Bilge Dumping

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Archive for category: Bilge Dumping

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Ten years ago SkyTruth Revealed the Truth about the BP Oil Spill

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SkyTruth video highlights our work fighting oil pollution, then and now.

Ten years ago last week, BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 men and setting off the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. SkyTruth was there; not in person but remotely; using satellite imagery to track the spill from space. Watch our four-minute video to learn more about the disaster, and what SkyTruth is doing now to stop oil pollution at sea.

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Bilge Dumping in Southeast Asia Continues in 2020

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Southeast Asia appears to be a hotspot for bilge dumping.

SkyTruth continues to find frequent instances of apparent bilge dumping in the waters of Southeast Asia. On March 23, Sentinel-1 imagery captured three likely bilge slicks off the coast of Madura Island in Indonesia.

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Bilge Dumping at Sea: How can this be happening?

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Despite large penalties for breaking the law, bilge dumping continues to occur. Infrequent prosecution, combined with incentives to dump oily waste instead of treating it, means some polluters take their chances.

This is the third entry in a multi-part series revealing the significance of bilge dumping globally. You can read parts one and two on SkyTruth’s blog. 

Today, ninety percent of international trade relies on global shipping. From commercial to passenger vessels the world’s global fleet exceeds 95,402 ships plus around 2.8 million fishing vessels. With all this ocean traffic occurring every day, SkyTruth has been monitoring the oceans for bilge dumping; the illegal discharge of oily wastewater at sea. In this post, we explore regulations governing bilge dumping and consider why this practice is so widespread, despite these regulations.

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What’s a Mathematician Doing at SkyTruth?

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Alice Foster discovered her love for geology at Brown University, and meandered onto SkyTruth’s path.

My name is Alice Foster, and I started as an intern at SkyTruth this past January. But my journey to SkyTruth was a bit unexpected. Until recently, I was somewhat unenthusiastic about science, although I was interested in conservation issues. But after a few minutes in my first geology class, I was hooked.

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Bilge Dumping at Sea: Why should I care?

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Scientific research on the impact of oil pollution on marine life and coastal communities, combined with evidence of frequent bilge dumping, suggests oily bilge could be harming marine ecosystems and coastal economies.

Last year SkyTruth reported 163 accounts of likely bilge dumping across the world, from Brazil, to the Mediterranean, to Southeast Asia and elsewhere. As we described in our recent post,  bilge dumping is the illegal release of untreated oily wastewater from a vessel’s lower hull. This wastewater, or bilge, appears as an oil slick in the ocean, which eventually disperses and can migrate to vulnerable coastlines. 

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