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

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A LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL

IMPACT OF CRUISE HOLIDAYS

• Richard Farr and Christine Hall• Off-Campus Division• University of Bolton

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• 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

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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

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A GROWING INDUSTRY

Mill

ions

of

pass

engers

carr

ied(cruisemarketwatch.com,

2014)capacify.wordpress.com

AN INDUSTRY WITH APOOR REPUTATION

ISSUES

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ISSUES

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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.

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“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…

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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)capacify.wordpress.com

LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT

Raw materials acquisition

Manufacture (shipbuilding)

Use phase

End-of-life

Atmosphericemissions

Waterbornewastes

Co-products

Solid wastes

Otherreleases

(Adapted from EPA, 1993)

Materials

Energy

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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’.

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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.

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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.capacify.wordpress.com

SHIP BREAKING…

Recycled Gross Tonnagein 2010 (Taylan, 2013)

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“CRUISE HOLIDAY CARBON CALCULATOR”

A simple Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

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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. capacify.wordpress.com

One passenger’s share of… kg CO2e

Ship materials & construction process 87.56

Fuel usage1,116.14

Excursion travel10.92

Food and beverages84.00

Air travel to and from port of embarkation39.10

Reclaimed ship materials at end-of-life-24.03

Total contribution to climate change1313.69

RESULTS OBTAINED

(About four times the CO2e of a comparable hotel-based holiday.)

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CONCLUDINGREMARKS

• 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? (Am

eric

an V

ogue

, Oct

ober

196

6)

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THANK YOU

Richard FarrSenior Lecturer (Partnerships)Off Campus DivisionUniversity of Bolton

+44 (0)1204 [email protected]

Capacify, the Sustainable Supply Chain blog:http://capacify.wordpress.comTwitter: @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

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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

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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

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Slide 1: 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

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Slide 15: 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

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