Meriaura Group presented its plans to create a zero-waste fleet in the future. For this reason, in the end of 2018, the group announced a research cooperation with the Finnish Transport Safety Agency (Trafi), aiming to reduce ship-generated waste.
The study has as a target to assess what measures could shipowners take to deliver all of the ship-generated waste to the port reception facilities or achieve a ‘zero-waste’ level on board.
What is more, Ville Koskinen, Managing Director of VG-Shipping, added that the capability of ports to manage waste materials is vital to limit the environmental footprint of vessels.
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In comparison to cruise vessels, cargo ships’ discharges are less, but there are hundreds of cargo carriers operating in the Baltic Sea. For this reason, Meriaura believes that in order to improve the state of the Baltic Sea, there should be no discharges there.
Meriaura’s waste reduction program ‘MERI’, includes 4 areas:
- Limiting waste at source;
- Improving onboard process;
- Operation to decrease waste;
- Recycling of waste materials is increased and handling of residual waste products is better.
For the initial phase of the project, ideas from Meriaura ships are gathered for the practical implementation of these issues.
In the next phase which is planned for autumn of 2019, Meriaura will establish standards for all its fleet’s practices, in order to cut consumption, enhance recycling and reuse of materials, as well as limiting food waste.
The final aspiration of the group is to make its fleet the least waste producing fleet by the end of 2020.
