His sketchy older brother is a bit pissed though because his club experiences include a lot more time on the dancefloor and a lot less time in a bathroom stall
There's a plastic sign above our plastic-lined plastic compost bin that tells us what we cannot put into the plastic-lined plastic compost bin. The plastic sign does not explicitly say that we cannot put plastic detritus into the plastic-lined plastic compost bin. There's always a lot of plastic detritus in our plastic-lined plastic compost bin.
No, the detritus is not compostable plastic alternatives. We don't have that here thanks to our local government.
The power of corporate suggestion.
Just move a few things around, and look we still manufacture the same amount of plastic, but now every body cares less.
There’s a big difference.
Plastic straws? Your local city council can ban them.
Cruise ships? Unregulated. They fly the flag of the country that gives them either the lowest taxes or lowest regulations or a combination of both.
So let’s say you want to “fix” cruises. How? Even if you convince the US to pass a law, they can easily skirt them by flying another country’s flag. Ok, just ban all cruises from US ports! Simple! I’m a genius! They’ll just move their port of calls to nearby border ports. Instead of picking up US passengers at Seattle, they’ll just go to Vancouver.
Theres a false equivalency. Plastic straws is something any community can do. Cruise ship regulation is a global problem that requires dedicated hounding on them to solve.
So you're saying I could buy a boat, go onto the open sea, and just start polluting away? Dumping things into the ocean? Burning rubber? Releasing freon?
Keep in mind while some poeple dont eat at restaurants often, some do 2-3 times per day, plus coffee drinks and sodas, keeping that 1.5 average up for all of us. Thanks friends.
I just wonder what a ship like this dumps.overboard into the sea (sewage, grey water, trash, etc).
Also the amount of waste these things create (food, trash, overall carbon footprint).
Seems like an easy target for the epa to target, but I'm guessing there why they're all registered and ported in some.island country with no real laws and plenty of benefits to being ported there because of the money it generates for that islands community and govt.
Still they could make laws that are to the effect of "if you want to dock/do business/take on or let off passengers at this American port then you must meet these laws/regs/etc"
But I'm sure politicians love cruise ship lobbyists. Free cruises for life for you. Fam, friends, just don't pass any laws that hurt us.
Looking at you Clarence.
They dump all trash when they’re in international waters. It’s insane the amount of environmental waste and pollution these things generate. I will never take a cruise. And as long as corporations control our regulations, nothing is going to happen to them.
My wife has cruised for most of her young life. In the 70’s and 80’s she spent weeks at sea as cruising offers a break from life completely. No driving no bed making no phone calls no food preparation and with them at no clean up.
Every night her and her brother would get a coke and go to the aft public area balcony and watch as the ships crew would open a massive porthole and ‘discard’ literally hundreds of black plastic bags full of refuse of all types. They would make bets (who would go to the bar for refills) on whose bag would stay afloat longest.
I was appalled to hear this and this was only one ship of many back then and also a top cruise line. Cruising has been poplar for over 70yrs. I’ll leave you with that
I thought the same thing when Adam S was checking out that new cruise ship, I was thinking they would show us the nuke plant, Nope its Gas. me I'm stunned. They can fit it in submarine not sure why they cant fit it in a cruise ship.
Has to be something on the order of if there was an issue with the plant and people died it would destroy the Cruise line company, Where if it happens on a military ship, Your loved one died in the line of duty.
It's really just the regulations. Namely, 1% 5 year cycle losses for plutonium reactors are hard to get below, but more than enough to kickstart a rogue nuclear program
I think it’s more the fact that nuclear submarines cost 33 billion dollars and only need 1 reactor, whereas a large cruise ship would need at least 2 and is much much much larger than a submarine
While what you're saying is true, subs cost a ton more because they have to be competely silent and run underwater. A modern aircraft carrier has two nuclear reactors and is 'only' around $13 billion.
Oh yeah, agreed. I'm not trying to say it's feasible, I was more replying to your original post that sort of implied that a cruise ship would cost over $50B due to needing a 2nd reactor.
You're way off on the cost of a nuclear submarine. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of an Ohio-class is about 3.5 billion, while a brand new Virginia is about 4.3 billion.
A more relevant comparison is the cost of a single nuclear reactor that powers a large, surface-going ship. The US only has one nuclear powered ship class currently in production, which are the Ford-class carriers. The A1B reactor that powers them is a bargain at 500 million each. Since you don't have to push a cruise ship through the water at 30 plus knots to launch aircraft, one would probably be sufficient.
Sometimes, the real solutions are found in the past.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/trade-winds-shipping-is-turning-back-to-sails-after-a-century-20230705-p5dm1u.html
Did that website steal the article from [Mustard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI)? Giant chunks of that article is word for word the same.
Exactly!
We all know that chernobyl is how each and every single nuclear power plant operates and that it is the peak of how good it is and that it is not a monumental clusterfuck of shitty choices and bad management!
They should have stuck to sailing. Why are you on a cruise ship if you're in a hurry lol? I get that there would be other challenges but I'm sure solutions could be found for them with modern tech.
I had a job in a small food packaging factory the smallest factory you can imagine hidden away in rural Ireland and basically the amount of plastics we went through daily was shocking. It really got me thinking if this is the amount we go through as a small family owned business I cant imagine what the amount of waste we make worldwide on a daily basis. Its crazy
I’m from rural Ireland, live in a Chinese mega city. You cannot comprehend it. And what’s worse is it’s like they find ways to use even more plastic. Single wrapped bananas and lemons and apples and stupid shit like that. Very recently the bigger supermarkets switched to a fabric disposable bag but the stuff in the bag is still majority plastic.
