ICS wants changes to ballast water convention

The 2004 BWM Convention, intended to prevent damage to local ecosystems by invasive species of marine micro-organisms carried in ships’ ballast water, is expected to enter into force within the next two years.

ICS Director of regulatory affairs, David Tongue, explained: “Shipping companies represented by our member national associations have serious concerns about the availability of suitable ballast water treatment equipment, the robustness of the type approval process and, above all, the difficulties of retrofitting tens of thousands of existing ships within the time frame established by the BWM Convention.”

In a submission to the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee, which meets in October, ICS has requested that the issue of fixed dates for the retrofitting of expensive new equipment by large numbers of ships, perhaps as many as 60,000, needs to be addressed urgently.

In particular, in view of the bottlenecks that will be created when the Convention enters in force, with many ships having to be retrofitted either before their next special survey or their next intermediate survey, ICS has proposed that the IMO should modify the BWM Convention’s requirements so that existing ships should not be required to be retrofitted with treatment equipment until their next full special survey.

Moreover, in order to make it possible for other ships to be retrofitted within the required timeline, ICS proposes that ships approaching their forth special survey should be exempted from the equipment requirements. Failing this, ICS suggests that ships over 18 years old should be exempted from the equipment requirements.

In practice, changes to the BWM Convention cannot be adopted until after it enters into force, but ICS says that IMO could agree provisional changes with respect to detailed implementation in advance.

In a separate submission to IMO, ICS has requested that IMO considers modifying its current draft guidelines for type approval of equipment, and for ballast water sampling and analysis that will be used by port state control, so that as far as possible they are comparable with those recently adopted by the United States – including US standards for type approval of equipment, which it says are far more robust than the IMO equivalent.