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Giovanni Romagnoli* frequents this beach most during hot summer days, with his own booth and parasol. But he had never seen anything like it before in August last year. ‘When I noticed that black substance around us, I panicked. I immediately wanted to get everyone out of the water as quickly as possible,” he says.
Having worked on cruise ships in the past, he now works as a chief engineer on a tugboat in Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, where he lives. The city is one of the busiest and most polluted ports in the Mediterranean, alongside Barcelona and Marseille. He is convinced that what he saw in the water on that summer’s day was “scrubber water”’.
Scrubbing is a technology comparable to a filter that cuts off polluting emissions when applied to ships, cargo ships and cruise ships. It’s a great invention, given the huge amounts of exhaust gases emitted by the less refined fuel oils used in shipping when burned. However, scrubbers – technically known as exhaust gas cleaning systems (EGCS) – have a dirty secret: the wastewater produced by their cleaning process is dumped into the sea. Scientists have warned that this practice has aggressive environmental consequences.
As the whole Mediterranean region grapples with the effects of an escalating climate crisis and pressure from the tourism industry, coastal cities now have to deal with this new threat to environmental health, despite the technology being presented as a way to improve air quality.
