Most of everything you own – clothes, shoes, food, tech – is made overseas then put inside a giant container ship, travelling thousands of miles across the ocean to reach you. In fact, around 90% OF ALL TRADED GOODS is transported on ships.
It’s economical to do this because ships run on the cheapest, dirtiest fossil fuel – “Heavy Fuel Oil”. This is the gunky black crap that comes out the bottom of an oil refinery, once all the transparent road fuels like gasoline and diesel have been separated out.
Heavy Fuel Oil contains up to 500 times as much cancer-causing sulfur as these road fuels. Sometimes even chemical waste and melted car tires, that companies don’t want to pay to dispose of safely, are just blended into shipping fuel!
That’s why the Financial Times says the shipping industry has functioned for decades as “a vast waste disposal system for the oil industry“. So all this toxic waste that’s illegal to burn on land, gets burnt out of sight at sea.
But it’s not just the people who work on ships – seafarers – who are are exposed to this filthy air. Around about 40% of the world’s population live within 100 km (60 miles) of the coast – and shipping’s dirty fumes blow further inland than this.
Shipping emits around 1 BILLION TONNES of climate-heating greenhouse gases every year – more than all but the 5 biggest country emitters like Japan and Germany or 243 coal-fired power plants, driving extreme weather effects and ocean acidification.
It’s time that every country and every company that ships goods from overseas – Sort Your Ship Out.