How Do Cruise Ships Handle Sewage
Posted February 24 2006.
How do cruise ships handle sewage. Federal law requires that cruise ships only dump treated wastewater if they are within three nautical miles of shore. Cruise ships do not as a matter of normal practice discharge sewage into the ocean. When a toilet is flushed on a cruise ship the sewage travels to the onboard treatment plant.
This water is pumped into the sea. The ships waste incineration room is manned twenty four hours a day by crew members who differentiate glass based on its color. Even with aeration systems designed to reduce the amount of water coming out of bathroom taps and shower heads the average ship will.
As the Palm Beach Post points out cruise ships alone dumped more than one. Green brown and white. The solids are then dried and the liquid from this process is added to the liquid waste stream.
Here the waste is filtered before it enters an aeration chamber. Its now positioned near San Franciscos Hunters Point. Plastic goes through this massive compactor.
But beyond that point its essentially a. All the small glass pieces are stored in bins until the ship docks. The best of the new ships process the sewage onboard to the point where the liquids are clean enough to drink as they do on the International Space Station although on ships the drinkable-clean reprocessed water is discharged back into the ocean.
Cruise ships like Symphony have a designated waste and recycling center. The aeration chamber cleans the waste. The solid waste is seperated from the Liquid waste.