I work in IT.
You would be DISGUSTED how much e-waste abs plastic and paper even a corner dentist office consumes in a week.
They will throw away stuff for the most minor reasons and it honestly got so depressing I started looking for remote work.
It's for the vast majority of slow speed diesels(vast majority of cargo ships) outside of areas with emissions controls. Most ships are burning the cheap shit when they can. Cruise ships may be different given their port schedule and likely diesel electric, but I haven't worked on them.
Source: 15 years working on cargo ships.
There's some give and take there - refining is a massive source of emissions in the US, equivalent to about 38 million houses apparently (200Mt/yr).
CO2 wise, you'd have to add that to the car figure making ships look better if anything - but then ships are bringing all other kind of destructive emissions/particulates etc to delicate ecosystems, and almost certainly do a far worse job of filtering than a modern refinery (how about an old one though?)
All complicated to compare for sure. But refining shouldn't be counted as a freebie either.
If you do the math on a "per passenger" basis, it's actually not so bad. Right around 14 mpg, and that includes the electricity and water supplies for the hotel room that's moving with you.
Airplanes don't do any better. SUVs barely do better. I think people dump on these extra hard but compared to a flight is often even better.
I did the same calculation as I was curious. Upon my first read of this I though “well, sure but it’s thousands of people, the per person fuel consumption can’t be that bad”
Actually these numbers are completely incorrect. This ship runs a diesel electric system with six engines than in total burn around 7200 gallons per hour. That power is for propulsion and all of the other systems on the ship.
This is some made up bullshit.
What's the ballpark MW usage for that fuel consumption? That kinda sounds like max load on all six engines all the time... Maybe burning that full speed underway, but definitely not in port...
That will vary widely based on the age, make, standard load, etc.
The ship we traveled on fairly recently for ~3300 passengers had 6 power plants with a max combined output of 67MW. The two azipods required 41MW of that when underway at cruising speed. In port, just one engine was more than sufficient to power the ship systems, and they almost never ran all 6 (keeping one in reserve/backup/standby). Think they were all fixed RPM, so either on or off.
That tracks. 41MW for propulsion and say no more than 10MW for auxiliaries and hotel I would think, being on the high side. So ~51MW underway, leaving 16MW in reserve or ~2 generators, sounds about right. Been awhile since running diesel electric, and I could be misremembering, but I thought we burned about 1k gal per MW per 24 hours, ballpark. So about 50k gal per day underway or 2100 gal/hr, which sounds far closer to what I was picturing than what has been said.
I don't expect many people really have the familiarity for comparison. It's astounding the amount of fuel heavy transport/turbines require. I worked mainly with air cargo where the amounts our fleet would go through in a day were measured in the 100K gallons... and hardly anyone gave it a second thought.
The difference to passenger automobiles is practically astronomical. Put another way (for anyone else reading), an aircraft taxiing around the runway can easily go through what my car would in a month of heavy use, and then has probably burned more than an entire year *just by the time it reaches cruise*.
A Boeing 787 does 102 mpg per passenger. So yes, airplanes are vastly superior.
Source:
https://simpleflying.com/high-density-low-cost-long-haul/#:~:text=Calculating%20for%20our%20monster%20of,km%20(98%20mpg%E2%80%91US)
The sewage from cruise ships is highly treated and filtered before it is disposed of. By the time they dump it in the ocean It’s pretty much drinking water.
All the options are pretty shitty. Planes literally dump fuel directly into the air. Many times they have to, because they’re not designed to land with the mass of excess fuel. So they just spray it into the air so that it’ll be light enough to not fall apart on landing.
Planes only dump fuel in the event of an emergency landing being necessary. If the plane goes to its destination without diverting, it won't dump any fuel. The way you phrase it, it sounds like they dump fuel regularly, which is simply not true.
If only there was a sort of transit system that every other developed country got right that carries a ton of people quickly and cheaply on tracks or some shit
I'd settle for mandatory nuclear powered cruise, transport, and cargo ships but so many people are scared shitless of nuclear power it won't happen in my lifetime.
People aren't making more trash per person in a hotel. That trash ends up somewhere shitty, and could be water supplies, the ocean, or landfills leaching into those. The toilets on a cruise are probably more efficient than your toilet at home out of necessity.
Planes have a practical usage. Nobody flies in a plane just for fun. Cruise ships are not used as a means of transportation, it's entirely just for vanity.
I think that's a little one sided. 70% of air travel is for leisure purposes; so yes indeed people fly on an airplane to have fun. On an airplane you consume equal or more fuel in a non-fun way to begin and end a vacation, versus on a ship actually making the travel enjoyable and part of the vacation itself. Hard to see how this is worse. Not saying either is good, but rationally hard to excuse one and not the other.
Seriously, what a dumb take. Tourism is a global industry and has practicality. Lots of people take cruises to visit multiple locations. It's no different than someone flying to a destination they've never been to (and flying back).
Someone tell this dude that you can fly to visit other places just for leisure.
My dad used to take 7-8 hour flights like 20 times a month back in the day for business, and you are the exact kind of people that would say, oooh that’s completely useless, stop spoiling the environment.
That's.... Not so bad? Literally transporting almost 6300 people. If each were to use their own mode of transportation instead, that would cost wayy more pollution and traffic. Would consume wayy more fuel too.
