Thousands of commercial vessels pass through Hampton Roads each year, such as cruise ships docking in Norfolk and container ships pulling into the Port of Virginia.
Local environmental advocates are increasingly voicing concerns about pollution such ships emit into the air and water.
A single ship can generate as much pollution as more than a million cars — or about the same as two weeks of traffic on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.
“I think it's been overlooked,” said Robert Hodson, executive director of Protect Virginia. “It's really bad stuff, and you can't see it, but it's coming out of ships.”
He presented on the issue Thursday to dozens of students and other attendees at Batten University in Virginia Beach. The local chapter of the Sierra Club hosted the “Responsible Shipping” event.
Hodson’s day job is at NASA, working as a technical fellow on projects such as the Artemis moon mission. He got interested in pollution from ships when a cruise line proposed coming to his home of Yorktown, and he joined a group of residents that successfully fought the plan.
“In the process, I started to learn about the practices of the cruise industry,” Hodson said. “And I realized that it wasn't only the cruise ships, but it was also the tankers and the container ships.”
He’s since dug into nearly 100 research papers and connected with international experts to try and grasp what’s happening in Virginia.
A majority of the global commercial shipping industry runs on heavy fuel oil, or "bunker fuel," a thick, tar-like substance leftover after extracting more refined products from crude oil.
Burning the material releases pollutants, including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and toxic metals.
Protect Virginia is concerned about the spread of fine particulate matter, tiny particles that can travel deep into people’s lungs and bloodstream and lead to health issues, such as asthma and cancer.
During Thursday's panel discussion, Old Dominion University professor and air quality expert Jim Blando said studies conducted at some U.S. ports show correlations between poorer air quality and adverse health outcomes.
“If you look statistically over a large population, you find people that live near ports have shorter lifespans,” Blando said, adding that other factors likely contribute.
To comply with international regulations, ships use what are known as scrubbers to remove harmful substances from gas exhaust before they are released into the atmosphere.
The technology falls into a refrain known as “the solution to pollution is dilution.”
But scrubbers often work by spraying seawater into the exhaust stream and discharging the resulting wastewater, including heavy metals and pollutants, directly into the bay or ocean.
Environmental advocates argue the process trades polluting air for contaminating water.
Panelist Soraya Moein Bartol, a marine biology professor at Batten University, noted that ships also cause noise pollution underwater, affecting creatures that rely on sound to communicate and navigate.
“Shipping is the No. 1 contributor to underwater noise in our oceans, and we see a doubling of this underwater noise every decade,” she said. “We have really loud, low-frequency sounds traveling” four times faster in water than in air.
The shipping industry has little incentive to change, Hodson said. Switching to cleaner fuels can cost roughly 60% more, though it would save some by eliminating the need for scrubbers.
His group is working on state legislation to mandate that large ships use low-sulfur fuels, such as marine gas or diesel oils, when in Virginia waters.
“If we accomplish that, I think we save a lot of the wastewater from the bay, and we potentially reduce the health burden on a lot of people in poor communities.”
Similar regulations have long been in place in other countries and California, meaning ships entering those areas must switch out the fuel they use within a certain boundary.
Hodson noted that the Port of Virginia has invested in more sustainable practices on land, including electrifying cranes and using renewable power sources.
But that doesn’t address emissions from the ships at berth or at sea.
