Icon of the Feces: Where Does the Poo Go on World's Largest Cruise Ship?

During the maiden voyage of Royal Caribbean's Icon of the Seas, passengers will consume meals from more than 20 different restaurants and dining spots as they're hauled around the Caribbean for a seven-night vacation. A floating city that touts its own "Central Park," 20 decks, and a record-breaking capacity of 7,600 passengers, the vessel is equipped to serve up an unparalleled quantity of meals at its eateries, including the signature Windjammer buffet.

With all that food to be devoured and digested on the high seas, the ardent newshound gets a whiff of one particularly urgent question lingering in the tropical sea air:

Where does the poo go?

Cruise passengers are prone to overindulge, but we'll stick to conservative estimates of daily human dookie production — six ounces of wet fecal weight per day, which by our calculations equates to more than 20,000 pounds of poop produced by adult passengers and crew over a seven-day voyage. The excrement flows by the ton into a massive mazelike septic network inside the vessel.

And from there it's fish food, right? Not so fast, matey!

In a statement to New Times, a Royal Caribbean spokesperson explains that all of the cruise line's ships, including Icon of the Seas, process human waste — "black water" in industry parlance — via "a five-step tertiary system, which far exceeds most land-based treatment plants." The company says it runs both black water and "gray water" (from showers, baths, sinks, and laundry) through that purification apparatus, then releases the treated liquid into the open sea.

Royal Caribbean says that if a ship's treatment system is malfunctioning or bypassed, the company permits untreated wastewater to be released only if the vessel is at least 12 nautical miles from land — a policy more stringent than the three-mile distance required under federal regulations governing untreated sewage discharge.

Additionally, the company maintains that its policy is never to release wastewater (even after it has been treated and purified) from a ship when docked at port.

"Clean, treated water is discharged beyond three nautical miles, again going beyond requirements," the company tells New Times.

Cruising out of its home base in PortMiami, Icon of the Seas is scheduled to depart on its maiden voyage on Saturday, January 27. The largest cruise ship in the world, the 250,800-ton vessel spans nearly 1,200 feet, complete with eight "neighborhoods," seven pools, six water slides, 2,805 staterooms, the largest swim-up bar at sea, a 55-foot waterfall, and a nigh-unfathomable 2,350 crew members.

According to environmental group Oceana, 30,000 gallons of wastewater are dumped into the oceans daily by a cruise ship with 3,000 passengers and crew — significantly smaller than Icon of the Seas.

Though maritime regulations set tight boundaries on sewage dumping, environmental groups have expressed concerns over lack of oversight and transparency. John Kaltenstein, a deputy director with environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Earth, tells New Times the public tends to hear about illegal dumping too late, after "the damage has been done."

Adds Kaltenstein: "The information is often hard to glean even from the federal government who should be collecting the reporting information. It's not made easy for public citizens to just figure out what's going on on these cruise ships, from air emissions to wastewater to the use of advanced technologies — all of that is very opaque."

As cruise ships are getting larger and carrying more passengers, Kaltenstein says, their water-purification systems must be closely monitored.

"You have to make sure it's finely tuned and it's getting the maintenance and oversight that it requires," he tells New Times. "Because even if you have the Ferrari of advanced water-treatment systems, if you are not ensuring that your components are working properly or if they've broken down and have to be replaced, then the whole system can be compromised."

Mass streams of passenger excrement aren't the only cruise ship waste that concerns environmentalists.

Carnival Corp., the parent company for Carnival Cruise Lines and Princess Cruise Lines, was under scrutiny for more than a decade for illegally dumping oil-contaminated water.

In 2016, Princess pleaded guilty to seven federal charges and was hit with a $40 million fine — the largest vessel-dumping penalty ever at the time — after authorities discovered the Caribbean Princess had been illegally discharging oil-contaminated water into the ocean from 2005 to 2013. A whistleblower reported that the ship had a "magic pipe" to divert oil-contaminated waste into the ocean. The federal investigation found the company had falsified records to hide the practice from investigators, and that other ships in the Carnival fleet had violated waste-dumping regulations as well.

Three years later, Carnival and Princess were fined an additional $20 million for probation violations, which included dumping plastic into the ocean.

Royal Caribbean paid $27 million in criminal fines in the late 1990s for dumping oil and hazardous chemicals into the ocean via ships including Sovereign of the Seas. A federal probe discovered that "a secret bypass pipe was destroyed after a Coast Guard inspection and that similar methods of discharging waste oil were in use on every Royal Caribbean cruise ship," according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The company secured a measure of redemption from environmentalists in 2009, when it earned praise from Oceana for pledging to install high-tech sewage filtration systems on its entire fleet. Royal Caribbean said at the time that the project would cost more than $100 million.

The upgraded systems on several ships use "biological reactors," chemicals, and mechanical processing to break down fecal matter. The "resulting very clean water is then pumped through polishing filters" and exposed to ultraviolet light for final disinfection before it is discharged, the company says. Remaining solids are held in a tank, with options to incinerate, dispose in a landfill, or discharge in open water.

Royal Caribbean announced in July that it was equipping Icon of the Seas with a pyrolysis system to heat up waste using microwaves and reduce it to "syngas," which the company plans to use as fuel on the ship. The system can process food waste, garbage, and sludge from wastewater.

Notwithstanding improved wastewater filtration on the fleet's cruise ships, Kaltenstein advocates for stronger regulatory monitoring.

"We don't have a good kind of compliance-monitoring system that ensures there's proper sampling and we know that the technology is working every hour," he says. "We found out about violations when Carnival was in probation because they were under judicial oversight."