Protecting Washington Waters
and Puget Sound from Pollution
What's new
With up to 5,000 passengers and crew, cruise ships are floating towns—but Washington
State does nothing to regulate the wastes they discharge in our waters. WashPIRG
working to pass a bill in Olympia that will protect our coastal waters from
cruise ship pollution by setting high water quality standards for cruise ship
discharges.
Brief summary
Washington waters
are seriously threatened by pollution. Tens of thousands of acres of shellfish
beds in Puget Sound are closed, and Hood Canal has recently experienced major
fishkills due to a lack of dissolved oxygen. This is not just an environmental
problem—fishing is worth $1.2 billion to Washington's economy, and shellfishing
is worth $77 million to Mason and Pacific counties alone.
In a day, a typical cruise
ship of 3,000 passengers and crew produces 30,000 gallons of sewage, 270,000
gallons of other wastewater, and additional gallons of hazardous wastes, biomedical
waste, oily bilge water, and solid waste. They are the size of small towns,
but unlike towns in Washington, the state does not regulate what they can dump
into Puget Sound and other Washington waters.
Cruise ships also have a
poor environmental record. In 2003, a cruise ship dumped 16,000 gallons of raw
sewage into the Sound near Whidbey Island. And in 2004, the cruise lines broke
environmental promises to the state of Washington 3 times. Both California and
Alaska have already passed legislation to regulate cruise ship dumping; it's
clear we need more than promises to protect our coasts.
WashPIRG is working to pass
a state law—H.B. 1415—that will ban cruise ships from dumping some wastes -
including hazardous waste and biomedical waste—in our water. It also requires
cruise ships to treat other wastes with state-of-the-art treatment systems.
More information
Factsheet
on H.B. 1415
Questions and Answers
about H.B. 1415
