Environmental Impact of Cruise Holidays

A LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
OF CRUISE HOLIDAYS
• Richard Farr and Christine Hall
• Off-Campus Division
• University of Bolton capacify.wordpress.com

• The cruise industry: some numbers
• Issues and concerns
• Focus on greenhouse gases
• Life Cycle Assessment
• The cruise holiday carbon calculator
• Results obtained
• Concluding remarks
CONTENTS
capacify.wordpress.com

Tax paid on profits
AN INDUSTRY, IN NUMBERS
(WTTC, 2013)
(Leonhardt, 2011; Frantz, 1999)
(statistica.com, 2015)
Cruise ships, worldwide
Passenger capacity
Industry value, 2013
Passengers carried, 2012
Growth

A GROWING INDUSTRY
(cruisemarketwatch.com,
2014)

AN INDUSTRY WITH A
POOR REPUTATION

SMOKE IS NOT
AN INDICATOR
OF CLIMATE
CHANGE
Our interest was in
greenhouse gases;
carbon dioxide and
other substances that
pose a hazard to our
common future.

“Climate change is occurring, is caused
largely by human activities, and poses
significant risks for a broad range of human
and natural systems.”
– National Resource Council (2010: 2)
CLIMATE CHANGE…

A “cradle-to-grave” approach for
assessing industrial systems,
beginning with the gathering of
raw materials and ending at the
point when all materials are
returned to the earth.
LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT
– Environmental Protection Agency (1993)

LIFE CYCLE
ASSESSMENT
Raw materials acquisition
Manufacture (shipbuilding)
Use phase
End-of-life
Atmospheric
emissions
Waterborne
wastes
Co-products
Solid wastes
Other
releases
(Adapted from EPA, 1993)
Materials
Energy

RAW MATERIALS
• Building a cruise ship requires up to 100,000 tonnes
of materials; mostly steel.
• Each material obtained has “carbon consequences”.
• Substantial amounts of material can be reclaimed at
the end-of-life, at which point the ship earns a
‘discount’.

SHIPBUILDING
• No clear figures for emissions and energy
expenditure during shipbuilding are available in the
public domain.
• Shipbuilders do have detailed information on this,
and an excellent tool for measuring their
performance: the Shipyard Greenhouse Gas
Emissions Inventory Tool (EPA, 2014)
• A workaround: the DEFRA (2012) Conversion
Factors give a blanket figure for “other transport
equipment” including ships at 0.76kg CO2e per
pound spent.

USE PHASE
• Fuel usage is the “big
problem” – and heavy fuel
oil (HFO) is exceptionally
dirty.
• Fuel consumption: around
127 tonnes per day.
• DEFRA (2012) quotes
3766.5 kg CO2e per tonne
for HFO.
• Add in connecting flights,
food and drink, excursions,
etc.

SHIP BREAKING…
Recycled Gross Tonnage
in 2010 (Taylan, 2013)

“CRUISE HOLIDAY
CARBON CALCULATOR”
A simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

USE OF THE MODEL
• DEFRA’s (2012) Conversion factors were used to
quantify the greenhouse gases associated with the
construction of a ship, its operations and end-of-life.
• The paper presents a fictional cruise holiday,
featuring a return flight from London to Barcelona,
and a week-long cruise of the Mediterranean,
including excursions and food and drink consumed
while aboard.
• This was compared with a week-long hotel holiday
in Barcelona, staying in an Accor Group hotel for
which environmental performance data were
available.

One passenger’s share of…
kg CO2e
Ship materials & construction process
87.56
Fuel usage
1,116.14
Excursion travel
10.92
Food and beverages
84.00
Air travel to and from port of embarkation
39.10
Reclaimed ship materials at end-of-life
-24.03
Total contribution to climate change
1313.69
RESULTS OBTAINED
(About four times the CO2e of a comparable hotel-based holiday.)

CONCLUDING
REMARKS
• A massive carbon footprint.
• Cruise passengers aren’t
paying anything close to the
real cost of their holiday –
which means that the rest of us
are.
• Will cruising one day be no
more acceptable than wearing
a fur coat?
(AmericanVogue,October1966)

THANK YOU
Richard Farr
Senior Lecturer (Partnerships)
Off Campus Division
University of Bolton
+44 (0)1204 903631
r.farr@bolton.ac.uk
Capacify, the Sustainable Supply Chain blog:
http://capacify.wordpress.com
Twitter: @Capacified

Cruise Market Watch (2015) Growth of the Cruise Line Industry, available
from: http://www.cruisemarketwatch.com/growth/
DEFRA (2012) 2012 Greenhouse Gas Conversion Factors for Company
Reporting, available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2012-
greenhouse-gas-conversion-factors-for-company-reporting
Environmental Protection Agency (1993) Life Cycle Assessment: Inventory
Guidelines and Principles, EPA/600/R-92/245, Cincinnati, Ohio: Office of
Research and Development.
Environmental Protection Agency (2014) Shipbuilding Greenhouse Gas
(GHG) Emission Inventory Tool Version 2.1, available from:
http://www.epa.gov/sectors/publications/pubsector.html
Frantz, D. (1999) Soverign Islands: A special report; Cruise Lines Reap Profit
From Favors in Law, New York Times, 19th February 1999
REFERENCES

