Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowRWolf
if youre more than 3 miles off shore evreyting except plastic is tossed
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Not entirely correct for those of us in MARPOL signatory countries that have passed the requirements of MARPOL Annex V-Garbage into their own law then anything, including
food, that goes over the side between 3 and 12 nm must be comminuted to less than 25mm in size. This, I suspect applies to most if not all of us (for those boats domiciled or registered in the
USA by the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships I believe).
Nothing must be discharged within 3 nm, plastics cannot be discharged anywhere, and floating dunnage, linings and packing materials may be discharged if more than 25 nm from land.
There are also 8 regions where the rules are much stricter - those that are frequented a lot by sail boats are the
Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Wider
Caribbean Region. In these places the disposal of any rubbish at all apart from food is prohibited and that must be more than 12 nm from land, except in the
Caribbean Region it must be more than 3 nm from land.
In a number of countries (including the
USA and New Zealand) vessels over a certain small size are required to carry notices along the above lines but also including
oil, etc - that I am sure will be a surprise to many NZ'ers with pleasure vessels 12 meters or longer 'cos from what I've seen very few carry them
.
While we are not into
blue water cruising (it is much more comfortable to fly in our experience
) we do regularly
cruise remote places for periods up to 4 weeks or so with no place to dump any rubbish at all. We have never found it any problem at all to hold all our rubbish (apart from scraps from
fish we have caught) for such periods for a crew of two and I have no doubt we could do it for a crew of six. We bag all daily rubbish in smaller bags and when full place those in large trash bags which we lash to the shrouds.