cruise ships

March 24, 2023 10:37 AM

Take a typical Alaska cruise and see the damage in its wake. The evidence is clear: the industry needs an overhaul. Article addresses sewage, pollutants, trash, impact on wildlife, impact on port towns and cities.

Wikipedia's articles on cruise ship pollution in Europe and in the United States

posted by aniola (22 comments total)

Modern cruise ships are terrible, but they probably treat their sewage to higher standards than the cities and towns that line those shores.

Victoria, capital of British Columbia, built its first sewage treatment plant in 2021. Yes, really.
posted by ryanrs at 11:08 AM on March 24, 2023 [7 favorites]

The total climate impact of a typical Alaska cruising season, beginning and ending in Seattle (including flights), is equivalent to one-third of the city’s entire annual carbon emissions.

A supposedly fun thing I'll never do.
posted by box at 11:52 AM on March 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was curious why ships didn't dock at Campbell River. I only found this article which suggests that they simply never got into the habit of doing it, thanks in part to the bad timing of the 2008 recession, and that's about all there is to it.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 11:55 AM on March 24, 2023

These monsters ply the waters off my home island, and I hate them. I don't know if they do treat their waste better than the cities they pass by. When they are in US waters they are not allowed to dump waste, but in Canada, we have weaker laws (hopefully those are changing this year). That means that all their shit is dumped off of Canadian coasts.

2020 was glorious. Not a single one of these illuminated wedding cakes could be seen. I hoped it meant the death of the industry, but alas.
posted by salishsea at 12:48 PM on March 24, 2023 [8 favorites]

That is a very informative article, but I was pretty tired of LARGE PRETTY PICTURES and having to slowly scroll to little text boxes for long periods of time in order to read it.

I'm glad I never wanted to go to Alaska and turned my mom down when she did that cruise.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:05 PM on March 24, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd never heard of Hakai Magazine before. Thanks for sharing the article.
posted by montbrarian at 1:44 PM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

most ships arrive in the late afternoon or evening. This allows little time for visitors to do much of anything or spend their dollars

Be forewarned, potential Alaskan cruiser, excited about that visit to Canada: it may be for only a couple hours.
posted by Rash at 2:32 PM on March 24, 2023

The total climate impact of a typical Alaska cruising season, beginning and ending in Seattle (including flights), is equivalent to one-third of the city’s entire annual carbon emissions.

This seems like a lot until you realize that Seattle uses more renewable energy than basically any other major city in the US. 86% of Seattle's power comes from carbon-free hydro, and another 10% comes from wind and nuclear. So right off the bat, they're way ahead of most other places in the US. Seattle also has a very progressive approach (for the US) towards public transportation, requirements for EV charging stations, bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure, and discouragement of single-passenger commuting.

I'm not saying the cruise industry shouldn't make improvements, but picking Seattle as the denominator for comparison is kinda stacking the deck.

Also, the real metric that we should be looking at is not the ships' carbon emissions compared to their port cities, but the per capita emissions compared to other vacation/leisure options. Like, if I take a cruise from Seattle to Anchorage and back, how does that compare to flying from Seattle to Anchorage, renting a car, and driving around for about the same length of time while staying in hotels and using resources from shore-based infrastructure? Flying is very carbon-intensive, even with modern ETOPS aircraft, and I bet the shore-based infrastructure in AK isn't optimized for carbon footprint (to put it politely—it is literally a petro-state). The wastewater facilities in most towns up and down coastal Alaska are probably not as good as what's on a cruise ship, either.

Beyond that, we should also consider that the alternative to cruise ships would probably be more construction of hotels and resorts ashore in the areas those ships visit. On one hand, the construction itself might be better for local economies than a ship built somewhere in Northern Europe, but it would require buildable land to be cleared, roads to be paved, electrical and sewage capacity to be built out, etc. etc. Having one or two "boat days" a week where people show up, spend money, take pictures, and then leave might not seem like a bad deal by comparison. (Particularly in some of the ecologically-sensitive areas that cruise ships visit, especially in the Caribbean and Central America.) Or, of course, the tourists could just go elsewhere, and those areas wouldn't get the revenue at all. But then they're using electricity and flushing toilets somewhere else; it just moves the issue around.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:42 PM on March 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

I hoped it meant the death of the industry, but alas.

I am on record here (in February 2020!) as espousing my hopes that the burgeoning pandemic would end cruise ships once and for all. Alas, indeed.

Samuel Johnson once wrote,

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned... a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.

