Performance Car Reviews, News and Parts for the Car Enthusiast

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.

But the shipping industry is not all promise and bright colors. Several environmental issues are closely related to the shipment of national and international diesel-powered dreams. The auto shipping industry is a new and growing industry and so are the problems, effective solutions to which are yet to be implemented. It was only in June 2008 that the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, organized a meeting on the subject of greenhouse gas emission from ships in general, and cargo ships in particular.

Ballast water discharged from these huge ships is equivalent to a whole other sea. Ballast water is taken in on unloading the cargo or when prior loads of the water are discharged. With these enormous carriers, the problem lies in their international course of travel. Water is pumped into the ship in one coastal area and pumped out down the sea lane in a completely different coastal zone.

The golden-haired guy with the golden Rolex waiting for his super-car may not care, but despite the world’s oblivious enthusiasm for luxury cars and wristwatches an environment so mixed up can’t help deteriorating. Ballast water contains plants and animals, viruses and bacteria. When pumped into the ship’s tanks, these life forms are either alive or properly dead in their natural environments. By the time they are discharge some of them will be dead, some will still be alive, some will have increased in numbers or mutated, and all of them will be completely out of their depth and range in foreign waters, turning to liter, pests, or invasive species. The effect is chaos and destruction in aquatic 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.

If fewer people drove their personal vehicle those same long distances, the auto transportation industry would still continue to thrive because of the car manufacturing and car handling industry. The automotive industry is undergoing increasing expansion and growth because of newly developing third world countries. So more cars are in demand, which means more transportation by land, sea and air and more contribution to environmental disasters.

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