Ranking the Best and the Worst Cruises for the Environment (Spoiler Alert: It's Not Pretty) Bruce Watson - The Guardian
go to original January 9, 2015

The luxury cruise ship Costa Concordia leans on its starboard side off the port at Giglio, after running aground on the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio, Italy. The cruise line received an F grade for environmental sustainability this year. (Gregorio Borgia/AP)

Sustainably speaking, taking a cruise is a pretty dicey proposition. After all, any practice that centers around loading a few thousand people into a giant steel behemoth, motoring them around environmentally sensitive areas and feeding them extravagantly is going to burn a lot of fuel, consume a lot of water, and produce a lot of waste.

That said, sustainability practices vary greatly from cruise line to cruise line and even from ship to ship. For environmentally considerate travelers, choosing the best cruise option can be confusing at best and impossible at worst.

In order to cut through that confusion, for the past five years, Friends of the Earth (FOE), a network of environmental organizations in 74 countries, has produced a yearly report card for the cruise ship industry. The group rates cruise lines and individual ships based on three key factors: their water treatment, their sewage treatment, and their air pollution efforts.

Take a quick look at the best and worst of the industry, at The Guardian

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