Carl M. Adema, Anthony T. Rodriguez, and Christopher H.
Crane
Minimizing Environmental Impacts on Naval Forces:
RDT&E Strategy for Environmental Systems Cross-Fleet
Commonality
ABSTRACT
International, national, and local laws
and regulations restrict waste discharges from
Navy ships and submarines, creating significant
space and manning burdens, health and safety
risks, waste offload and disposal costs, and
worldwide reliance on shoreside support
infrastructure. Shipboard environmental
problems can also interrupt operations and
training exercises, jeopardize readiness, and
adversely affect relations with environmental
authorities, allied navies, host countries, and
environmental advocacy groups. Environmental
issues are becoming more acute as the Fleet
operates increasingly in littoral areas and in
internationally designated areas where
environmental constraints are particularly strict.
All Navy vessels have similar basic
environmental needs, regardless of platform and
mission differences. This suggests that the key
to minimizing the Fleets environmental
compliance costs and to maximizing its
operational flexibility is to standardize
shipboard environmental systems across the
widest range of vessels possible. Shipboard
environmental systems commonality will have
important total-ownership-cost and operational
benefits for naval forces by: standardizing the
allocation and design of shipboard spaces for
environmental systems; reducing the
proliferation of different ship environmental
solutions; reducing acquisition costs through
centrally-procured environmental equipment and
system upgradeability; simplifying installation
with modular hardware and standard
compartment interfaces; reducing procurement
and logistics costs by ensuring multiple
(competitive) suppliers and minimizing the
variety of spare parts; facilitating efficient
configuration management; simplifying
maintenance and logistics support through
interchangeable components; and minimizing
environmental-related manning and training
requirements for similar systems across different
platforms.
The Office of the Chief of Naval
Operations and the Naval Sea Systems
Command (NAVSEA) are sponsoring RDT&E
in several crucial areas under the Shipboard
Waste Management Program directed at Fleet-
wide environmental solutions. Shipboard
environmental systems commonality is being
maximized through the intelligent incorporation
of commercial products and standards, emphasis
on scalability and modularity, and the
application of open-architecture design
processes. There are different approaches for
achieving commonality depending on the classes
of ships involved, specific waste(s), ships
operating profiles, applicable environmental
regulations, and other factors. The type and
degree of commonality will by driven by the
realities of development and implementation
resources, schedules, and tradeoffs as much as
by design and engineering principles. The
Navys development of solid waste processing
equipment during the 1990s and the current
development of oily waste membrane treatment
systems offer contrasting strategies for achieving
commonality in shipboard environmental
systems.
INTRODUCTION
Navy combatant ships and submarines
are very different from commercial cargo and
passenger ships. Most of the differences arise
because Navy vessels are designed to fight wars
and to convincingly convey that capability
during peacetime. Navy warships and
submarines are only large enough to hold the
weapons, combat systems, propulsion systems,
hull, mechanical, and electrical (HM&E)
equipment, and crew needed to carry out their
military missions. Until the 1970s, there was
little impetus to seriously consider pollution
abatement as a significant design or mission
requirement for several reasons:
The Navy Fleet constituted a very small
portion of the worlds and even U.S.
shipping, and thus contributed relatively
little to overall marine pollution problems.
Deck space was too valuable, in terms of
monetary cost and operational priorities,
to allocate significant shipboard space to
holding or treating wastes.
Holding wastes on board ship introduced
additional safety, health, sanitation, and
morale concerns to an already hazardous
and demanding working and living
environment.
The crews were busy with warfighting,
ship operation and maintenance, and
training duties and had little time to
devote to waste management chores.
Relatively little was known then about the
impacts of wastes discharged at sea on the
marine environment.
In recognition of the above constraints, the
Navy typically was exempt from the
environmental laws and regulations
applied to the commercial maritime sector.
Except for the last two items above, these
concerns are no less valid today. In fact, the
Fleet is busier now than during the Cold War,
ships and submarines are even more costly, and
manpower constitutes an increasing proportion
of the Fleets operating budget. Nevertheless,
five trends over the last 25 years caused the
Navy to place greater emphasis on its Fleet
environmental objectives:
The growing willingness of environmental
legislators and regulators to withhold
traditional national-security exemptions
from the Navy and to actually target the
Navy for new environmental
requirements.
The worldwide expansion of U.S.
peacetime naval operations that raise the
visibility and increase the littoral presence
of ships and submarines.
A growing, more coordinated, and
increasingly influential international
environmental advocacy community.
The increasing costs and political risks
of offloading wastes from Navy vessels in
U.S. and especially foreign ports for local
disposal.
