CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

The cruise industry is booming, but cruise ships are not sustainable – the average cruise ship carrying 3,000 passengers and crew generates 80,000 litres of sewage a day, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and many cruise lines use out-dated filter systems, resulting in minimally treated sewage being dumped into the water. Most large ocean liners use bunker fuel to power their engines. This is the heavy, residual oil left over after gasoline and diesel have been extracted from crude oil and can emit dangerous levels of sulphur dioxide.

The Ecoship Project aims to challenge the status-quo and has set itself a radical set of targets to demonstrate what is possible, and necessary for the industry to exist in a sustainable world.

In order to meet these goals we knew we would need to work with experts from a diverse range of fields and that every element of the ship from its hull to its engines to its onboard programmes would need to work together.

We therefore took a whole-system integrated design approach to the project; A concept derived from the belief that elements of a system work best when they are specifically designed to complement, rather than to compensate for each other.

In April 2014, we gathered world experts on naval architecture, marine engineering, renewable energy, energy efficiency, maritime law, biomimicry, and biophilia, for an Ecoship design charrette in Hamburg, Germany. This multi-disciplinary charrette approach had never before been applied to the cruise industry and the innovative outcomes formed the basis of our Ecoship specifications.

The innovative design of the Ecoship was created by Oliver Design.