Frequent passenger would prefer less on-board entertainment

Growing concerns over environmental impact of increased shipping on Gulf of Finland and Baltic Sea

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By Anna-Leena Pyykkönen
     
      Helsinki student Mira Suominen, 20, boards a ship in Tallinn Harbour, which is scheduled to set sail at 8:30 in the evening.
     She has but one goal: to get home to her dogs as quickly and as comfortably as possible. Mira Suominen, who studies economics at the Tallinn Technical University, travels back and forth between her home city and the city where she studies at least once a fortnight.
     
This time there is space and it is peaceful on the Star, but every tourist staggering on a stairway makes the seasoned traveller shudder. This student would prefer not to do her study travel in a floating entertainment centre.
     "The noise and the drunks annoy me as they do many other frequent travellers. I prefer to withdraw to a quiet corner with sofas and stare at my computer", she says.
     The young woman especially shuns places on the vessels where live music is played. "I don't even eat on the ships, because the price of the food has gone up. It would be nice if there were a tunnel beneath the Gulf of Finland, and a road going through it", Mira Suominen ponders.
     The student, who sails back and forth across the Gulf of Finland, has not thought of the emissions caused by the ships, and she does not plan to let her conscience bother her about them. "Anyway, I don't drive a car", she points out.
     She has noticed the pollution of the sea at her shoreline home in Jollas in the east of Helsinki.
     "There has been so much blue-green algae in the summers, that the dogs have not been able to go swimming."
     
Passengers have plenty of choices, especially as the summer season kicks in, with ships crossing between Helsinki and Tallinn with a frequency akin to that of trams on Mannerheimintie.
     However, the number of vessels in service has decreased somewhat, as shipping companies have replaced small ships with larger ones. There are a total of about 5.8 million passengers a year on the route between Tallinn and Helsinki, which is one of the busiest in the Baltic Sea.
     More large and fast vessels are coming onto the route. Viking Line just introduced the XPRS, and Tallink brought in the Superstar, the sister ship of the Tallink Star.
     The new ships are 200-metre multi-purpose vessels, allowing people to be entertained while travelling fast.
     The XPRS can carry 2,500 passengers at a speed of 25 knots. The Star takes 1,900 passengers, and is slightly faster. Both ships also take cargo.
     The refurbished 100-metre Super Sea Cat can reach speeds of 40 knots. The ship glides from city centre to city centre in 100 minutes. Linda Line is expected to get a new fast vessel to accompany the catamaran, the Merlin, making the crossing between the cities in 90 minutes.
     
The shipping companies swagger over the speed and size of their ships, but unless they take the newest environmental technology into use, they will not be very successful on the environmental market of the seriously polluted Gulf of Finland.
     The heavier the vessel, and the faster the speed, the more powerful engines are needed, and the more oil the engines use - and the greater the emissions of pollutants.
     "It is not a very environmentally-friendly type of travel to drag half of the city along, while riding fast", says special researcher Kari Mäkelä of the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT).
     Moving along with the people on the sea are hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and conference centres.
     Especially questionable in the view of Kari Mäkelä are cruises during which people do not disembark at the other end at all - they just spend time partying at sea.
     
There are many reasons for the increased grow of algae in the Baltic Sea, and one of them is shipping, which spews out nitrogen oxide and sulphur into the air.
     The large amount of nitrogen surprised experts: in Finnish waters alone, nitrogen emissions were higher than in highway traffic in the whole country.
     Ship travel produces many times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions compared to trains, or cars. The emissions from a fast passenger vessel are nearly double those of a car ferry.
     Fortunately for the seas, the new technology has made ships pollute less. Tighter environmental regulations also mitigate the damage.
     The International Maritime Organisation has just reached agreement on plans to reduce nitrogen and sulphur emissions in the coming years.
     
The next step is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Mika Nykänen, Managing Director of the Finnish Shipowners' Association, expects rapid progress, so that an agreement could be reached this year on a model for emissions trade for shipping. A number of different models are up for discussion, with which the shipping lines can start to buy and sell emission entitlements.
     "The system should be global so that remote areas would not be put at a disadvantage. The European Union supports the goal that the IMO would agree on the matter among its own circle. If it is unable to do so, various local models could emerge in the world, which would not be advantageous for the issue", Nykänen says.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 30.4.2008


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Paper plates?!? Tallink´s new green Superstar goes disposable (22.4.2008)
  Progressively tighter emission standards for ships on Baltic Sea (9.4.2008)

ANNA-LEENA PYYKKÖNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
anna-leena.pyykkonen@hs.fi