The unacceptable shipboard safety, health,
and morale impacts of holding larger
volumes of wastes as legal discharge
restrictions have intensified.
The greater environmental awareness and
concern of each new generation of Sailors.
Environmental Driver
Environmental issues can create serious
operational problems and cost implications for
the Fleet, ranging from delays in new vessel
shock testing due to the proximity of legally-
protected marine animals, to diverting ships
from littoral waters where they are operating to
discharge wastes in the open ocean. Over the
last two decades, the Navy has increasingly
incorporated environmental considerations into
its ship design processes and operating
principles. Environmental compliance,
including anticipated requirements that will
apply to existing and new vessels over their
lifetimes, is now a top-level operational
requirement for new ship and submarine
designs, routinely appearing in program
documents (Mission Needs Statement (MNS),
Operational Requirements Document (ORD),
solicitation, etc.) for a new platform. For
example, the solicitation for the Zumwalt
(DD 21) Class design program requires
environmental compliance for design,
modernization, and disposal, as well as an
Environmental, Safety, and Health (ESH)
evaluation. The ORD for the new T-AKE Class
states that it will conduct operations, in port
and at sea, in such a manner as to minimize
adverse impact on the marine environmentThe
ship will be compliant with all applicable
environmentalregulations, Navy policies,
international agreements, and industry
standards. The Programmatic Environmental,
Safety, and Health Evaluation (PESHE) for the
T-AKE Class says that the ships will meet or
exceed environmental regulations and policies
for ten years after delivery and will minimize
adverse environmental impacts over its life-
cycle. Although this new support ship is not
representative of the Navys typical surface
combatant in terms of crew size, waste volumes
generated, and mission profile, it reflects the
seriousness with which life-cycle environmental
considerations are being incorporated into new
ship designs.
The Secretary of Defenses 2001 Annual
Report to the President and the Congress states
that ...international standards for ship pollution
require DoD to design ships that strictly control
their discharges of waste and that ...ship
designs for the LPD 17, the DD 21, and
auxiliary cargo ships emphasize minimizing
discharges to ensure global access to ports.
DoD Directive 5000.1, The Defense
Acquisition System, of 23 October 2000
requires program managers of all acquisition
programs to give full consideration to, among
other things, environmental, safety, and
occupational health factors as they try to
optimize total system performance and minimize
total ownership cost (TOC). Interim Regulation
DoD 5000.2-R on Mandatory Procedures for
Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs)
and Major Automated Information System
(MAIS) Acquisition Programs of 4 January
2001 states that a system design shall be capable
of being tested, operated, maintained, repaired,
and disposed of in accordance with
environmental, safety, and health (ESOH)
statutes, regulations and policies and that ESOH
considerations shall be integrated into the
systems engineering process. It also states that
the users performance requirements that are
being addressed by an acquisition program shall
include environmental requirements and that
TOC includes environmental costs. This DoD
acquisition guidance leaves no doubt that
environmental compliance must be an integral
part of the design and systems engineering
process from life-cycle and TOC perspectives.
The Navys afloat environmental
requirements and guidance are documented
primarily in Chapter 19 (Environmental
Compliance Afloat) of OPNAVINST
5090.1B (CH-2), Environmental and Natural
Resource Protection Manual. This states that
Protection of the marine environment is
mission essential. Navy ships shall conduct
operations, in port and at sea, minimizing or
eliminating any adverse impact on the marine
environment. Although the Office of the Chief
of Naval Operations provides overall
compliance guidance in this instruction, each
NAVSEA program office must evaluate the
applicability and impacts of environmental laws,
regulations, and treaties for its platforms and
formulate an appropriate implementation plan
within TOC and schedule constraints. The
Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Installations
and Environment) is in the process of clarifying
Fleet environmental compliance requirements in
response to recent environmental problems
encountered during at-sea exercises and training.
The Navys intent to comply with environmental
laws, regulations, executive orders, and
international agreements is clear. Exactly what
the environmental requirements are, however, is
not always so definitive, especially their
implications for the design, operation,
modernization, and disposal of each Navy ship
and submarine. Furthermore, institutionalizing
an environmental decision-making process that
encompasses the entire life cycle of a Navy
vessel and recognizes the myriad tradeoffs
involved remains a challenge in the face of
warfighting-driven design traditions.
Acquisition Strategy
As environmental laws and regulations
increasingly curtail the types and amounts of
wastes that can be discharged at sea, the
prospects of retaining additional wastes on board
and/or interrupting operations at sea to transport
wastes to port or beyond restricted waters have
focused Navy attention on more organic
shipboard waste management capabilities. This,
in turn, has resulted in environmental control
systems becoming more significant parts of
ships and submarines. For example, the
development, acquisition, and Fleet-wide
installation of the suite of solid waste processing
equipment during the 1990s cost nearly $500M,
with every surface combatant from frigates on
up receiving several pieces of equipment.
