Ballast Water treatment - points to remember

Ballast water may be taken onboard by ships for stability and can contain thousands of aquatic or marine microbes, plants and animals, which are then carried across the globe. Untreated ballast water released at the ship’s destination could potentially introduce a new invasive marine species.  Hundreds of such invasions have already taken place, sometimes with devastating consequences for the local ecosystem.  The International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships' Ballast Water and Sediments ( BWM Convention)  was adopted in 2004 to introduce global regulations to control the transfer of potentially invasive species. With the treaty now in force, ships need to manage their ballast water. Read more   here . Status of the BWM Convention The BWM Convention  entered into force  on 8 September 2017. BWM treaty requirements  Under the Convention, all ships in international traffic are required to mana...

When the Marine Environment Protection Committee 71 (MEPC71) decided to extend the date of compliance with the Ballast Water Management Convention, shipowners gave out a sigh of relief. Vessels built before 8 September 2017 have  two years to install compliant ballast water management systems , which means two extra years of planning and searching for the right technology to implement . However, that also means that contaminated water may be carried from one destination to another. It is difficult to imagine that the ballast water in your tank could crush economies, but history suggests that the alien organisms carried in the ballast water tank have caused havoc, and even risked lives. what is next implementation schedul e n  Marine Menace – Alien invasive species in the marine environment , a paper by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the cause for many cases of alien invasions was attributed to human activity. The cases usually invo...