Editorial: Cruise ship industry must clean up its act

Tuesday, Dec. 7, 1999 | 9:33 a.m.

States and federal authorities have grown increasingly concerned about the wastes that cruise ships are dumping into U.S. coastal waters. Earlier this year Royal Caribbean agreed to pay an $18 million fine for discharging oil and hazardous chemicals in coastal waters, including a $6.5 million fine for dumping pollutants in Alaska alone. Even in Juneau, Alaska, which has seen its economy thrive from the cruise ships that stop there, a backlash has developed. Nearly 70 percent of its residents passed a referendum in October to impose a $5 tax on every passenger aboard a cruise ship that stops in Juneau.

As the cruise ships make their way through Alaska's Inside Passage, they can dump their raw sewage and garbage as long as it is more than three miles from land, which is just outside the territorial waters of the United States where tougher restrictions apply. Bowing to public pressure, the industry pledged on Friday it will no longer dump untreated garbage in the Inside Passage. While this is a step in the right direction, Congress should do more.

Ironically, as the New York Times noted in a Nov. 29 story, it is the Alaska congressional delegation that has done the bidding of the industry, blocking attempts to place strict antipollution standards for these ships. It is time, though, for Congress to reconsider adopting tougher restrictions that would ensure cruise ships don't dump wastes that pollute our coastal waters.