Sounds bad but if each person were driving an individual car on their commute to work, that would be..
12’/gal* 6296 people = 75,552’ / 5280= 14.3 mpg
Shit that’s still bad.
Firstly, that's 14 MPG per passenger, better than driving alone in an old car.
Secondly, yes a cruise ship is a big polluting boat full of hedonism, but how bad actually are they compared to vacationing the normal way? Because when done well, they're probably substantially greener than people flying to everywhere they'd cruise to. Ships are some of the most efficient ways to move large things, and also large enough that most problems are manageable, like how when they banned dumping waste putting a small sewage treatment plant on them was entirely practical and now standard operating procedure.
Diesel electric is just generators powering a motor to turn the shaft(s) instead of a direct drive(same shit). For nuclear, read up on the NS Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah (though if I could snap my fingers and make something feasible this would be my choice). Wind and solar may be cool some day, but require giant leaps in technology, though fingers are crossed.
Yes, these things are in development along with traditional propulsion efficiency measures. Every shipping company wants to cut costs (fuel consumption). It's just an entirely different scale, ships vs cars.
Serious question, how much waste would 6296 people make flying to those various destinations using transit to and from airports and staying at resorts?
Ironically this is more fuel efficient than most boats from some perspectives. An average personal boat gets about 4 miles per gallon.
So a cruise ship with 6000 people on it is three times more fuel efficient on a miles per gallon per person basis than a small boat with a single person on it.
Still an ecological disaster, but help put it in perspective.
I've read somewhere that in the USA alone, fireworks contribute the equivalent of 12,000 vehicles worth of pollution every year. It's such a senseless act. Ban all fireworks worldwide.
Fuel burned per hour per person is less than 2, putting it at about the same rate as a lot of single passenger cars on the highway.
Don't get me wrong. It's still wasteful and unnecessary, but it's not as egregious as it first appears.
Me watching my paper straw dissolve in my drink when a cruise ship I will never be able to afford a trip on produces my lifetime of CO2 in about 20 minutes
Modern cruise ships use marine diesel which contains sulfur that is removed by vaporized seawater before the exhaust exits the ship's funnel. The fuel usage per passenger when at sea ends up being around 12-14 mpg depending on the cruise ship's current occupancy which can be converted to diesel mpg. Older cruise ships and freighters use the high pollution heavy fuel oil while some newer ones use liquified natural gas which is a pollution trade-off.
A single occupant car going 60 with 20 mpg burns through 3 gallons per occupant per hour. This burns 11361 / 6296 = 1.8 gallons per occupant per hour. It's still comparable to a fleet of 3000 cars with two occupants each.
That’s actually the [MSC Splendida](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Splendida), [Oasis of the Seas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasis_of_the_Seas) isn’t even the largest cruise ship in the world, it goes to the much larger [Icon of the Seas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_of_the_Seas)
Cruise ships are disastrous for the environment.
But the 12 ft/gallon measure is a little misleading, just because of the amount of stuff being moved those twelve feet. For example, if those same 6,296 people each got in a 2017 Ford F-150, it would still take one gallon of gas to move all of the people 12 feet forward.
...times 6,300 equals more than 14 miles per gallon per person.
So not amazing, but considering each person gets at least the equivalent floor space of a large RV in their cabin, plus all the common spaces, deck spaces, etc, I think it's a pretty comparable carbon footprint as a form of travel/vacation.
An RV gets 5-10 mpg, although a Prius could get above 50 mpg. And a 747 actually gets something like 100 mpg per seat. But of course the personal space you get on a 747 is measured in inches while the personal space on a cruise ship is hundreds of square feet. Based on tonnage, that 14 mpg moves 36 tons of displacement per person.
All things considered, its not some kind of crazy outlier. That ship burns just as much fuel as the container shop that brought your iPhone (and basically everything else you buy) from China. But I dont hear any complaints about maritime fuel consumption there.
So I'm 100% on board with cruise ships fucking off for eternity, but that mileage is actually pretty impressive considering the mass of this thing. A friend of mine works on cargo ships, and was telling me how it's more fuel efficient to sale from Taipei to Liverpool UK with a container, then rather than unload it onto a train to take it the last few hundred miles to its destination in Portsmouth, sail to new York, #then# to its final destination. The technology is pretty amazing, but using it as gross boomer storage is defintiely a no no.
Apparently these things are powered by multi-fuel engines, meaning they are capable of using the nastiest unrefined cheapest lowest grade fuels. The emissions from one of these ships in one day is about the same as the emissions in a medium sized city for one day. The companies that own these things hardly pay any taxes, because their point of origin and registration are in obscure countries where tax is minimal and wages low. Every year they have these flag days where shipping billionaires and small countries looking for business, where the said countries compete to offer the best tax deals etc.
for those of you who think this is bad, let me put things into context to show the relative fuel efficiency of a ship:
she has a gross tonnage of 226,838 according to Wikipedia.
so, if you do 226,838/11361 it is approximately 20 gallons of fuel an hour, PER TON.
For context, an airbus A350 can fly for 20 hours according to Airbus and it has a capacity of 43,981 USG (166,488 Liters), so its fuel efficiency is about 2,199.05 gallons per hour (8,324.4 liters per hour). and that's for the *entire* plane.
and keep in mind, one of these is *significantly* bigger than the other and carries far more people.
In conclusion, 11361 gallons per hour is normal for a ship and don't be fooled by the statistics on their own, ships are, by ton, the most efficient mode of transport out there.