Now we can add disease and a week’s worth of performances from a band who had their last hit in 1974.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:57 PM on March 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was born in and live in Victoria, and I know this much: cruise ships suck. Cruise ship passengers suck. The "jobs" "created" to "serve" cruise ship passengers suck. The traffic cruise ships create sucks. The stank of cruise ships sucks. The noise of cruise ships sucks. The impact of cruise ships on the local environment sucks. The special pleading and apologetics for cruise ships sucks. The glassy-eyed chamber of commerce boosterism around cruise ships sucks.

Fuck cruise ships. They suck.
posted by klanawa at 5:02 PM on March 24, 2023 [12 favorites]

Modern cruise ships are terrible, but they probably treat their sewage to higher standards than the cities and towns that line those shores.

You'll get no argument from me that coastal Alaskan communities should do better with their waste handling but there's an issue of scale here.. I live in one of the larger Alaskan cruise stops (Ketchikan) and we have fewer than 15,000 year-round residents. The prediction for 2023 cruise visitors, last I heard, was 1,500,000 people.

I also wouldn't be too sure they're treating their sewage to higher standards. I'm not very up on current practices but it wasn't that long ago that the cruise ships serving the Alaska route routinely dumped their raw sewage when passing through international waters and were also occasionally caught doing so in controlled coastal areas as well.

On edit: having now clicked through to read the article - you can see my house in the picture heading the article.. (waves "hello!")
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:03 AM on March 25, 2023 [9 favorites]

Besides the issues outlined in the article, I'll throw in another one that I hear a fair bit about from other locals (in fact, someone was complaining about it to me today, during a conversation where we were talking about the imminent start of the cruise season, which starts earlier and runs later every year.)

I don't have any numbers on this, and it could be wrong, but it certainly is widely believed locally that the cruise lines have shipped their older, dirtier, highest-emission buses up to Alaskan ports to carry tourists around in places where there is little monitoring and where their economic clout guarantees little pushback. Again, I don't have any hard data to prove it - but it seems plausible enough to me and it certainly would not be notably out of character given their other behavior.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:14 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like Kadin I’d love more info about cruises compared to other potential vacation activities. One of the biggest issues that I’ve always seen with cruises is that they can be a self contained economy. No need to stay at a local hotel, off shore excursions can book booked through the company, in many places in the Caribbean they literally own their owns islands to keep from having to interact locally (like Castaway Cay and Labadee).

No real money goes into the local economy while at the same time creating a huge resource drain on the area. And this can but true of “typical” vacations as well! If you stay at a Marriot, eat at chain, or appearing to be small owned but actually chain restaurants, and the activities you do are actually owned by a large non local company, the local economy (and people) aren’t gaining much from your presence.
posted by raccoon409 at 6:33 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Modern cruise ships are terrible, but they probably treat their sewage to higher standards than the cities and towns that line those shores.

In the article:

During cruise season, BC waters are a dumping ground for untreated gray water that can have fecal coliform levels higher than domestic sewage, as well as pollutants such as detergents, oil, grease, heavy metals, and medical waste.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:47 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

On top of that, there's way more information about the pollutants involved. Read this thing, it's full of info!
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:49 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

Have to agree, cruises suck. Average cruise ships get 12-14 mpg! Versus 67 mpg for planes! And you combine the two anyway to get to where the cruise departs.

I found Hakai magazine through their podcast. Although I sometimes wonder if the voices reading the articles are human, the subjects are always interesting.
There's also a podcast for The Walrus, "Canada's most popular general-interest magazine".
posted by HE Amb. T. S. L. DuVal at 7:53 AM on March 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

The first half of that long scrolling experience left me thinking about how wasteful and harmful the Alaskan cruise industry is on not just an environmental scale, but also a humanitarian one.

The second half convinced me that the entire article was a thinly veiled attempt to enable someone to write off a new drone purchase by selling a load of shots to Hakai magazine.
posted by Sphinx at 11:08 AM on March 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

One of the biggest issues that I’ve always seen with cruises is that they can be a self contained economy. No need to stay at a local hotel, off shore excursions can book booked through the company, in many places in the Caribbean they literally own their owns islands to keep from having to interact locally (like Castaway Cay and Labadee).

Their behavior is much the same in Southeast Alaska - the cruise lines try to do everything they can to make sure that they're the ones extracting money from the tourists. Some local businesses manage to benefit despite them but wherever they can the cruise lines try to direct their passengers to excursions and shopping that is owned by, or giving a big kickback to, the cruise companies.

More recently they've been building out alternative port facilities to minimize what they pay to dock. All of the ships visiting Ketchikan, for example, used to either moor at the cruise ship berths along the main city-owned wharf or, if space was not available, would anchor out in the harbor and transport passengers to the downtown wharf using lightering vessels.