Leonhardt, D. (2011) The Paradox of Corporate Taxes, New York Times, 1st
Feb 2011
Leslie, D. (2012) Responsible Tourism: Concepts, Theory and Practice,
Wallingford: CABI
National Research Council (2010) Advancing the Science of Climate Change,
Washington DC: The National Academies Press
Statistica.com (2015) Forecast of passenger capacity of the cruise industry
worldwide in 2015, by cruise line, available from:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/269134/passenger-capacity-of-the-cruise-
industry-worldwide-by-cruise-line/
Taylan, M. (2013) An Insight into Ship Recycling: Facts and Figures, in
Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium of Maritime Safety, Security
& Environmental Protection, Athens, 30th – 31st May 2013
REFERENCES

WTTC (2013) President and CEO of WTTC urges the cruise industry to speak
with ‘One Voice’ to Governments around the world, WTTC News and Media,
12th March, available from: http://www.wttc.org/news-media/news-
archive/2013/president-ceo-wttc-urges-cruise-industry-speak-one-voice-
governm/
REFERENCES

In our earlier Chios study we had discovered that Greek
people were concerned about pollution of the sea, being affected by
the 2007 sinking of the MS Sea Diamond near Santorini, where
leaking oil wrecked their beaches… but what about climate change?
Ward (2010) in the Berlitz Guide to Cruising quoted 960kg CO2 per
week. (For comparison, UK norm is 152kg.) Was this accurate?
Slide 5: The Shields cartoon protests against fecal contamination
and illegal dumping, and shows a plume of black smoke… but says
nothing about climate change (or a number of other issues of
concern).
Slide 6: Those “financial issues” include the question of who pays for
the services that cruise ships depend upon, such as the Coast
Guard – bearing in mind only around 1% of tax on profits is paid, as
was shown on Slide 3.
Slide 7: The focus of this paper is only on greenhouse gas
emissions; not sulphur dioxide (causing acid rain and breathing
difficulties; fuel oil may be up to 4.5% sulphur) and not particulates
(linked with cancer).
Slide 9: David Leslie describes transport as tourism’s Achilles heel,
because of its carbon footprint. It’s worth considering how much
worse this is when your holiday is “all transport”, and when you move
not just the tourist but a small resort constructed mostly out of metal.
Slide 12: The melting point of steel is around 1370°C, and we put in
a lot of energy to reach that temperature. The specific heat capacity
of steel is 420J/kg/°C at room temperature, and increases to
720J/kg/°C near the melting point. That’s a minimum 375KWh to
melt a tonne of steel, if starting at room temperature… but real-world
machinery isn’t 100% efficient. In reality foundries use between 500
and 800 KWh to melt a tonne of steel… and that’s just to make steel
slabs – you still need to shape it into a boat, later.
Slide 13: Shipbuilding harm is spread between all passengers over
the lifespan of the ship, so we can divide by the number of
passengers berths, by the number of cruises undertaken in a year,
and by the number of years for which the ship will operates. A
passenger’s share of the harm resulting from shipbuilding actually
works out quite small (see Slide 16).
Slide 14: In CO2, cruise ships compare favourably to hotels in some
ways: a hotel in an unfashionable resort is a ruin, whereas a cruise
ship can simply be sailed elsewhere. They produce their own water,
and their sewage doesn’t require treatment of the kind performed on-
shore. Also, the staff don’t commute to work!
The vast majority of the carbon footprint of the cruise comes from
fuel usage. Possibly invite the audience to consider how they might
choose a vehicle based on miles per gallon: Hinrichsen [2010] tells
us a cruise ship delivers about 12 feet per gallon – that’s 0.0023
mpg.
PRESENTER NOTES

Reclaiming steel yields a carbon saving: 1,300 kg CO2e
according to DEFRA (2012). Note, however, that the ship breaking
nations are not countries we normally associate with excellence in
worker safety or ‘green’ performance… only carbon saving is a
positive and toxicity remains a concern. The west is still exporting its
pollution.
Slide 16: Simplicity. There’s nothing complicated going on in the
“cruise holiday carbon calculator”; just mathematical operations like
multiplication and addition. Excel was used as a common
denominator: it’s a simplistic approach but this means that anybody
can use (and improve) the model.
Slide 18: Our fictional cruise holiday (detailed briefly on the previous
slide) worked out about four times as much as a more conventional
holiday, staying in an Accor Group hotel in Barcelona… and it
involved about eight times as much of a contribution to climate
change as a typical week for a UK citizen.
Recall how we demonise air travel – and penalise it with departure
taxes and the like – but it forms only a very small part of the overall
carbon footprint of the holiday. Air travel does contribute to climate
change, but being crammed into a “cigar tube with wings” for a few
hours while it flies high is a lot different to having a stateroom on a
ship that has to push its way through the sea. We’re not comparing
like with like, in this regard… but Mintel [2014] describes a cruise
ship as “hotel-at-sea” so it’s worth considering fly-and-stay as
opposed to the cruise product.
Slide 19: In terms of carbon emissions, passengers are “using more
than their fair share” – and cheap fuel plus a large existing base of
installed engines means the industry isn’t likely to change any time
soon. As with the issue of who pays for the Coast Guard, the people
who cruise are basically subsidised by the people who don’t.
Cruise Tourism is a mass product nowadays, but to some extent it
still likes to trade on past glories, recalling ocean liners and
associating the cruise with luxury. But will a conspicuous display of
wealth and excess one day become as unfashionable as wearing
fur? It hasn’t happened yet… but then, few cruise passengers know
their carbon footprint.
PRESENTER NOTES

Environmental Impact of Cruise Holidays

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