In Precious Shipping's annual review Hashim reiterated his stand against scrubbers as a way of complying with the IMO's 0.5% sulphur cap in 2020 which he described as “transferring the pollution from the sky into the seas”.
Hashim drew attention to literature such as the The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History a non-fiction book which argues that man’s activity is acidifying the oceans threatening the world's coral reefs.
“At some point in time, dumping toxic/sulphuric waste water from ‘open loop scrubbers’ into the oceans will come back to haunt us with such ships being banned from pumping their toxic waste water into our oceans/seas,” he warned.
Read more: Open-loop scrubbers – an own goal for the shipping industry
Hashim noted that Singapore and China along with a number of states in Asia Europe, Middle East and the Americas had announced in port or coastal bans on open-loop scrubber wash water discharge, something he likened to the non-smoking sections in the past on aircraft.
“How long will it be before the world realizes that it would be best to ban the dumping of waste water generated by ‘open loop scrubbers’ anywhere in the oceans/seas?
“It’s like saying that a small portion of an aircraft (territorial waters of any country/port) is declared as a ‘non smoking’ zone whilst the rest of the aircraft (oceans/seas) are designated as an unrestricted smoking zone, and we know how that ended!”
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