How do ships and transportation pollute the seas

Also, if you are interested in listening to this episode instead, here is the link to it: How do ships and transportation pollute the seas

The fact that marine pollution is hard to measure, control, and improve made me interested in what pollutes the waters, turns out transportation pollution poses many threats to the marine environment, so I decided to dive a little deeper into the pollution caused by transportation. Over 90 percent of world trade is carried across the world’s oceans via some 90,000 marine vessels. Like all modes of transportation that use fossil fuels, ships produce carbon dioxide emissions that significantly contribute to global climate change and acidification. Besides carbon dioxide ships also release a handful of other pollutants that contribute to the problem. The shipping industry is responsible for a significant proportion of the global climate change problem. More than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to ocean-going ships. This is an amount comparable to major carbon-emitting countries — and the industry continues to grow rapidly.

If global shipping were a country, it would be the sixth-largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Only the United States, China, Russia, India, and Japan emit more carbon dioxide than the world’s shipping fleet. Nevertheless, carbon dioxide emissions from ocean-going vessels are currently unregulated.

Shipping and Carbon Dioxide

Ships contribute a significant amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) calculated that ocean-going vessels released 1.12 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2007. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from over 205 million cars, or more cars than were registered in the entire United States in 2006 (135 million).

Shipping is responsible for over three percent of global anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and is growing. Over the last three decades, the shipping industry has grown by an average of five percent per year. The IMO predicts that without introducing measures to reduce emissions from shipping, carbon dioxide emissions from the industry could rise to 1.48 billion metric tons by 2020, equivalent to putting 65 million new cars on the road.

Solutions: Reduced Speed

Overall, speed reductions are a quick, easy and effective way to achieve emissions reductions from ocean-going vessels. Given the recent increases in oil prices, speed reduction makes sense not only environmentally but also economically.

Emissions, especially those of carbon dioxide, are directly proportional to fuel consumption. Greater speeds require increased fuel consumption. Consequently, slowing down, even by a small amount, can result in significant fuel savings and emissions reductions.

The IMO calculated that a speed reduction of just 10 percent across the global fleet by 2010 would result in a 23.3 percent reduction in emissions. Hapag-Lloyd found that slowing some of their ships by just five knots, or 20 percent, resulted in savings of around 50 percent on fuel costs. Restrictions on vessel speed would reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, black carbon, nitrogen oxides, and nitrous oxide.

Recently, as the price of fuel has been increasing, shipping lines have been voluntarily reducing their speeds to realize financial gains through fuel savings. A senior official with the French line CMA CGM stated that to minimize fuel consumption, most lines will begin steaming at “economic speeds.”

Compared to other forms of transport, ships traveling at slow speeds be far more efficient and less polluting — roughly ten times more efficient than trucks and at least a hundred times more efficient than air transport. As ship speeds increase, much of this efficiency is lost. Ships traveling at very high speeds have been found to have similar energy demands to those of airplanes. Thus, slowing down is the way to go when it comes to shipping.

Shipping is the most common way of transportation when it comes to big amounts of objects, shipping them slowly may cause some disadvantages, but the positive side of saving the environment is worth the time spend sailing away into the oceans that rely on the environment themselves.