This is a very short clip I shot of the Norwegian Dream’s garbage being dumped onto a small Belizean barge. Quite a large amount was offloaded from the cruise ship and as far as I know, this is illegal, as Belize is not supposed to accept any foreign trash. Solid waste disposal is one of the number one environmental problems in the country, so it seems pretty silly to accept a bunch of garbage produced by wasteful Americans on a discounted cruise.
I’m not sure what bothers me more – the fact that Norwegian Dream and its passengers are dumping on Belize or the fact that the quantity of trash coming out of this ship could easily have been reduced, but that waste reduction is not a priority for cruise ship life. I’m told the other ships docked off the Belize coast have incinerators, but everyone says these big floating toilets dump all kinds of garbage and sewage into the open ocean. Why don’t they instead arrange something like the Rubbish collection Melbourne services to pick up their trash at different docks?
While I’m standing on my boat, which is preparing to receive passengers from the Dream, a masked man wearing white and carrying a spray pump bottle of disinfectant boards us from the ship and sprays the perimeter of our deck. He is wearing plastic goggles and is apparently protecting the Dream from our dirty Belize germs (though I’m not sure how spraying our decking does this). After he is through and back on his ship, I joke with my Belizean captain that he should have sprayed their trash and we get a good laugh out of it.
Here she is in all her monstrous glory: the Norwegian Dream in the middle of her 7-day “Texaribbean” journey, based out of exotic Houston and dumping trash on Progresso, Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, and Belize. The opening to the left of this photo, near the stern of the ship, is the anus out of which the giant Belize-bound turds were passed.
