When The Coast posted a picture of the massive Halifax-bound cruise ship Oasis of the Seas to our Instagram page, the number one question we got was about number two.
So what happens to poop on a cruise ship? Glad you asked. They have to follow the same rules I had to follow as a watch officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. Canada, even though the federal government promised stricter rules in 2019, still follows international regulations. When they are at least three nautical miles away from land, cruise ships can dump treated or disinfected sewage into the ocean. If they don’t have the capability to treat sewage, or for whatever reason just don’t want to treat it, ships that are at least 12 miles offshore can dump untreated sewage into the water as long as they’re going faster than four knots (~7.5km/hr).
The promised stronger regulations have yet to materialize despite being a three-year-old commitment from the federal government. The regulations are important because off the west coast, large ships hold their waste until they get to Canadian waters. The reason they do this is—and hold on to your stereotypes about which is the better country—Canadian environmental regulations are more relaxed than American regulations. In fact, Canadian waterways collect far more wastewater (147 billion litres) than the country produces milk (9.3 billion litres) in an average year. All the milk in all of the grocery stores in all of the country for a whole year, is a tiny fraction of the 💩 that’s dumped into our waters.
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This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2022.
Environmental regulations that deal with the dumping of waste materials inside and outside of Canadian waters are definitely in need of an update. Climate change has shown us that human actions have significant effects on the global and local environment. We need not to just do a better job, we need to aggressively enforce appropriate environmental protection regulations like our future lives depend on it… because they do!