Shipboard waste management has become much
more than purchasing commercial trash
compactors or even installing holding tanks.
This requires consideration of the same design,
acquisition, and logistics principles used for
major shipboard HM&E systems. Many aspects
of recent DoD acquisition guidelines that apply
to the development of weapons and other major
shipboard systems also directly or indirectly
influence pollution control and other
environmental systems as they become more
significant acquisition items.
As the cost and shipboard space
associated with pollution prevention and control
systems increase, it becomes more important to
avoid a multitude of class- and hull-specific
hardware, software, control systems, crew waste
management practices, and logistics support
requirements. The Navy must minimize the
escalation of the Fleets environmental-related
TOC while complying with environmental
requirements. This is complicated by the fact
that different classes of Navy vessels have
different missions, weapons and auxiliary
systems, configurations, arrangements, and crew
sizes and they generate different types and
amounts of wastes. They also differ in
deployment scenarios in terms of relative times
spent in the open ocean, internationally-
designated special areas, littoral waters, and
port.
Shipboard pollution control systems can
sometimes be standardized across several hull
types or throughout the entire Fleet, while at
other times a one-size-fits-all approach is not
technically appropriate. The Navys primary
challenge is to provide each vessel with waste
management capabilities that fully comply with
all applicable existing and projected
environmental requirements while reducing the
proliferation of platform-unique solutions that
require different shipboard locations and
arrangements, operator and maintenance
training, logistics support, crew waste handling
procedures, and residual waste disposal
requirements. Shipboard environmental systems
commonality across the Fleet will provide
substantial benefits to the Fleet and to the Navy
as a whole. It must be tempered, though, by the
realities of the availability and suitability of
commercial products over time, the lure of
technology-insertion opportunities for new-
construction and especially new-design vessels,
and growing cost and manning pressures.
There are several strategies for
achieving environmental equipment and systems
commonality. It is unlikely that any single one
will always be the preferred method because of
the need to adapt to changing Navy and joint
warfare visions, U.S. and allied Naval Force
structure requirements, operational and
deployment scenarios, ship designs, technology
maturity and upgrade opportunities, acquisition
rules, shipboard manning levels, and logistics
support paradigms.
Ship-to-ship variations in environmental
capabilities across a battle force can interrupt
and delay operations and exercises while
individual vessels leave station to discharge
wastes beyond discharge-restricted zones or
offload wastes in port according to specific
shipboard constraints. With the Navy taking on
increased littoral and ground support warfighting
responsibilities, this operational problem will
become more pronounced in the future. A
unified environmental capability for a battle
force minimizes the operational impacts of
environmental requirements, provides
consistency for ship operators and crews, and
encourages the adoption of realistic
environmental requirements for naval vessels in
the area of international law and practice.
FLEET ENVIRONMENTAL
REQUIREMENTS
Navy ships and submarines are subject
to a wide variety of laws, regulations, and
policies that directly or indirectly influence how
their wastes must be managed. These influences
range from a specific prohibition on the
overboard discharge of a certain type of waste
within a set distance from land, to the high cost
of handling and disposal of an offloaded waste
considered hazardous, to top-level DoD and
Navy commitments to preserve and enhance the
marine environment. A wide variety of U.S.
laws and regulations apply to naval vessels, as
highlighted in Table 1. These environmental
requirements range from the very high-level
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and
Executive Order 12114, which require the Navy
 TABLE 1. Major Laws and Other Legal Requirements Applicable to Navy Vessels

Solid Liquid Air Hazardous Other

Source of Environmental Requirements Wastes Wastes Emissions Materials Issues
Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships
Clean Air Act
Clean Water Act
Endangered Species Act
Marine Mammal Protection Act
Marine Plastic Pollution Research and Control Act
National Environmental Policy Act
Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act
Coastal Zone Management Act
Oil Pollution Act
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
Toxic Substances Control Act
U.S. Public Vessel Medical Waste Anti-Dumping Act
Executive Order 12088 (Federal pollution standards)
Executive Order 12114 (environmental effects abroad)
Executive Order 12843 (Federal procurement requirements)
Executive Order 13089 (coral reef protection)
Executive Order 13101 (greening the government)
Executive Order 13112 (invasive species)
Executive Order 13148 (greening the government)
Executive Order 13158 (marine protected areas)
State and local laws and regulations
International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution
from Ships (MARPOL 73/78)
Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone
Layer
Foreign-country laws, regulations, and policies (SOFAs)
DoD and Navy directives and instructions

to assess the potential environmental existing environmental requirements, there are

consequences of proposed actions that could
affect the quality of the environment, to the very
topic-specific Executive Order 13089 on
protecting coral reefs.