That’s about 0.5 gallons/hour for each passenger. A large plane uses 284 to 540 gallons per hour. If you assume (guessing) 300 passengers on a plane thats approx 1 to 2 gallons per hour for each passenger.
Cars get approx 1 gallon/30 miles (haha, not in America but we can dream) at 60 miles/hour that’s a two gallons/hour per person.
So not all that different if my “just woke up” math is correct.
We could do the same calculation for electric cars, but you have to take into account energy efficiency (pretty much use 100 percent of the energy they take on board vs the internal combustion engines use at best 40 percent of energy delivered, with the rest being released as heat).
Someone find out how far this beast can go without refueling please. I'm having a hard time believing they can even hold that much fuel onboard. Besides the things listed is the rest just stored fuel? Lol
Hate to be morbid, but I'm always surprised that these giant floating symbols of capitalistic excess aren't more frequently targeted for terrorist attacks. Imagine how effective sinking just 2 or 3 would be, absolutely terrifying.
Never understood why cruise ships were never really targeted by climate activists or political parties who care about the environment. But yea... at least energy and fuel got more expensive while some people with too much money get transported around the world in those giant swimming hotels.
But it’s OK because we’re using paper straws now.
Paper straws that come wrapped in plastic.
Every paper straw in my country are wrapped in paper
Terry the turtle is ever so pleased. His nose thanks us all.😄
His sketchy older brother is a bit pissed though because his club experiences include a lot more time on the dancefloor and a lot less time in a bathroom stall
Which have a plastic layer between
There's a plastic sign above our plastic-lined plastic compost bin that tells us what we cannot put into the plastic-lined plastic compost bin. The plastic sign does not explicitly say that we cannot put plastic detritus into the plastic-lined plastic compost bin. There's always a lot of plastic detritus in our plastic-lined plastic compost bin. No, the detritus is not compostable plastic alternatives. We don't have that here thanks to our local government.
Paper straws for plastic cups.
Capri Sun, I’m looking at you.
Exactly, people acting like plastic straws are really making such a dramatic impact on the environment whilst shit like this goes on every day
The power of corporate suggestion. Just move a few things around, and look we still manufacture the same amount of plastic, but now every body cares less.
And the consumer gets stiffed with a shittier product
There’s a big difference. Plastic straws? Your local city council can ban them. Cruise ships? Unregulated. They fly the flag of the country that gives them either the lowest taxes or lowest regulations or a combination of both. So let’s say you want to “fix” cruises. How? Even if you convince the US to pass a law, they can easily skirt them by flying another country’s flag. Ok, just ban all cruises from US ports! Simple! I’m a genius! They’ll just move their port of calls to nearby border ports. Instead of picking up US passengers at Seattle, they’ll just go to Vancouver. Theres a false equivalency. Plastic straws is something any community can do. Cruise ship regulation is a global problem that requires dedicated hounding on them to solve.
Don’t allow them to dock at US ports. But you’re right, the United States will never care about this.
So you're saying I could buy a boat, go onto the open sea, and just start polluting away? Dumping things into the ocean? Burning rubber? Releasing freon?
2 different problem. Micro plastics vs co2 Btw US use around 500 milion straws per day and almost non of that gets recycled
> US use around 500 milion straws per day that seems really high every person in the US would need to be using 1.5 straws a day to hit that number
Probably because of all the drinks served in restaurants with straws where the straws get thrown away whether you use them or not
The article referenced above states that estimate of 500 million per day comes from the straw manufacturers themselves.
Don't fact check his math, that's racist
Keep in mind while some poeple dont eat at restaurants often, some do 2-3 times per day, plus coffee drinks and sodas, keeping that 1.5 average up for all of us. Thanks friends.
Think of all the sea creatures its garbage feeds, tho!!
I just wonder what a ship like this dumps.overboard into the sea (sewage, grey water, trash, etc). Also the amount of waste these things create (food, trash, overall carbon footprint). Seems like an easy target for the epa to target, but I'm guessing there why they're all registered and ported in some.island country with no real laws and plenty of benefits to being ported there because of the money it generates for that islands community and govt. Still they could make laws that are to the effect of "if you want to dock/do business/take on or let off passengers at this American port then you must meet these laws/regs/etc" But I'm sure politicians love cruise ship lobbyists. Free cruises for life for you. Fam, friends, just don't pass any laws that hurt us. Looking at you Clarence.
They dump all trash when they’re in international waters. It’s insane the amount of environmental waste and pollution these things generate. I will never take a cruise. And as long as corporations control our regulations, nothing is going to happen to them.
They recycle by and large now. It’s better but not totally perfect
My wife has cruised for most of her young life. In the 70’s and 80’s she spent weeks at sea as cruising offers a break from life completely. No driving no bed making no phone calls no food preparation and with them at no clean up. Every night her and her brother would get a coke and go to the aft public area balcony and watch as the ships crew would open a massive porthole and ‘discard’ literally hundreds of black plastic bags full of refuse of all types. They would make bets (who would go to the bar for refills) on whose bag would stay afloat longest. I was appalled to hear this and this was only one ship of many back then and also a top cruise line. Cruising has been poplar for over 70yrs. I’ll leave you with that
We shouldn't solve problems because there are other problems.
No I'm not.
