Group Sues Over Cruise Line Pollution

An environmental group called Friends of the Earth filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, seeking an immediate response to a seven-year-old cruise ship pollution petition submitted in March 2000, Florida Today reports. The petition asked the EPA to assess and regulate pollution from cruise ships, and Friends of the Earth say the agency has not yet responded. "The cruise business in Port Canaveral is increasing dramatically and there are no new protections in place," Teri Shore, campaign director for Friends of the Earth, told the paper. "There's no monitoring of the discharges, so we don't know how much is going in, but we know each cruise ship with 3,000 to 5,000 passengers produces a tremendous amount of waste." A typical one-week voyage with 3,000 people on board generates about 210,000 gallons of sewage; 1 million gallons of "gray water" from sinks and showers and 37,000 gallons of oily bilge water, according to the EPA.