Cruise Ship Scrubbers Pollute Alaska Air, Seas

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Category: News

Created on Thursday, 20 February 2025 15:22

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By KAY BROWN

Alaska Beacon

The first cruise ship of the year will arrive April 14 in Juneau. Large cruise ships will soon be calling at communities around the state, bringing more than a million tourists this season.

 While cruise ships boost Alaska’s economy, they also impose health, environmental, wildlife and subsistence costs on individuals and communities. The growing use of scrubbers on cruise ships is causing multiple unnecessary costs and risks that are currently going unaddressed.

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that the toxic poisons from scrubber discharge damage the marine environment and increase human health risks. Southeast Alaska waters, which are heavily trafficked by cruise ships, receive more than 25,000 tons of scrubber discharge daily from just one medium-sized cruise ship. 

Exhaust Gas Cleaning Systems, known as scrubbers, remove sulfur and toxic pollutants from the exhaust gasses produced by ships’ combustion engines burning heavy fuel oil, one of the dirtiest fuels on Earth. Scrubbers take these harmful pollutants out of the air and dump them into the water. Burning cleaner distillate fuels removes the need for scrubbers.

A recent report that I co-wrote, Poison in the Water: The Call to Ban Scrubber Discharge, The Health and Environmental Costs Industry Wants Us to Ignore, argues that it’s urgent to limit the harmful impacts of scrubbers on the marine environment and human health.

Scrubber wastewater is highly toxic, significantly hotter and much more acidic than the surrounding waters. Pollutants from scrubber wastewater include heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, nitrates and nitrites, sulfates and particulate matter. The presence of heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in scrubber discharge is especially concerning given their ability to persist in the marine environment and accumulate within marine species. Even at extremely low concentrations — just 0.001% — scrubber pollutants can harm marine life and disrupt biological processes that harm ecosystems, subsistence fishing, ocean resources and the health and livelihoods of individuals in coastal communities.

Exposure to these toxins have been linked to DNA damage, endocrine disruption, developmental abnormalities, lung deficiencies such as asthma, and disrupted cognitive development. Toxic scrubber discharge can contaminate our seafood and drinking water, and with contact cause skin issues, like rashes, redness and infections.

Scrubbers also contaminate the air. Ships burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers emit 70% more particulate matter, up to 4.5 times more black carbon and considerably more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into the atmosphere compared to ships running on marine gas oil. This black carbon pollution is accelerating the Arctic meltdown and global warming.

The proliferation of scrubbers came about in response to regulations limiting the maximum sulfur content of marine fuels, and scrubbers were authorized as a method of complying with these regulations. Since 2015, scrubbers have been installed on almost all large cruise ships that visit Alaska.

While industry representatives have argued that banning scrubbers would penalize those operators who adopted them in good faith, the report found that while scrubbers may remain more cost-effective than using distillate fuels, analysis shows that a return on capital investment in scrubbers is quickly realized. Inaction allows scrubber use to keep increasing while enabling companies that have already recouped their investment to continue profiting from the ongoing use of polluting, hazardous heavy fuel oil.

Given the significant environmental and human health harms and risks, scrubber use should be quickly phased out instead of being allowed to continue growing as scrubbers are included in hundreds of orders for new ship builds and are added to more vessel types. 

The International Maritime Organization, which regulates global shipping, has been slow to act on scrubbers due to lack of Member State consensus and industry objections. At a recent meeting in London, the organization inched closer to more precisely quantifying emissions from scrubbers, but regulatory action to ban scrubber discharge globally appears to be at least years away.

Until the International Maritime Organization institutes a global ban on scrubbers, national governments, states, communities and ports should independently ban the discharge of scrubber waste within their jurisdictional waters and stop approving scrubbers as an alternative compliance method to meet sulfur limits for ships registered under their flags.  More than 45 countries have already adopted scrubber bans or regulations. 

Without a ban on the discharge of scrubber wastewater — or a mandate to use cleaner distillate fuels — ecosystems, ocean resources and coastal communities will continue to be threatened, and human health risks will increase.

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https://alaskabeacon.com/kay-brown

Kay Brown is the Arctic policy director at Pacific Environment. She has broad experience in political, nonprofit and public arenas, including 10 years of service as an Alaska state representative. She is a former director of the Division of Oil and Gas for the state of Alaska.

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