How Auto Shipping Effects the Environment
There is nothing quite like a cargo ship – they are both enormous and impressive to watch. They resemble moving mountains along the surface of the sea. They are not the usual battleship grey of some huge ships. They carry impossibly high stacked loads of bright blue, orange and green containers. On a load such as this one, your luxury German car is carefully loaded and ready to disembark at its given destination overseas. An equal array of bright-hued cranes, also impressive in their enormity, will unload your new baby onto the dock. You are a satisfied customer knowing that that expensive car was shipped overseas by an efficient shipping company and saved you money and hassle by doing so.
Unfortunately, there is a downside to all this colorful efficiency. There are environmental concerns associated with the shipment of both domestic and international diesel-fueled cargo. As a new and burgeoning industry, the shipping industry is also responsible for new and growing environmental problems, with no viable solutions implemented as yet. The IMO (International Maritime Organization) met on the subject of greenhouse gas emissions from ships, particularly cargo vessels as late as 2008.
Ballast water is discharged by all ships. The bigger the ship, the more the ballast water, in some cases, a small ocean is discharged by these huge vessels. This ballast water is of most concern to international shipping as the water is taken in at one coastal area during unloading and discharged into a completely alien environmental coastal zone at the port of destination.
The aforementioned person waiting for his luxury car from Germany to be unloaded at the dock in Los Angeles is probably not concerned about this, but despite our world’s excitement over foreign-made luxury products, the environment is becoming very unsettled and is bound to get worse. Ballast water has in its contents plants, animals, bacteria, and viruses. These life forms are pumped dead or alive into the vessel from their natural habitats. They are carried many sea miles to the site of their discharge. By this time, some will be dead, some will be alive, some will have cohabited and multiplied, and some will have mutated. All of them will be alarmed at being in foreign seas, and will morph into litter, vermin, or invasive species. We now have chaos and destruction of marine ecosystems.
Gasoline used for car transportation over land should be an environmental advantage because the huge carriers carrying many autos in a single load do cut down on the gasoline that would have been consumed by each of those vehicles being driven separately across a vast expanse of land. Unfortunately, this saves only money not the environment. This is good for the company, they earn money, and good for the customer, they save money. Resources are happily circulated and the environment becomes ever more depleted.
The solution is not in more people driving their car long distances themselves because the auto industry, including manufacturers, handlers and dealers still thrive. As the industry grows because of the development in third world countries, more cars are used, more cars are shipped over sea, land and air, and more damage is done to our environment.
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Tags: Environment, Automobile, vehicle transport