Cruise Ship Food Waste
Cruise ship tourists expect their vacations to be similar to lodging in a luxury hotel with many restaurant choices. A one-week cruise may be supplied by more than 100 tons of food and drink to supply 250,000 meals. That amounts to 28,000 – 30,000 dishes/day and 16,862 liters of alcohol. In one-week Caribbean cruises, one cruise company indicated that it brought on-board, 67,550 pastries, 21,000 ice cream cones, 10,680 hot dogs, and 7,200 burgers offered by 250 on-board chefs.
Food safety rules require that food put out for consumption must be discarded if not eaten within 4 hours. The many food options that cruise passengers have result in enormous food waste. Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines generated 53,655 cubic meters of food waste in 2022 – enough to fill 14 Olympic-size swimming pools with compressed food scraps. Some portion of uneaten food is processed through food pulpers, transmitted down pipes, and pyrolyzed in microwaves to dry it out so that it can be used as fuel, e.g., to support an onboard water park.
Thus, waste food is burned to generate energy, resulting in carbon dioxide emissions. All of the resources used to prepare fields, plant seeds, feed livestock, water and fertilize plants, harvest, transport, and cook food go up in smoke with wasted food. What cruise ships don’t dry out to burn ends up in port landfills or dumped in the ocean three miles from U.S. shorelines.
Nationwide, over 30% of food is wasted, despite many Americans having insufficient nutritious food. When food ends up in garbage destined for landfills, it is metabolized by microorganisms to methane, which is 80 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Although some landfills collect methane, new satellite detection has documented that landfills contribute about 4% of our greenhouse gas emissions (14% of our national methane gas emissions). Sitka’s food waste is shipped to Washington state for land-filling. We could save on shipping costs and lower our greenhouse gas emissions by composting our organic waste locally, creating a product that gardeners can use to amend our poor soils. Growing more food locally is prudent, given the cost volatility of fossil fuel fertilizers and transport. Other reasons for increasing local food production are Sitka’s cost of living, import tariffs, and climate impacts on food production across the U.S. and foreign bread baskets.
Composting our school, restaurant, grocery store, and household food waste merits consideration at a community level. The community garden being planned on Jarvis Street on municipal land is an obvious potential customer for local compost as are our home gardens.
Much like the Victory Gardens of World Wars I and II, not only could more productive Sitka gardens help meet an essential need, but the gardens help boost community spirit—Just stop by Sitka’s Farmers Market this summer to see.
–––––––––––––––––
--Kay Kreiss, Transition Sitka