The annual National Defense
Authorization Act is one legislative vehicle used
to target DoD and the Navy for new
environmental requirements. For example, this
law was used to amend the Clean Water Act in
FY94 and FY97 to impose solid waste discharge
restrictions on the Navy Fleet and in FY96 to
create a new DoD-wide program to regulate the
discharge of liquid wastes from vessels within
12 nm of the U.S. In addition to complying with
several emerging legislative and regulatory
developments with important implications for
the legacy Fleet and all future platforms,
including:
New Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) National Ambient Air Quality
Standards (NAAQS) for ozone and
particulates.
A proposed annex under MARPOL 73/78
that would restrict blackwater discharges
within 12 nm of land.
 An anticipated annex under MARPOL
73/78 that would cover air emissions from
shipboard engines and incinerators.
An anticipated annex under MARPOL
73/78 that would seek to prevent the
spread of non-indigenous species
inadvertently carried by ocean-going
vessels.
The CWAs Uniform National Discharge
Standards (UNDS) that will require
shipboard Marine Pollution Control
Devices (MPCDs) for 25 liquid
discharges.
Expanding protections for marine animals
(whales, sea turtles, etc.) under the Marine
Mammal Protection Act and Endangered
Species Act.
As environmental laws are reauthorized and
amended and as new implementing regulations
are promulgated, the Navy can face new and
unexpected environmental compliance issues.
The Navy routinely predicts future military
threats against which it must plan Fleet
operations and new ship designs, but forecasting
environmental requirements based on legal and
regulatory developments is fraught with
uncertainty.
DoD and Navy directives and
instructions implement the various legal
requirements and apply other environmental
policies that go beyond the laws and regulations.
For example, OPNAVINST 5090.1B (CH-1)
requires ships to hold and bring back hazardous
materials even though the Clean Water Act
prohibits discharge only within 200 nm. DoD
5000.2-R integrates environmental
considerations into the acquisition process by
requiring, for example: inclusion of
environmental requirements among users
performance requirements; definition of the
environmental compliance portion of TOC;
integration of environmental, safety, and health
considerations into the systems engineering
process (through a PESHE that must be updated
throughout the systems life cycle); compliance
with ESOH statutes, regulations, and policies
during testing, operation, maintenance, and
repair; hazardous materials
elimination/reduction; and pollution prevention.
In 1989, recognizing that Navy ships
and submarines must be able to travel in any
body of water and visit any port worldwide, the
Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO)
formulated a vision for the environmentally
sound ship of the 21st century (ESS-21). This
vision now encompasses several thrusts for the
design and operation of new ships:
Ships should be able to operate in U.S.,
foreign, and international waters without
degradation of mission or quality of life
attributable to environmental laws and
regulations.
Ships should cause no significant adverse
environmental impacts.
Ships must be designed and operated to
minimize waste generation.
Wastes should be treated or destroyed on
board to the extent practicable.
Waste-related logistics cost and shore
dependence should be minimized.
The vision focuses on new-design ships and
submarines that will operate well into this
century. These new platforms offer the greatest
opportunity to integrate advanced waste
management technologies, minimize ship space
devoted to pollution control, and reduce the
manning burden of sorting and handling wastes.
To achieve the CNO vision, designers and naval
architects must consider environmental
compliance as a top level design requirement
commensurate with military priorities. New-
design platforms are the primary focus of the
ESS-21 vision because they provide the clean
slate needed for the most revolutionary
approaches to environmental compliance.
However, ships being constructed to an existing
design, and even some existing ships, can adopt
evolutionary environmental improvements. The
ESS-21 vision has become even more relevant in
the last few years as the Navy Fleet has been
tasked with expanding peacetime
responsibilities that involve increased presence
in littoral waters and foreign ports, where
discharges are either prohibited or generate local
resistance.
There was a time when Navy shipboard
waste management was largely an afterthought.
For example, ships purchased their own
commercial trash compactors (that proved to be
short lived on warships) and the Navy backfit
holding tanks for blackwater that was discharged
beyond certain distances from shore. Pollution
control and other environmental systems are not
mission-critical in the sense that weapons,
propulsion, and HM&E systems are vital for
warfighting and for vessel and crew safety.
