How Do Cruise Ships Handle Sewage

Law allows cruise ships to dump raw sewage in the ocean once a ship is more than three miles off US.

How do cruise ships handle sewage. For a start theres a lot of liquid to deal with every day. On some cruise ships especially many of those that travel in Alaskan waters sewage is treated using Advanced Wastewater Treatment AWT systems that generally provide improved screening treatment disinfection and sludge processing as compared with traditional MSDs marine sanitation devices. As a result all of those millions of passengers and crew members dining and defecating and showering on the oceans have left filthy discharges in their wake.

When a toilet is flushed on a cruise ship the sewage travels to the onboard treatment plant. As HERKIMER noted the sewage is treated on board. The work continued after the ship left port to anchor in the bay on March 16.

Here the waste is filtered before it enters an aeration chamber. The ships waste incineration room is manned twenty four hours a day by crew members who differentiate glass based on its color. The solid waste is seperated from the Liquid waste.

Cruise ships are equipped with water treatment systems that clean the human waste black water and grey water water that goes down the sinks and showers before it gets treated and combined and released back into the ocean. Cruise ships are not subject to the requirement for federal permits covering sewer and waste disposal systems that are de rigueur for the resorts and hotels on land. The way cruise ships handle effluent is covered by the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships MARPOL.

Plastic goes through this massive compactor. But beyond that point its essentially a. It contains a set of regulations prohibiting sewage discharge from ships unless via an approved sewage treatment plant via a comminuting and disinfecting unit CDU at.

The best of the new ships process the sewage onboard to the point where the liquids are clean enough to drink as they do on the International Space Station although on ships the drinkable-clean reprocessed water is discharged back into the ocean. To clean seawater ships often rely on two main methods. Every ship has its own environment officer and crew are responsible for their own recycling.