Page 26: of Marine News Magazine (July 2018)

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COLUMN LUBRICANTS

EALs On Deck

Lubricants below deck and under the waterline are critical aspects to your vessel’s smooth operations. Neglecting what happens on deck can also cost you money, and run you afoul of the regulatory hammer.

By Ben Bryant

If your environmental program for Consider the fate of lubricants used in vessel operations. vessel operations does not include lu- Each year your company purchases hundreds of pounds of bricants used in on-deck applications, lubricating products for use in deck machinery on each of you may be missing a golden oppor- your vessels. Some of the volume is returned in the form of tunity to be green. High-performance, oil changes. A small percentage is released to the environ- environmentally acceptable lubricants ment through accidental discharges, and yet much is sim- are available for these critical operations ply washed off, worn out, or disappears in quantities too and can play a signi? cant role in your small to be detected by an oil sheen. Added up across ? eets overall sustainability efforts. and across the industry, this volume of lubricants amounts

Bryant

The use of Environmentally Accept- to a considerable source of non-point pollution into the able Lubricants (EALs) ? rst came to the waterways. By converting the lubricants used in these ap- attention of vessel operators through requirements in the plications to EALs, you can signi? cantly reduce the impact 2013 Vessel General Permit, where the focus is on oil to of your operation on the environment.

water interfaces and equipment subject to immersion in water. As you continue to look for methods to minimize A R Q

SKING THE IGHT UESTIONS your operational impact on the environment, using EALs To begin a conversion to EALs, the ? rst question to ask in on-deck applications can be a cost-effective and opera- might be: “What is an EAL?” The complete answer can be tionally bene? cial next step. found in an appendix to the 2013 Vessel General Permit; how-

Commercial dredgers have myriad oil-to-water interfaces that must be considered.

(*) All images Credit: Klüber Lubrication

July 2018

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