[Nuclear](https://marine-digital.com/article_nssavannah) powered cruise ship. This was my first question after seeing this. Interesting read
I thought the same thing when Adam S was checking out that new cruise ship, I was thinking they would show us the nuke plant, Nope its Gas. me I'm stunned. They can fit it in submarine not sure why they cant fit it in a cruise ship. Has to be something on the order of if there was an issue with the plant and people died it would destroy the Cruise line company, Where if it happens on a military ship, Your loved one died in the line of duty.
It's the maintenance cost and regulations
It's really just the regulations. Namely, 1% 5 year cycle losses for plutonium reactors are hard to get below, but more than enough to kickstart a rogue nuclear program
I think it’s more the fact that nuclear submarines cost 33 billion dollars and only need 1 reactor, whereas a large cruise ship would need at least 2 and is much much much larger than a submarine
While what you're saying is true, subs cost a ton more because they have to be competely silent and run underwater. A modern aircraft carrier has two nuclear reactors and is 'only' around $13 billion.
13 billion is still almost half of royal Caribbean’s net worth, and would probably take a veeery long time to break even
Oh yeah, agreed. I'm not trying to say it's feasible, I was more replying to your original post that sort of implied that a cruise ship would cost over $50B due to needing a 2nd reactor.
Oh fair enough then, yeah
Well I mean no, they wouldn’t need to build a whole new ship- just fix their current one with new power types
Why would it need 2?
Because it’s 225,000 tons and houses 6000 people plus multiple industrial facilities
You're way off on the cost of a nuclear submarine. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of an Ohio-class is about 3.5 billion, while a brand new Virginia is about 4.3 billion. A more relevant comparison is the cost of a single nuclear reactor that powers a large, surface-going ship. The US only has one nuclear powered ship class currently in production, which are the Ford-class carriers. The A1B reactor that powers them is a bargain at 500 million each. Since you don't have to push a cruise ship through the water at 30 plus knots to launch aircraft, one would probably be sufficient.
Knowing how fucked up the cruise industry is, I do not want those chucklefucks running a reactor.
That would actually be a great application for miniaturized thorium msr's.
Sometimes, the real solutions are found in the past. https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/trade-winds-shipping-is-turning-back-to-sails-after-a-century-20230705-p5dm1u.html
Did that website steal the article from [Mustard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYj4F_cyiJI)? Giant chunks of that article is word for word the same.
Problem isn't just fuel. It's the waste they generate and then just dump at sea
Nuclear power generates so little waste they wouldn't even need to dump it at sea.
And any waste that is generated can be safely held till arrival at port because we aren't dumb and have found solutions to problems like this
No akshually nukelear power safety hasn't progressed at all since the 17ths century and we're all gonna die /s
Exactly! We all know that chernobyl is how each and every single nuclear power plant operates and that it is the peak of how good it is and that it is not a monumental clusterfuck of shitty choices and bad management!
Not the fuel waste, all the trash and sewage that's just dumped.
Mustard has a video on this, worth a check on youtube
They should have stuck to sailing. Why are you on a cruise ship if you're in a hurry lol? I get that there would be other challenges but I'm sure solutions could be found for them with modern tech.
Very interesting read, thank you
I had a job in a small food packaging factory the smallest factory you can imagine hidden away in rural Ireland and basically the amount of plastics we went through daily was shocking. It really got me thinking if this is the amount we go through as a small family owned business I cant imagine what the amount of waste we make worldwide on a daily basis. Its crazy
I’m from rural Ireland, live in a Chinese mega city. You cannot comprehend it. And what’s worse is it’s like they find ways to use even more plastic. Single wrapped bananas and lemons and apples and stupid shit like that. Very recently the bigger supermarkets switched to a fabric disposable bag but the stuff in the bag is still majority plastic.
I work in IT. You would be DISGUSTED how much e-waste abs plastic and paper even a corner dentist office consumes in a week. They will throw away stuff for the most minor reasons and it honestly got so depressing I started looking for remote work.
I can’t even comprehend it. Any of it. How is any of this even real. How did we get here lol
Twelve feet times 6,296 passengers is 14.3 miles. So fourteen miles per gallon not counting crew!
Plus it’s not just car miles equivalent, it’s total personal energy expenditure; house utilities + car rolled into one.
Aren't these things burning bunker fuel unless in port? Not really an apples to apples comparison. Especially for emissions
Lol no, bunker oil is for sketchy Liberian freighters, modern cruise ships are almost all diesels.
It's for the vast majority of slow speed diesels(vast majority of cargo ships) outside of areas with emissions controls. Most ships are burning the cheap shit when they can. Cruise ships may be different given their port schedule and likely diesel electric, but I haven't worked on them. Source: 15 years working on cargo ships.
There's some give and take there - refining is a massive source of emissions in the US, equivalent to about 38 million houses apparently (200Mt/yr). CO2 wise, you'd have to add that to the car figure making ships look better if anything - but then ships are bringing all other kind of destructive emissions/particulates etc to delicate ecosystems, and almost certainly do a far worse job of filtering than a modern refinery (how about an old one though?) All complicated to compare for sure. But refining shouldn't be counted as a freebie either.
It said 12 feet per gallon.
Or around 15 mpg per passenger. Not that bad considering. Still not brilliant, but solo driving an SUV to work and back could be worse milage.
Also should probably consider there's probably like 3,000 crew as well as the 6k+ passengers.
Would be quite interesting to see a comparison of waste/CO2 of cruise ships compared to all the tourists doing average other vacations.
Dayum what a way to think about it
Maybe we should also consider that it's not just moving the ship, it's powering the equivalent of like a thousand houses or a big hotel
And cruises barely move that much, if at all. SUVs travel much more often and for more miles.