However one of the major cruise lines (Norwegian, I think, but I'm not positive) was dissatisfied with this arrangement so they built their own port - no blackjack or hookers yet, as far as I know, but for passengers who travel on their cruises, instead of a port call in the cute quirky Alaska port town pictured at the top of the article in the write-up, instead they get to make their port call at "The Mill at Ward Cove", which is a barebones port facility built on the defunct industrial site of the shuttered wood pulp mill that used to operate about 6 miles north of town. Passengers who alight there can choose between whatever limited shopping the cruise line has set up in its Potemkin Ketchikan, whatever excursion companies the cruise line has cut a deal with, or a bus trip into the actual town, which is about the only way they'd get to interact with any business who isn't giving a cut to the cruise line.
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:29 PM on March 25, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'd never heard of Hakai Magazine before. Thanks for sharing the article.

The Hakai Institute is a scientific vanity project by noted asshole and medical tech millionire, Eric Peterson. They do a fair amount of interesting work (I work with people who work there, and may end up on site myself soon), and it seems to be a pretty good thing, though I hear that Peterson is a bit capricious and will simply end a research project on impulse if he's not vibing. That's a grapevine thing though, and not direct experience.
posted by klanawa at 4:07 PM on March 25, 2023

I sign up for newsletters that seem interesting and then drop them when I lose interest or my inbox starts filling up too fast. Hakai is in the rotation right now. Here's the "Behind the Story" blurb they included with this article:

Andrew Engelson, author of this week’s feature story, “Cruise Ship Invasion,” gives some background on his research and the behind-the-scenes effort that went into creating this week’s immersive visual feature.

As a reporter living in Seattle, Washington, it’s impossible not to notice the massive cruise ships that sail in and out of Elliott Bay each summer. I was vaguely aware that these cruise ships—each of which serves as a temporary home to upwards of 4,000 tourists journeying from Seattle to Alaska—have a variety of negative environmental impacts. I wanted to learn more. After doing some initial reporting and research, what began as a fairly simple article pitch to Hakai Magazine grew into something more complex. Faced with a daunting array of impacts—from sewage and scrubber discharge to trash and carbon emissions, editor Jude Isabella and I agreed we needed a better way to make the cumulative damage more accessible.

We decided to create a multimedia feature that would follow one cruise ship, in this case, a fictional but representative ship we christened the Oceanic Topaz, on its seven-day journey from Seattle to Alaska and back. Over the summer of 2022, I interviewed community activists, whale biologists, environmental regulators, Indigenous elders, and government officials. What I found was both disheartening and inspiring. I was astonished at the long list of negative effects these floating hotels leave in their wake—whether it’s engine noise limiting killer whales’ ability to hunt or how the tourism industry has decimated small villages in Alaska. But I was also encouraged by people in the United States and Canada speaking out about the cruise industry.

One of the most poignant moments in my reporting was a conversation with Wanda Culp, an Indigenous activist who has seen her quiet village of Hoonah transformed into a tourist playground where more than 200,000 visitors each year ride zip lines, zoom around in jeeps, and snap pictures inside people’s homes. Culp became so exasperated, she finally moved from Hoonah to Juneau. “There’s nothing more of a village in Hoonah that I can see. We’ve been gutted,” she told me.

In all my years as a journalist, this was the first multimedia feature I’d worked on, and I was humbled and impressed by the dedication of the team effort that went into the final product. In addition to my words, there were many hours put in by photographers, videographers, copyeditors, graphic designers, and fact checkers. (I never thought my career would require me to double-check just how many liters of water are found in an eight-person hot tub.)

The final product is a powerful indictment of the cruise industry, which touts itself as being an inexpensive and relatively benign way to travel. But as you’ll see, the harms are significant and most likely not worth the economic benefits to our region.

Here's the other article from this week's newsletter I was considering when deciding which one to share, on müllspuren. I picked the feature on cruise ships because I figured the plastic trash destroying the ocean floor's ecosystems I figure everyone already knows a dozen different ways plastic is terrible, whereas cruise season is coming up and it might inspire someone to cancel their plans.
posted by aniola at 9:12 PM on March 25, 2023 [2 favorites]

Now we can add disease and a week’s worth of performances from a band who had their last hit in 1974.

By the way, I wrote these words on Friday. On Saturday, I learned one of my high school classmates (a longstanding fan of cruises) just got back from a seven-night cruise where she got to see the Bay City Rollers every day. (Their Ship of Theseus moment is drawing near: guitarist Stuart “Woody” Wood, age 66, is the last Teen Tartan Sensation still in the band.)
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:05 PM on March 26, 2023 [1 favorite]

Antarctic Tourism Is Up, but Experts Give It a Thumbs Down: Fuel spills and invasive species could be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impacts of increasing tourism in Antarctica.
posted by aniola at 7:42 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]