cruise industry, did not respond to KTOO requests for comment.
Right now, a medium sized cruise ship can discharge between 6 and 8 million gallons of scrubber wastewater a day.
That water is acidic, and it can contain heavy metals and other toxic chemicals from fossil fuels, including carcinogens.
Research on the effects of these toxins are relatively limited, but one study found that scrubber wastewater negatively affects sea urchin reproduction at concentrations as low as 0.0001%.
Aaron Brakel is the clean water campaigns manager for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. He worries Alaska’s marine life can’t handle more pollution threats.
“Our oceans are at so much risk already, with ocean warming, ocean acidification,” he said. “And so really the right thing to do now is stop discharging this stuff. Stop using the dirty fuel.”
Nations like Sweden and Denmark have already banned scrubbers, and California requires vessels sailing of their coast to use cleaner-burning low sulfur marine distillate fuels. Brakel says he hopes Alaska will follow suit.