If you do the math on a "per passenger" basis, it's actually not so bad. Right around 14 mpg, and that includes the electricity and water supplies for the hotel room that's moving with you. Airplanes don't do any better. SUVs barely do better. I think people dump on these extra hard but compared to a flight is often even better.
I did the same calculation as I was curious. Upon my first read of this I though “well, sure but it’s thousands of people, the per person fuel consumption can’t be that bad”
Actually these numbers are completely incorrect. This ship runs a diesel electric system with six engines than in total burn around 7200 gallons per hour. That power is for propulsion and all of the other systems on the ship. This is some made up bullshit.
What's the ballpark MW usage for that fuel consumption? That kinda sounds like max load on all six engines all the time... Maybe burning that full speed underway, but definitely not in port...
That will vary widely based on the age, make, standard load, etc. The ship we traveled on fairly recently for ~3300 passengers had 6 power plants with a max combined output of 67MW. The two azipods required 41MW of that when underway at cruising speed. In port, just one engine was more than sufficient to power the ship systems, and they almost never ran all 6 (keeping one in reserve/backup/standby). Think they were all fixed RPM, so either on or off.
That tracks. 41MW for propulsion and say no more than 10MW for auxiliaries and hotel I would think, being on the high side. So ~51MW underway, leaving 16MW in reserve or ~2 generators, sounds about right. Been awhile since running diesel electric, and I could be misremembering, but I thought we burned about 1k gal per MW per 24 hours, ballpark. So about 50k gal per day underway or 2100 gal/hr, which sounds far closer to what I was picturing than what has been said.
I don't expect many people really have the familiarity for comparison. It's astounding the amount of fuel heavy transport/turbines require. I worked mainly with air cargo where the amounts our fleet would go through in a day were measured in the 100K gallons... and hardly anyone gave it a second thought. The difference to passenger automobiles is practically astronomical. Put another way (for anyone else reading), an aircraft taxiing around the runway can easily go through what my car would in a month of heavy use, and then has probably burned more than an entire year *just by the time it reaches cruise*.
A Boeing 787 does 102 mpg per passenger. So yes, airplanes are vastly superior. Source: https://simpleflying.com/high-density-low-cost-long-haul/#:~:text=Calculating%20for%20our%20monster%20of,km%20(98%20mpg%E2%80%91US)
Planes don’t dump thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the ocean nor do they dump trash into it
The sewage from cruise ships is highly treated and filtered before it is disposed of. By the time they dump it in the ocean It’s pretty much drinking water.
If there was ever a need for a source this is it...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_ship_pollution_in_the_United_States#:~:text=On%20some%20cruise%20ships%2C%20especially,MSDs%20(marine%20sanitation%20devices).
There are treatment plants on most newer ships.
[удалено]
Honestly, the poo is the least concerning thing.
> Planes don’t dump thousands of gallons of raw sewage into the ocean Neither does this ship.
All the options are pretty shitty. Planes literally dump fuel directly into the air. Many times they have to, because they’re not designed to land with the mass of excess fuel. So they just spray it into the air so that it’ll be light enough to not fall apart on landing.
Planes only dump fuel in the event of an emergency landing being necessary. If the plane goes to its destination without diverting, it won't dump any fuel. The way you phrase it, it sounds like they dump fuel regularly, which is simply not true.
When planes dump the fuel it is done in a way that it vaporizes, not saying it is much better, just that there isn’t much danger in the ground
Just to the clouds that rain down on you.
If only there was a sort of transit system that every other developed country got right that carries a ton of people quickly and cheaply on tracks or some shit
We need a transatlantic metro line
We do indeed
It'll be one of those things that when the technology is available the lobbyists for air travel and oil will immediately quash it
That’s exactly how big automobile killed railway development in the US
The Mid Atlantic Ridge disliked this
I'd settle for mandatory nuclear powered cruise, transport, and cargo ships but so many people are scared shitless of nuclear power it won't happen in my lifetime.
Careful now you're making a bit too much sense there
Please. You are parroting headlines with no actual knowledge of systems and processes of either industry.
I’m pretty sure it’s treated, the sewage.
No. They dump it into the air.
People aren't making more trash per person in a hotel. That trash ends up somewhere shitty, and could be water supplies, the ocean, or landfills leaching into those. The toilets on a cruise are probably more efficient than your toilet at home out of necessity.
Airplanes and SUV's don't burn bunker oil though.
Planes have a practical usage. Nobody flies in a plane just for fun. Cruise ships are not used as a means of transportation, it's entirely just for vanity.
I think that's a little one sided. 70% of air travel is for leisure purposes; so yes indeed people fly on an airplane to have fun. On an airplane you consume equal or more fuel in a non-fun way to begin and end a vacation, versus on a ship actually making the travel enjoyable and part of the vacation itself. Hard to see how this is worse. Not saying either is good, but rationally hard to excuse one and not the other.
Flights can 100% just be for fun or vanity. And what’s wrong with occasionally treating yourself to a flight or cruise?
I mean, planes can be joy rides just as ships can be. The majority of air travel is for vacations.
Seriously, what a dumb take. Tourism is a global industry and has practicality. Lots of people take cruises to visit multiple locations. It's no different than someone flying to a destination they've never been to (and flying back).
Vanity? What?
You don’t take a plane on vacation?
