Waste processing equipment developed and Implemented to allow existing ships to meet current environmental requirements has sometimes created new problems and costs for the crew, the ship's life-cycle managers, or shoreside support activities. New platforms offer the opportunity to integrate ship-wide waste management and pollution prevention strategies and systems early into the ship design, but this requires the identification and careful analysis of interrelated costs and benefits at different stages of the vessel's life cycle. NAVSEA's environmental RDT&E approach for both backfit and forward-fit situations focuses on maximizing reductions in total ownership cost (TOC) by optimizing the environmental-related tradeoffs across the vessel's life-cycle stages, there by minimizing the impacts to both the environment and the ship.
Fleet operational considerations are also important in evaluating the impacts of environmental restrictions and the Navy's solutions to these restrictions. Cost-effective and efficient shipboard environmental performance is key to enhancing a vessel's warfighting and peacetime capabilities and readiness through sustained littoral presence, reduced crew burden, improved quality of life at sea, unimpeded port access and better public relations. The Navy cannot allow legal environmental requirements to hamper the national security responsibilities of its ships and submarines or compromise the safety of the vessels or their crews. This means that wastes cannot be held onboard for long periods, that vessels should not be forced to interrupt operations to dispose of their wastes, and that vessels should not have to rely unduly on shoreside support for waste management, especially where foreign ports will not accept offloaded wastes.
The Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) is helping to implement the Office of the Chief of Naval Operation' vision for the environmentally sound ship of the 21st century (ESS-21) , which is being implemented through the CNO's Environmental Protection, Safety and Occupational Health Division (N45). The ESS21 vision for new ship design requires environmentally compatible worldwide Fleet operations without degradation of mission or quality of life, shipboard waste treatment or destruction to the extent practicable, and minimal waste-related logistics and shore support. The Ship Research and Development Group within NAVSEA plans and executes the Shipboard Waste Management RDT&E Program, which has as its goal the development of shipboard equipment, systems, and procedures to manage ship wastes in compliance with existing and anticipated environmental restrictions worldwide without jeopardizing ship mission, survivability, or habitability and to minimize the cost of Fleet environmental compliance. The program is geared to achieving the ESS-21 vision through both evolutionary and revolutionary technology advances that will ensure that interim environmental solutions will be available for existing and new-construction vessels even while ship-wide environmental systems are being planned for early integration into new ship designs.
The Shipboard Waste Management RDT&E Program encompasses a wide range of projects that address several types of environmental problems on ships and submarines:
・"Traditional" high-volume wastes (garbage, bilgewater, blackwater, and graywater)
・Used/excess hazardous materials
・Other wastes that are targeted for regulation on Navy vessels (engine and incinerator air emissions, other low-volume liquid effluents (e.g., aircraft-carrier catapult oily wastes), etc. )
・Ozone depleting substances (chiorofluorocarbon refrigerants and solvents, Halon fire suppression agents), which are not actually shipboard "wastes"
