The ship left Seward, Alaska Tuesday, and stopped at Kodiak Island and Dutch Harbor before yesterday’s layover in Nome. After Nome, it has two stops on Victoria Island - Ulukhaktok in the Northwest Territories and Cambridge Bay in Nunavut - then on to Pond Inlet on Baffin Island. The cruise ship Crystal Serenity left Nome, Alaska yesterday, the first leg of an unprecedented cruise through the Northwest Passage.

While both Crystal ships traveled to Alaska from 2010 to 2012, it chose to discharge sewage from those ships outside of Alaskan waters, thereby avoiding Alaska’s strong water quality standards, giving it an ‘N/A’ for water quality compliance in Alaska.Īnd last month I noted: Cruising the Northwest Passage In total, none of Crystal’s ships that dock at a port with shoreside power are plug-in capable, giving the company an F in this category. In determining the air pollution reduction grade for each cruise line, only ships that dock at a port that currently has shoreside power facilities (thereby avoiding burning dirty fuel in port) were considered. These discharges were made despite the company’s promise not to discharge any wastewater into the Bay.Ĭurrently, neither of Crystal’s two cruise ships has installed an advanced sewage treatment system, resulting in a grade of F for the company’s 0 percent sewage treatment score.

It has been awarded an “F” grade by Friends of the Earth, which comments:Ĭrystal Cruises is a subsidiary of a Japanese shipping company founded in 1998 with its headquarters in California. Crystal operates two cruise ships worldwide-the Crystal Serenity and the Crystal Symphony-which are designed to carry between 1,500 and 1,700 passengers and crew. Crystal ships were banned from entering the Port of Monterey, California for 15 years after one of its former ships, the Crystal Harmony, discharged untreated graywater, treated sewage and oily bilge into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 2003.

Crystal serenity pictures