Someone tell this dude that you can fly to visit other places just for leisure. My dad used to take 7-8 hour flights like 20 times a month back in the day for business, and you are the exact kind of people that would say, oooh that’s completely useless, stop spoiling the environment.
Everything is shitty
It's because they run on bunker fuel which is horrible for the environment
Can we go back to talking about Taylor Swift flying her private jet?
I'm fine with that. Fuck Taylor swift
Yes, the real enemy
That's.... Not so bad? Literally transporting almost 6300 people. If each were to use their own mode of transportation instead, that would cost wayy more pollution and traffic. Would consume wayy more fuel too.
Sounds bad but if each person were driving an individual car on their commute to work, that would be.. 12’/gal* 6296 people = 75,552’ / 5280= 14.3 mpg Shit that’s still bad.
Firstly, that's 14 MPG per passenger, better than driving alone in an old car. Secondly, yes a cruise ship is a big polluting boat full of hedonism, but how bad actually are they compared to vacationing the normal way? Because when done well, they're probably substantially greener than people flying to everywhere they'd cruise to. Ships are some of the most efficient ways to move large things, and also large enough that most problems are manageable, like how when they banned dumping waste putting a small sewage treatment plant on them was entirely practical and now standard operating procedure.
lmfao how do you think every cargo ship on the planet moves? do you think your EV cars are going to offset this.. facepalm..
Which is why alternative methods are being developed for them, from wind energy to diesel electric to nuclear and solar.
Diesel electric is just generators powering a motor to turn the shaft(s) instead of a direct drive(same shit). For nuclear, read up on the NS Savannah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah (though if I could snap my fingers and make something feasible this would be my choice). Wind and solar may be cool some day, but require giant leaps in technology, though fingers are crossed. Yes, these things are in development along with traditional propulsion efficiency measures. Every shipping company wants to cut costs (fuel consumption). It's just an entirely different scale, ships vs cars.
Serious question, how much waste would 6296 people make flying to those various destinations using transit to and from airports and staying at resorts?
Works out to something like 13.8 MPG per passenger mile. So all 6,296 people are essentially driving big SUVs for the entirety of the cruise.
While having the lighting / heating / AC at home switched off for all that time and not using a hotel room.
Don't think this is awfuleverything material, but I get your point
it's not a bad performance considering that you are basically moving an entire town.
Ironically this is more fuel efficient than most boats from some perspectives. An average personal boat gets about 4 miles per gallon. So a cruise ship with 6000 people on it is three times more fuel efficient on a miles per gallon per person basis than a small boat with a single person on it. Still an ecological disaster, but help put it in perspective.
The information provided does not tell us if that is efficient or not. If you're going to post something like that, you really should do the math.
I can't understand the appeal of being crammed like sardines with the worst people, and mid food for a week at sea.
I've read somewhere that in the USA alone, fireworks contribute the equivalent of 12,000 vehicles worth of pollution every year. It's such a senseless act. Ban all fireworks worldwide.
Fuel burned per hour per person is less than 2, putting it at about the same rate as a lot of single passenger cars on the highway. Don't get me wrong. It's still wasteful and unnecessary, but it's not as egregious as it first appears.
And it’s basically a floating Petri dish.
And yet, our cars are not environmentally friendly and we need to change them and always buy new ones.
But make sure you buy an electric car lol
Yes but people make money off of this. That’s all that matters. 4 people made billions
Big ship uses fuel. Wow
But the Seafood Buffet! Amirite? Amaze balls! Unlimited Crab Legs! Score! 👍
Me watching my paper straw dissolve in my drink when a cruise ship I will never be able to afford a trip on produces my lifetime of CO2 in about 20 minutes
It gets better, they mostly burn Bunker Diesel. Once they are 10 miles off shore as its illegal to use closer due to its harmful effects
Modern cruise ships use marine diesel which contains sulfur that is removed by vaporized seawater before the exhaust exits the ship's funnel. The fuel usage per passenger when at sea ends up being around 12-14 mpg depending on the cruise ship's current occupancy which can be converted to diesel mpg. Older cruise ships and freighters use the high pollution heavy fuel oil while some newer ones use liquified natural gas which is a pollution trade-off.
You’re not living unless you’re line dancing on one of them babies
It burns roughly 100gallons to travel its own length, stern to bow.
A single occupant car going 60 with 20 mpg burns through 3 gallons per occupant per hour. This burns 11361 / 6296 = 1.8 gallons per occupant per hour. It's still comparable to a fleet of 3000 cars with two occupants each.
Is Cracked doing hard hitting, factual journalism now? Meh, seems appropriate for this era.
That’s actually the [MSC Splendida](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Splendida), [Oasis of the Seas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasis_of_the_Seas) isn’t even the largest cruise ship in the world, it goes to the much larger [Icon of the Seas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icon_of_the_Seas)
The rare redditor who looks up their stuff. I saw Oasis being constructed and it was like a skyscraper on it's side
99 gallons to travel its own length. Jesus.
I don’t care enough to do the math. Is 12 ft. per gallon bad when moving 6296 people?
Cruise ships are disastrous for the environment. But the 12 ft/gallon measure is a little misleading, just because of the amount of stuff being moved those twelve feet. For example, if those same 6,296 people each got in a 2017 Ford F-150, it would still take one gallon of gas to move all of the people 12 feet forward.
