Water management: every drop counts!
We have further intensified our measures for the economical and resource-conserving use of water last year.
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Minimizing the use of fresh water
Conserving water, one of our planet’s most important resources, is a vital issue for AIDA. Our main priority is to reduce our water consumption as much as possible, to increase the amount of water we can produce and to avoid needing to use fresh water from land wherever possible in order to conserve drinking water supplies on land. Through the use of water-saving devices, we have been able to continuously reduce the daily onboard consumption of fresh water per person per day in recent years.
Our information suggests that AIDA currently has the lowest per-capita consumption of fresh water in the entire cruise industry. The toilet flushes on board our ships, for example, function using a water-saving vacuum system that consumes just one liter of water per flush cycle. Compared to 2012, we were able to reduce freshwater consumption per person per day by more than eleven percent.
We use modern reverse osmosis systems to turn seawater into top-quality drinking water on board our ships. Only on rare occasions when this is not possible do we fill the onboard tanks with clean drinking water while docked in a port. In order to do so, we are mindful to check the availability of water on land during the route planning stage. This is because we understand the importance of conserving reservoirs of drinking water at our destinations. In the course of its AIDA Selection cruises, AIDAcara spends more time at sea and in regions where it is not always possible to guarantee a reliable supply of water on land. In order to conserve drinking water resources at our destinations, we can produce up to 600,000 liters of high-quality drinking water per day for both passengers and crew with our highly-efficient desalination systems. The drinking water production systems on AIDAsol and AIDAluna were also improved and made more efficient in 2018. They can now, for example, produce drinking water even when the sea temperature is low.
Ten of our thirteen ships are fitted with an innovative vacuum food waste system for food waste, which uses considerably less water than conventional systems. Instead of waste being flushed away with water through pipes, it is routed to the designated storage tank via a vacuum suction system.
Hand towels, bed sheets, tablecloths, clothes and much more are laundered on board every day. By using the latest laundry technology, over the past ten years AIDA Cruises has managed to reduce its water consumption per kilogram of laundry by up to 50 percent, which is also in part thanks to the use of innovative tunnel washers on board AIDAprima and AIDAperla.
Fresh water production on AIDAcara > Watch video
Wastewater treatment
AIDA Cruises exceeds in many areas the high international environmental standards for the processing and disposal of wastewater in the maritime industry (MARPOL). For example, on board all of our ships that have been brought into service since 2007, wastewater is processed in biological membrane purification systems to almost drinking water quality. With these “Advanced Waste Water Purification Systems” (AWWPS), we reach a degree of water purity which is not achieved by many treatment and purification plants on land. Furthermore, as early as the route planning stage, we take into account the ports where it will be possible to hand over our wastewater to carefully selected and certified disposal specialists.
In order to improve the quality of our treatment systems even further, we collaborate with, among other bodies, the Testing Institute for Wastewater Technology in Aachen. Together we seek out technical solutions that can further enhance the efficiency of the cleaning process.
Each of our ships has two oil separators on board. These separators divide the water that accumulates in the bilge (i.e. bilge water) from any potential oil residues. We moreover examine the oil content of the wastewater by additionally using a second sensor system called a ‘white box’. Before the international threshold value of 15 parts per million is reached, the white box issues a warning and the discharge of the bilge water is suspended. Without exception, we hand over the filtered oily residues from the oil separators to land-based disposal companies and use the port’s unloading facility to do this wherever possible.
AIDA Cruises signed a declaration of commitment back in 2008 not to release any untreated wastewater anywhere in the Baltic Sea, but to unload it in ports. AIDA now goes one step further. We only unload wastewater from our ships in the Baltic in ports that have sufficient capacity and can guarantee that the wastewater will be treated appropriately. In the years to come, AIDA will further improve the wastewater treatment systems on its ships as part of a modernization project. We comply with the strict HELCOM limit values and are prepared for requirements in the future, e.g. in the Norwegian fjords.
