- CSA trying to correct open-loop scrubbers misconceptions by highlighting relevant facts and findings.
- They are fighting fake news by stressing on the necessity of specific detailed news and not just open-loop scrubbers linked port activity news report.
- CSA underlines that every port has a right to target nil discharge but that will amount to prohibiting all kinds of discharges.
- According to CSA head, Ian Adams the need of the hour is ‘specific and lucid’ Scrubber Technology news reporting.
- Meanwhile, CSA is collecting data from individual ports to present its own findings relating to the composition of wash waters.
The new head of the Clean Shipping Alliance (CSA) 2020 has hit out at ‘fake news’ and ‘sensationalist’ statements concerning recent bans on use of the emissions abatement technology, reports Marine Propulsion.
How to counter sensationalization?
The CSA’s mission is to provide information and research data to promote a better understanding of the environmental performance and benefits of open- and closed-loop Exhaust Gas Cleaning Systems (EGCS) and associated air and water emissions. Its membership comprises a mix of commercial and passenger shipping companies that have installed exhaust gas scrubbers on their vessels.
Ian Adams (pictured above), who was previously chief executive of the International Bunker Industry Association, has used his position as newly-installed executive director of the CSA, to take issue with reports that have linked open-loop scrubber discharge bans in Singapore’s port waters, many of China’s emissions control areas and the Emirati port of Fujairah, with a decades-old blanket ban on all water discharge from ships that Belgium imposed in 1971 and Germany’s 2009 restrictions on shipping water discharge along parts of the Rhine and other inland waterways.
“Any port or harbour is perfectly within its rights to say we want nil discharges. But that means not just open-loop scrubbers, that means everything,” Mr. Adams said. According to him, when there’s a blanket ban on the discharging, highlighting open-loop scrubbers is very unfair. If it’s no discharge, that’s every single type of discharge.
Need for Specific News
“There are other people putting out these lists of where people are [not] able to use open-loop scrubbers. It’s not just the media, all we’re saying is let’s get it reported clearly, whether it is a general ban or aimed specifically at open-loop scrubbers. As nine times out of 10, it’s not aimed at open-loop scrubbers,” Mr Adams said.
Fighting It Out With Facts & Findings
In recent months, the CSA said it has sent representatives to visit several individual ports and other authorities to present its own findings relating to the composition of wash waters. The CSA said the lobbying effort would continue and that it had its own studies underway. He said the findings from CSA’s studies were too preliminary to reveal publicly. “We are just using our preliminary findings to show the ports what we have found so far.”
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Source: Marine Propulsion
