Scourge of the Seas: Handling Shipping Waste
Horrifying pictures of trash strewn across beaches and sea life caught in floating plastics are now par for the course, and companies across industries have pledged to clean up their act. But what about waste generated by ships?
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Jeanne Grasso is vice chair of the Maritime & International Trade Practice Group and member of the maritime emergency response team at US law firm Blank Rome. She says that in every industry there are outliers, but rather than introducing new regulation, one answer is ensuring enforcement is stronger across the board. As an example, she points to the US Coast Guard, which closely monitors how many enforcement actions ships have had, prioritises enforcement accordingly, and inspects ships at least once a year as policy.
“I think we’ve got the waste streams covered pretty adequately,” says Grasso. “It’s a matter of making sure these conventions and laws are complied with and enforced, and that responsibility is shared amongst the flag state, the port state and the shipping company itself and in many cases local jurisdictions.
“In my view, what companies can do is make sure that their crews are adequately trained, send a very strong compliance message to their ships, make sure the culture on that ship is a compliant culture, and have a good programme and policy for verification.”
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Ultimately, when it comes to massive accumulations of waste in the seas, the priority needs to be stemming the source on land, particularly when it comes to nations with a less friendly environmental record.
“The consensus here strongly is that this is a problem for land-based action on plastics and how it’s dealt with – primarily from a number of Asian countries, where the garbage literally floats down the river into the ocean,” says Joan Bondareff, another member of Blank Rome’s Maritime Group.
"Scourge of the Seas: Handling Shipping Waste," by Joe Baker was published in Ship Technology on November 12, 2018.