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BALLAST WATER
Since the rules requiring operators to address the issue of ballast water management came into force, there has been what Mark Riggio of Filtersafe describes as a tectonic shift from compliance to actually living with the ballast water system installed on the ship
BUCKING THE SYSTEM
Mark Riggio Head of Marine, Filtersafe Automatic Screen Filtration
“When people say that a ballast water system doesn’t work, there are really only two things they are talking about,” says Mark Riggio, head of marine based in Israel, Filtersafe Automatic Screen Filtration. “Eighty per cent of the time, they are talking about the filter and it is the filter that is slowing down flows. It is the filter mesh that is clogging and creating the issue that they have.” According to Riggio, when ballast water management approval standards were initially introduced, owners and operators scrambled to get the cheapest equipment that would be compliant. Now, he says, we have reached a state in the retrofitting cycle where operators are moving from the bare fact of compliance to considering whether the system actually works in practice; whether it needs additions to improve performance or changed completely. It is no longer just a question of ensuring compliance with the regulations, he explains, but of actually having a system on board
C L E A N S H I P P I N G INTERNATIONAL – Autumn 2021
that meets the operating profile of the ship in question. Systems are designed to work at the test facility, he explains, but that creates certain limitations when you take them out of the test facility and put them on an actual ship. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) addressed this with onboard testing, but again there was something of a disconnect, Riggio believes, because the manufacturers themselves got to select which ship they used so that everything could be done perfectly. Once the doors were thrown open to fitting thousands of ships, this created a lot of challenges. Filters are tested for a very specific organic removal rate, he explains, but issues become apparent due to high sediment flows that ships would experience in operation. For example, there might be a number of different river deltas feeding into ports with different sediment loads and ships serving those ports could be drawing a lot of mud, silt and dirt into the
