Logistics of ballast water reception in Polish ports

Ballast water is commonly used in maritime transport to ensure the stability of vessels. It is taken on in ports of discharge and discharged into port waters at places of cargo loading. Along with the ballast water, various types of living organisms (at different stages of their life cycle) are taken on board. These organisms often pose a serious ecological and economic problem in the aquatic environment to which they have been transferred with the ballast water. The problem was first noticed as early as 1903, when it was discovered that the Asian algae Biddulphia sinensis (phytoplankton) had been transferred from the China Sea to the North Sea with ballast water, where it subsequently multiplied on a massive scale. The problem of the introduction of species that became invasive in their new environment began to grow in the last decades of the previous century, along with increasingly frequent reports on the negative effects of organisms transferred in ballast water on the biotic and abiotic environment,3,4. In order to solve the problem, the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), operating within the IMO, led to the creation in 2004 of the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments, referred to in short as the BWM Convention. (…)

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