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Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful cruise ship line. One that may be transforming itself from the poster child of ocean pollution to industry leader for responsible treatment of cruise ship wastes.
Hard to believe, but this is a positive story of a big corporation with a poor track record that's now doing the right thing.
The company is Miami's Royal Caribbean, whose 29 cruise ships operate under the Royal Caribbean or Celebrity Cruise brands. One ship, Splendour of the Seas, sails from Tampa during the winter season.
This is the same company that in 1999 agreed to a 21-felony plea deal. It paid a record $27-million in criminal fines and other penalties after acknowledging it had polluted the ocean repeatedly, then lied to the U.S. Coast Guard to cover it up. The company even rigged its ships with secret piping systems to bypass pollution treatment equipment.
Last week, in a rather roundabout way, we learned that Royal Caribbean is mending its ways and even taking a leadership role.
Company chairman and CEO Richard Fain wrote a letter dated May 4 to Oceana, an environmental group in Washington, saying Royal Caribbean plans to install "advanced wastewater purification" systems on all of its cruise ships, probably within the next two years. The company has AWP systems on three of its cruise ships that travel to Alaska, where pollution laws are more rigorous.
Curiously, Royal Caribbean, the world's second-largest cruise company, announced the fleetwide antipollution upgrade in Fain's letter to Oceana but never issued a press release about the positive step.
On Friday, Royal Caribbean spokesman Lynn Martenstein was careful not to portray her company as an industry frontrunner eager to embrace new antipollution technology.
Yes, her company plans to adopt AWP systems fleetwide, "once the technology is environmentally and economically feasible," she said.
But didn't Fain's letter say the company is "confident today" that such technology is feasible? Well, yes.
If I may read the political tea leaves, Royal Caribbean is taking the industry lead here but does not want to appear to be doing so. The cruise industry's trade association, the International Council of Cruise Lines, generally endorses the idea of advanced wastewater purification systems on cruise ships.
But the trade group - meaning all of its cruise line company members - is apparently not quite ready to announce it. A scientific study led by California oceanographer Sylvia Earle and an analysis of competing AWP systems must come first.
Oceana's focused public relations campaign against Royal Caribbean in effect prompted the cruise line to make the first industry commitment.
"We are pleased to have reached an agreement with Oceana," Royal Caribbean's Martenstein said, "and that they have ceased their campaign against us."
Oceana, for its part, prefers to say it has "suspended" its campaign, pending adoption of the new waste systems.
Touche. Just for the record, Martenstein volunteered that Oceana's campaign did not hamper Royal Caribbean's booming business. In the first quarter of 2004, company profits nearly doubled from a year ago, beating analysts' forecasts. And Royal Caribbean forecasts double-digit growth ahead.
For years, Oceana had pushed Royal Caribbean to clean up its ocean dumping practices. When Royal Caribbean did not see eye-to-eye with Oceana last summer, the activist group organized a specific campaign aimed at the cruise ship line.
Oceana had a plane fly by one of the cruise ships with a banner that read: "Got Sewage? Royal Caribbean Dumps Daily." Rallies were staged. Oceana sent people aboard the ships during cruises and slipped flyers under cabin doors. A protest Web site (www.stopcruisepollution.com/) offered details of the campaign.
With receipt of the letter from Fain, the Web site now boasts an "Oceana Victory" headline.
To the environmental group, this is a watershed event.
"This is cutting edge. This is precedent setting. No other cruise line, major or minor, has made a similar commitment to outfit their entire fleet," Oceana spokesman Sam Haswell said. "So we hope Royal Caribbean will set an example and others will follow suit."
Sounds promising. Just don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
But you may want to hold your nose when taking a closer sniff of the cruise ship wastes known as gray water and black water. Gray water comes from a cruise ship's cabin sinks and showers, laundries and dishwashers, and air conditioner runoff. And black water? That's a mix of waste from the ship's medical facility and sewage from its toilets.
"We're talking about No. 2 here," Haswell explained.
One cruise ship can dump up to 30,000 gallons of sewage and 255,000 gallons of gray water a day. That's why Oceana got so upset in the first place. Ships traditionally have used Coast Guard-approved "marine sanitation devices" to treat waste water, but the systems are considered outdated and inefficient.
It helps neither the industry's reputation, nor the health of the oceans, that the cruise ship business has grown so dramatically in the past decade. More people on more ships means more waste.
Kudos to Royal Caribbean for taking the early plunge. When it comes to bumping up to the next level of antipollution technology, the cruise industry's overdue.
- Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com or 727 893-8405.