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Prepositioned ships use tech to treat waste
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Posted on Jul 19 2008
Maritime pre-positioning ships, which are often viewable from the Saipan coastline, use high technology systems to treat the sewage and leftover food that the ships generate.
Last Sunday, a group of 20 visitors from the Department of Environmental Quality, their families and Saipan Tribune staff got a first-hand look at how these ships use advanced science to ensure that their constant presence will not have an environmental impact on the waters of Saipan. The group toured the steamship Stephen W. Pless to observe how food waste and trash are disposed of on the high seas.
DEQ’s Joe Kaipat, who coordinated the event and invited the participants, noted that the visit was prompted by repeated inquiries from local residents as to the methods of waste disposal utilized on the pre-positioning ships.
During the excursion, the group split, with the two groups toured around by Chief Mate Darrel Jones of the Marine Corps and Joe Kaipat.
A Marine Sanitation Device treats the ships’ daily food waste and sewage. The machine rids the waste of germs and turns the resulting substance into water, which is then expelled from the ship into the ocean.
Non-food items such as plastic bottles and aluminum cans are recycled in specific rooms on each ship.
A waste management company takes the trash that cannot be liquefied or recycled off the ship every eight to ten days.
“We store plastic waste in the ship. We either pay Ambyth to take it off here or we dump it off ourselves,” said Jones.
“The sewage goes to a storage machine which breaks it down into small pieces, and then it will be moved to another treatment machine where it will electronically clean all the germs using chlorine,” said one of the workers.
The Stephen W. Pless was built in 1981 in Boston and was activated militarily in 1984. It was the last steamship built in the United States. The ship has three sister ships: the Maersk Class, Waterman and AmSea.