Over the last 25 years, the Navy has become
subject to more diverse and stricter
environmental-related requirements, which
range from legislative and regulatory restrictions
on overboard waste discharges to more general
Navy ship design and shipboard systems
engineering practices. This has elevated
environmental compliance and engineering to
the mission visibility level, as reflected in the
top-level operational requirements for new-
design platforms (LPD 17, CVN 77, DD 21,
CVN(X), JCC(X), etc.). Ship designers and
builders must now consider life-cycle pollution
control and other environmental requirements at
the earliest stages of ship and system design to
ensure that new platforms are not already out of
compliance when they enter service.
FLEET ENVIRONMENTAL
COMPLIANCE
In addition to legal and policy
requirements that dictate how an individual ship
or submarine should manage its wastes, the role
of that vessel in an operational context also
influences the capabilities and procedures
employed. For example, it may be appropriate
for a ship operating or transiting alone to leave a
Segregate
Waste
& Collect
FIGURE 1. Navy Shipboard Waste Management Options
discharge-restricted area to release waste in
international waters, but not when it is part of a
naval force or when it is providing shore
support. Ships and submarines typically employ
a combination of several strategies to comply
with environmental restrictions on waste
discharge at sea:
Discharge raw or treated wastes overboard
where allowed by laws and regulations.
Hold raw or treated wastes where
practicable for overboard discharge
(where allowed) or return to shore.
Destroy wastes on board, with discharge
or return-to-shore of minimal processing
residues.
These waste management strategies are
represented in Figure 1. While this would seem
to provide some flexibility in outfitting ships
and submarines with pollution control
capabilities, these options are constrained by
numerous factors, including:
Distance-from-shore and area-wide
restrictions on overboard discharges.
Operational factors (mission, location,
time on station, readiness requirements,
safety and health risks, etc.).
Vessel size and manning limitations.
Suitability of waste processing equipment
for the demanding Navy shipboard
environment (ship motion, shock,
vibration, electromagnetic compatibility,
signatures, etc.)
Availability and cost of adequate
shoreside offload and disposal facilities.
Process /
Treat
Discharge
Hold
Return to
Shore
 This introduces complexity from ship
design, technology implementation, and Fleet
operational perspectives. The Fleet prefers to
train the way it fights, so altering the way a
ship manages its wastes in response to changing
environmental requirements as the ship moves
from blue water, to littoral areas, to ports, to the
International Maritime Organization (IMO)
designated special areas introduces an element
of uncertainty and can lead to changing
treatment requirements and manpower required
to collect, handle, process, and store wastes. A
vessels crew must know the ship's location to
ascertain the discharge restrictions that are in
force and what shipboard waste management
procedures the crew will have to perform. The
Office of the Chief of Naval Operations has
published and distributes to the Fleet the whiz
wheel to assist vessel Commanding Officers
and crews in determining their location-specific
waste handling requirements. Nevertheless,
there is the potential for confusion and for
improper waste management practices.
Ideally, every ship and submarine would
have shipboard waste management practices and
systems that could be used regardless of
geographic location. Hence, there would be no
risk of discharging something overboard where
it is not allowed, vessels would not have to
consider moving from restricted to unrestricted
waters to discharge, and crews would not have
to contend with accumulating wastes on board.
The best way to address these uncertainties
would be to have unmanned waste processing
systems that run continuously, regardless of
the ships location or operational status. For
example, Navy surface ships are required by law
to operate their new solid waste pulpers and
shredders only near shore and in the MARPOL
in-effect special areas, but the Navy has
committed to operating this waste processing
equipment. There is a need to standardize
shipboard environmental systems and
capabilities across the Fleet as much as possible
to bring that Fleet-wide vision closer to reality
and to achieve operational, compliance, human
interface, and cost benefits.
CROSS-FLEET COMMONALITY
Navy ships and submarines need
environmental systems and practices that
comply with legal requirements and enhance
operational effectiveness and flexibility. These
systems and practices should:
Facilitate the mission of surface ships and
submarines by enabling operations in
U.S., international, and foreign waters, as
well as access to U.S. and foreign ports,
without restrictions and/or additional costs
associated with environmental laws,
regulations, or policies and without other
significant compromises.
Minimize the environmental-related total
ownership cost (TOC) of Fleet vessels
through planned and coordinated tradeoffs
among the life-cycle phases of the
vessel/system (design and development,
procurement, operations and maintenance,
modernization, and disposal).
Enhance shipboard safety, health, and
quality of life for Sailors.
These objectives may not always be compatible,
e.g., where the installation of waste processing
equipment is associated with additional manning
and (processed) waste holding. One approach
for meeting these objectives while minimizing
the associated burden and cost to the Fleet is to
make environmental systems and procedures
uniform throughout the Fleet. Such
commonality cannot be achieved haphazardly,
but must be driven by a farsighted and
coordinated NAVSEA corporate strategy. It
should involve all elements of the naval
community and encompass all phases of the ship
life cycle (design, construction, operation, and
disposal).
