How do you reduce the environmental impact of what are essentially small floating cities? By working on every aspect that makes up a cruise fleet, whether related to energy, procurement or waste management.

It is no coincidence that Costa Crociere, together with Cial, recently presented the results of the first project to collect and recycle aluminium cans on board the group's cruise ships. "Sustainability at Costa is perfectly integrated into the business model," confirms Stefania Lallai, Director of Sustainability and External Relations at Costa Crociere. "A model that has a certain complexity: the ship is effectively a small town, with around 5,000 people moving per leg."

The watchwords are therefore optimisation and rationalisation: "It's about having that extra sensitivity to understand that everything generated in such a concentrated world can still create value," as indeed the aluminium recovery project demonstrates.

But a ship must above all consume less, in order to produce fewer emissions. Consumption has been reduced "on the one hand by reviewing and optimising the ships' itineraries, and on the other by launching on board a whole series of initiatives and projects that lead to a reduction in impacts," Lallai points out. To this end, all 450,000 lamps have been replaced with new LED lighting fixtures, achieving 80 per cent more energy saving.

The future of maritime transport lies in LNG

But the big news concerns the new ships, already ordered and under construction, which will be ready in 2019. "The next 4 ships will be powered by liquefied natural gas," confirms Alessandro Bertorello, head of the environment section at Carnival Maritime. "We will be the only ones in the cruise ship world. In this case we will drastically reduce all emissions linked to fuel use, from CO2 to NOx and SOx."

In this respect, Costa will simply be following European directives, in particular the "Clean energy for transport" package, which describes in detail an action plan for the development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in maritime transport, as well as complying with the recent international regulations on ship emissions, which set a maximum sulphur content of 0.1 per cent within the ECA (Emission Control Areas) zone, an area covering the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and the coasts of North America and the Caribbean.