Carnival cruise ship company fined US$20 million

Troubled waters: Carnival Corp. cruise ship Fascination sails out of in Miami. Photo / Getty Images

Carnival Corp. will need to cough up an additional $US20 million after Princess Cruises, a Carnival subsidiary, admitted violating its probation from a 2016 conviction for improper waste disposal, reports the New York Times.

Carnival is accused of releasing food and plastic waste into the ocean in the Bahamas, failing to record waste disposal accurately, falsifying training records, and secretly examining ships to fix compliance issues before third-party inspections could do so, without reporting its findings to the inspectors, a court filing submitted on Monday said.

Carnival Corp. has only seven days to pay the fine, and faces new probation requirements. If Carnival does not meet deadlines to revamp its dirty habits, it will have to pay additional penalties of $US1 million to $US10 million a day.

In 2016, Princess Cruise Lines agreed to pay a US$40 million penalty for illegally dumping oil-contaminated waste into the sea and trying to cover it up.

Vessel pollution is just one of the many ways humans present a threat to ocean life today.

Ship traffic and noise can kill sea creatures, plastic kills sea creatures, and climate change caused by human activity are destroying many ocean ecosystems.

Cruise lines have been closely watched for violations of environmental rules for decades now. However, even the most efficient cruise ships can emit three to four times as much carbon dioxide per passenger-mile as a plane can.

Carnival is on probation for polluting the ocean. They're still doing it, court records show. Photo / Getty

According to a report from a court-appointed monitor, Carnival violated environmental laws at least 800 times in the first year of the probation. Carnival Corp. is credited with reporting violations to authorities directly or noting them in their internal records. None of the violations was intentional, according to the report.

But the list is fairly damning: systematically dumping oily waste into the ocean and lying about it to regulators, its ships illegally discharged more than a half-million gallons of treated sewage, gray water, oil and food waste, and burned heavy fuel oil in ports and waters close to shores around the world, the Miami Herald reported.

"Carnival Corporation remains committed to environmental excellence and protecting the environment in which we live, work, and travel," a Carnival representative said. "Our aspiration is to leave the places we touch even better than when we first arrived."