Commonality As Part of Acquisition
Guidance
The word commonality appears only
four times in the 155-page DoD 5000.2-R
(Mandatory Procedures for MDAPs and MAIS
Acquisition Programs). Although this might
imply that commonality is not an important
acquisition concept, it is mentioned in the
critical areas of analysis of alternatives (AoA),
modeling and simulation, open systems design,
and interoperability through standardization.
Commonality does not appear at all in the
latest versions of DoD Directive 5000.1 (The
Defense Acquisition System) and DoD
Instruction 5000.2 (Operation of the Defense
Acquisition System). Nevertheless, the concept
of commonality pervades these acquisition rules
and guidance through several programmatic
thrusts, including performance-based
requirements, time-phased requirements driven
by projected threat assessments and technology,
open systems engineering, modularity,
interoperability, planned upgrades, evolutionary
acquisition (blocks), priority consideration of
commercial products and standards, logistics
supportability, and competitive sourcing.
Commonality can provide major
acquisition benefits in several areas.
Performance requirements combined with space
and arrangement surveys of several ship classes
can facilitate open-architecture system designs
that establish standardized dimensions, ship
service connections, and technology refreshment
strategies based on upgradable commercial
components. Modular or scalable systems can
allow the same technology to be used on a
variety of ships, reducing training requirements
and simplifying shore-to-ship and ship-to-ship
logistics support. The greater the degree of
commonality, especially in terms of
commercial-based open design, the stronger is
both the competition and the industrial base. In
short, maximizing environmental systems
commonality is an excellent way to help meet
acquisition objectives while complying with
todays laws and regulations and establishing a
framework for meeting tomorrows
environmental requirements with minimal
disruption to shipboard life.
What is Environmental Systems
Commonality?
Commonality is not a simple or fixed
concept in a naval context. In a broad sense,
commonality refers to the degree to which the
environmental protection capabilities of ships
and ship systems are similar in form, fit, and
function. This encompasses many different
aspects of ship design, construction, and
operation, including:
Global legal environmental requirements.
Military mission and operational
requirements.
Technology, design, and engineering.
Source of systems and equipment
(commercial, navalized commercial,
Navy-developed).
Installation and arrangement.
Performance and system-to-ship
interfaces.
Human interfaces (equipment operation,
training, etc.).
System monitoring and control.
Configuration management.
Worldwide logistics support.
Commonality amongst Navy shipboard
pollution abatement systems has been in place
for decades. At a very basic level of
commonality, blackwater collection, holding and
transfer (CHT) systems on surface ships use
standardized valves and connections so that
wastewater can be transferred to any pierside
receiving facility either directly or through
rafted ships alongside each other. The Navy-
designed 10NP oil/water separator (OWS) is
used on most surface combatants to remove bulk
oil from bilgewater prior to discharge. Identical
large pulpers installed on larger ships grind
paper, cardboard, and food for overboard
discharge. Standardized hazardous materials
inventory management tools and handling
guidelines are implemented throughout the
Fleet. Standardized equipment in these areas
has enabled ships of different classes to retain
similar capability and a high degree of
interoperability. However, emerging
environmental regulations will further curtail
overboard waste discharges and require
secondary waste treatment, and possibly
tertiary treatment or destruction, to achieve
discharge or environmental quality criteria. This
will result in additional shipboard environmental
equipment that will exacerbate the costs and
burden of Fleet environmental compliance. The
development and implementation of shipboard
environmental systems can address commonality
through careful application of everyday design
and engineering principles plus a variety of tools
that the Navy is now bringing to bear upon all
shipboard systems, including open system
architecture (OSA), modularity, condition-based
maintenance (CBM), engineering for reduced
maintenance (ERM), and distance support.
There is even a Fleet operational element of
commonality for example, the Navy operates
its shipboard solid waste processing equipment
everywhere, thereby avoiding any possible
confusion about where to operate this equipment
and simplifying training requirements.
Component
Subsystem
Garbage System
Trash
Platform
Plastics
BattleForce
Bilgewater
Blackwater
Figure 2. Environmental Systems Commonality and Fleet Architecture
BATTLE FORCE LEVEL (CROSS-
PLATFORM) COMMONALITY
If the vessels within a battle force do not
have the same environmental capability,
operations may have to be modified to
accommodate a specific vessels inability to
comply with the prevailing environmental
regulations. For example, during littoral
peacekeeping missions and training operations, a
vessel that does not have sewage treatment
capability (nearly all surface ships) must pull off
station every few hours to discharge sewage
beyond a legally specified distance from shore,
as governed by foreign and domestic regulations
for those territorial waters. Such actions disrupt
battle force operations and result in additional
costs and crew burden. In contrast, most ships
have been outfitted with standardized OWSs
such that onboard processing of bilgewater is
The full consideration of commonality
opportunities spans all levels of ship and Fleet
architecture (see Figure 2): component,
subsystem, system, platform, and battle force.