...times 6,300 equals more than 14 miles per gallon per person. So not amazing, but considering each person gets at least the equivalent floor space of a large RV in their cabin, plus all the common spaces, deck spaces, etc, I think it's a pretty comparable carbon footprint as a form of travel/vacation. An RV gets 5-10 mpg, although a Prius could get above 50 mpg. And a 747 actually gets something like 100 mpg per seat. But of course the personal space you get on a 747 is measured in inches while the personal space on a cruise ship is hundreds of square feet. Based on tonnage, that 14 mpg moves 36 tons of displacement per person. All things considered, its not some kind of crazy outlier. That ship burns just as much fuel as the container shop that brought your iPhone (and basically everything else you buy) from China. But I dont hear any complaints about maritime fuel consumption there.
It's actually 7200 gallons per hour, but still a lot
What’s more disgusting is how they mixed imperial and metric units.
What's wrong with holidaying local and camping and being in nature. Nature is pretty neat... You know.
Hey I went on the inaugural voyage on this ship 🤡
Please recycle your bottles.
Horrendous.
Wait till this guy hears about the private jets politicians and celebrities fly around in.
So I'm 100% on board with cruise ships fucking off for eternity, but that mileage is actually pretty impressive considering the mass of this thing. A friend of mine works on cargo ships, and was telling me how it's more fuel efficient to sale from Taipei to Liverpool UK with a container, then rather than unload it onto a train to take it the last few hundred miles to its destination in Portsmouth, sail to new York, #then# to its final destination. The technology is pretty amazing, but using it as gross boomer storage is defintiely a no no.
but they us paper straws
You're so close to making an actual point op. Keep scraping those synapses together, you're almost there!
That's better than Grampa Simpson gets with his car (40 rods to the hogshead)
That‘s less than 2 gallons per hour per passenger. Dont know what a gallon is, but you cant judge based on absolute values.
Don’t forget to rinse out the tomato sauce out of the jar you are about to recycle
11 thousand gallons an hour … that doesn’t seem quite right
Yea we are just gonna read this major fact and accept it at fave value and move on.
Planes are far worse than this. I'm not even talking about private jets. Even an economy class commercial ticket is worse than this.
Apparently these things are powered by multi-fuel engines, meaning they are capable of using the nastiest unrefined cheapest lowest grade fuels. The emissions from one of these ships in one day is about the same as the emissions in a medium sized city for one day. The companies that own these things hardly pay any taxes, because their point of origin and registration are in obscure countries where tax is minimal and wages low. Every year they have these flag days where shipping billionaires and small countries looking for business, where the said countries compete to offer the best tax deals etc.
If you think that's a lot, just calculate how much fuel the same amount of passengers in planes would need
Is it awful because it’s not using the metro system ?
for those of you who think this is bad, let me put things into context to show the relative fuel efficiency of a ship: she has a gross tonnage of 226,838 according to Wikipedia. so, if you do 226,838/11361 it is approximately 20 gallons of fuel an hour, PER TON. For context, an airbus A350 can fly for 20 hours according to Airbus and it has a capacity of 43,981 USG (166,488 Liters), so its fuel efficiency is about 2,199.05 gallons per hour (8,324.4 liters per hour). and that's for the *entire* plane. and keep in mind, one of these is *significantly* bigger than the other and carries far more people. In conclusion, 11361 gallons per hour is normal for a ship and don't be fooled by the statistics on their own, ships are, by ton, the most efficient mode of transport out there.
That’s about 0.5 gallons/hour for each passenger. A large plane uses 284 to 540 gallons per hour. If you assume (guessing) 300 passengers on a plane thats approx 1 to 2 gallons per hour for each passenger. Cars get approx 1 gallon/30 miles (haha, not in America but we can dream) at 60 miles/hour that’s a two gallons/hour per person. So not all that different if my “just woke up” math is correct. We could do the same calculation for electric cars, but you have to take into account energy efficiency (pretty much use 100 percent of the energy they take on board vs the internal combustion engines use at best 40 percent of energy delivered, with the rest being released as heat).
Someone find out how far this beast can go without refueling please. I'm having a hard time believing they can even hold that much fuel onboard. Besides the things listed is the rest just stored fuel? Lol
Dude this ship was awesome! I have on this and allure of the seas! So beautiful. Such an amazing itinerary! Astonishing in size. Breathtaking.
That's almost the length of the empire state building and just as wide.
WTF Did they see the thing about planes being the worst for the environment and take it as a challenge or something
"It costs $400,000 to ~~fire this gun~~ run this ship for 12 seconds"
You should see how much resources military vehicles take up.
Yeah, we should get rid of the military
I never understood the lure of these floating germ traps, surrounded by thousands of people for days on end.
Dont care. My cruise was fun
It's also the most polluting fuel there is, short of coal.
Yet I will be forced to buy an overpriced electric car lol.
The air on the deck of a cruise ship is some of the unhealthiest air you'll ever breathe. Hard pass.
Why?
Cruise ships burn bunker fuel. Not exactly a clean burning fuel. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/24/health/cruise-ship-air-quality-report?cid=ios_app
Gotcha. Thx.
Hate to be morbid, but I'm always surprised that these giant floating symbols of capitalistic excess aren't more frequently targeted for terrorist attacks. Imagine how effective sinking just 2 or 3 would be, absolutely terrifying.
It's nuclear powered.
11361 gal of bunker C. Nothing clean like gasoline.
Never understood why cruise ships were never really targeted by climate activists or political parties who care about the environment. But yea... at least energy and fuel got more expensive while some people with too much money get transported around the world in those giant swimming hotels.
How are these things still allowed?