Commonality will not always have to be
established at every architecture level for a
particular waste or system, but the feasibility,
requirements, benefits, and costs of
commonality at each level should be evaluated.
Marine Animals
Hazardous Materials
Air Emissions
Paints & Coatings
Other Liquid Discharges
-- Deck runoff
-- Chain locker effluent
Graywater -- Elevator pit effluent
-- 20 others
possible without disruption to on-going
operations. Naval operations in support of low-
level conflicts and joint training exercises still
require full maritime environmental compliance
for all wastes including sewage, oily wastes,
solid and medical wastes, and hazardous
materials. Fleet-wide environmental
performance standards will enable equitable
environmental capability across a battle force
such that operations are not interrupted or
impeded by environmental regulations and
differing capabilities by vessel class. Common
performance standards coupled to common
interface specifications for the Fleets pollution
abatement systems will not only enable uniform
vessel environmental capability but also offer
promise of compliance at a lower total cost.
PLATFORM LEVEL COMMONALITY
Although pollution abatement
commonality can exert a measurable impact on
Navy vessel ownership costs, its roots begin
with the decisions made during the design and
acquisition phases of a vessel and continue to be
manifested through the operation, upgrade, and
disposal phases of the life cycle. With the onset
of acquisition reform and innovative ship service
arrangements, special attention must be paid to
retaining a uniform level of platform
environmental performance while maximizing
industrial competition and the insertion, where
appropriate, of commercial innovation and
practice. However, the application of
performance specifications alone across the
Fleet cannot achieve a uniform level of
compliance without a significant increase in cost
as driven by the life cycle of varied industrial
equipment, processes, and logistics software that
might be available for the Navys consideration.
Only the coupling of environmental performance
specifications with the description and
management of critical shipboard interface
specifications will ensure a degree of
commonality within a class of ships that can be
held nearly constant across the Fleet. At the
platform level, a common functional capability
must be established and specified to attain a
uniform environmental capability at the battle
group level. Some platform level requirements
are easily quantified, such as the requirement to
not discharge any oily water containing more
than 15 ppm of oil. Other requirements,
however, are more difficult to articulate, such as
compliance with changing laws and regulations
governing vessel interactions with protected
marine animals (whales, sea turtles, etc.). In
either case, a uniform and common set of
environmental requirements, objectives, and
thresholds for every platform in the Fleet,
coupled with common and demonstrated
environmental functional capabilities, will
enable affordable environmental compliance
into the 21st century. Achieving such affordable
future environmental compliance necessitates
commonality at the next lower (system) level of
ship design, in addition to a common set of
operational requirements (goals, objectives, and
thresholds) to guide new ships construction.
SYSTEM AND COMPONENT LEVEL
COMMONALITY
Although the environmental and TOC
drivers for commonality become evident at the
battle force and platform levels, pollution
abatement commonality is developed,
engineered and implemented at the systems level
of ship design. Performance specifications,
critical interface specifications, and qualification
testing (verification) are the tools needed to
describe a pollution abatement or prevention
system. Regardless of the state of the art for any
technology, ranging from commercial-off-the-
shelf (COTS) to Navy developmental, the
application of performance and interface
specifications to the acquisition process will
result in the level of commonality that is optimal
for the Navy. Navy-specified performance and
testing requirements ensure that a vendor or
shipbuilder delivers an acceptable product. A
high degree of commonality in cross-Fleet
environmental capability, compartment design,
and vendor competition can be achieved by
holding the performance and critical interface
specifications constant throughout the
acquisition of a ship and applying these same
requirements and specifications across vessel
classes as much as possible.
For example, Navy ship design practice
has evolved common bilge handling and
management techniques and reflects a recent
trend to minimize the volume of bilgewater
generated as a pollution prevention strategy. In
practice, all platforms must implement the same
functional capability for bilgewater
management. All ships have bilgewater
management systems composed of bilge
pockets, bilge and oil (B&O) plumbing, oily
waste holding tank, waste oil tank, an oil/water
separator, and associated damage control or
engineering remote displays. Common
compartment designs and modules can be
employed using uniform performance
requirements and interfaces to provide the
platform with the required capability. These
uniform requirements and interface
specifications can be readily applied to different
flights of the same platform, in addition to
different platforms, at reduced acquisition and
life-cycle logistic support cost. In the case of an
OWS, for example, critical interface
specifications are detailed such that backfit
installations are not unique to every ship class.
Three sizes of a new secondary oily waste
treatment system are being developed for
surface ships that will, through performance and
interface specifications, yield a high degree of
Fleet commonality and a reduced logistics
burden to the Navy while maintaining
commercial competition and design innovation.
The construction of multiple flights of a
platform, e.g., the DDG 51 Class, can lead to the
reissuing of equipment contracts to various
vendors for the pollution abatement equipment.
The application of performance requirements
and critical interface specifications to this
contracting process will result in a greater level
of Fleet commonality, as well as increased
commercial competition and reduced acquisition
and installation costs. Other common
compartment-level designs include sewage
pump rooms, solid waste processing
compartments, hazardous material control
centers, and flammable material storage lockers.
Why Is Commonality a Good Thing?
Shipboard environmental systems
commonality will provide measurable and
intangible benefits in three areas: military
mission and ship operations; total ownership
cost; and safety, health, and quality of life (see
Table 2).
MILITARY MISSION AND
OPERATIONS
From the standpoint of a deployed naval
force, especially a joint or Allied force, it is
important that ships and submarines have
worldwide access to international and littoral
waters without having to interrupt operations or
exercises to transfer wastes at sea or in port or
discharge accumulating wastes outside of
environmentally restricted areas. Similar waste
holding and treatment capabilities across the
various vessels involved will minimize the
frequency of such interruptions and the steaming
hours devoted to waste management excursions,
and will provide the flexibility to operate in
international, regional, and littoral waters as a
cohesive naval force. Equivalent environmental
functional capability and common
environmental systems will ensure that the
readiness of each vessel in the battle force can
be maintained so that rapid response is not
compromised by a particular waste management
evolution, by having to apply disproportionate
manpower to environmental-related activities, or
by vessel- or class-unique logistics support
needs.
There is growing interest in tiered port
entry/support fees in some foreign countries
based on the environmental capabilities of
visiting ships. Should such cost preferences be
extended to naval vessels, especially if some sort
of vessel certification was required, it would
be imperative that U.S. Navy ships possess
environmental systems commonality. This will
ensure that U.S. vessels operating together are
not charged different fees and/or have different
port restrictions imposed on them that reflect
their different environmental capabilities. This
could be especially troublesome where foreign
naval vessels that are part of an international
operation or exercise qualify for preferred status.
In the worst case, one or more U.S. vessels
within a naval force could conceivably be denied
port entry. Shipboard environmental systems
commonality is an essential component of the
Navys development of new self-regulation
paradigms, whereby the Navy seeks relief from
inconsistent regulatory requirements in different
states and ports through the promulgation of
national environmental standards that reflect
what can be reasonably and practicably achieved
on warships. The most visible of these self-
regulation programs is the recent UNDS
provisions of the Clean Water Act, which
established a rulemaking process between DoD
and EPA for shipboard MPCDs for liquid
discharges (other than blackwater) from Navy
and other DoD vessels. This rulemaking
program was modeled on the Clean Water Act
provisions for sewage (blackwater) generated on
DoD vessels, which allowed DoD to set its own
discharge standards and identify a limited
number of shipboard control approaches (Marine
Sanitation Devices, MSDs) for meeting these
standards. The Navy must be able to
demonstrate Fleet-wide solutions to waste
management and other environmental issues to
 TABLE 2. Major Benefits of Shipboard Environmental Systems Commonality

Military Mission and Operations

Facilitate environmental system/performance compliance and/or certification for access to regulated waters &
ports
Minimize interruptions to operations & exercises to transfer or discharge wastes
Minimize ship-to-ship disparities in environmental-related readiness or manning
Enhance interoperability & standardization at sea & in port
Simplify logistics support (especially at battle force level)
Minimize risk that different vessels will be treated differently by foreign regulatory agencies or port authorities
Support new Navy self-regulation paradigms (e.g., Uniform National Discharge Standards)
Total Ownership Cost
Reduce acquisition cost by maximizing competition, achieving economies of scale, avoiding sole-
source/proprietary risks, enabling centralized procurement, streamlining procurement procedures &
documentation
Simplify design & configuration management through single or limited number of designs & open system
architecture
Minimize number of installation configuration, arrangement, & guidance/documentation variations
Normalize maintenance procedures, documentation, & skill/education levels across Fleet
Simplify logistics support by reducing range of supported systems & associated spares, allowing cost-efficient
volume purchasing of spares, enabling cross-platform sharing, etc.
Reduce cost & complexity of system upgrades (at least within a hull class)
Improve projections of and confidence in system performance, reliability, & maintainability
Potentially lower port entry costs for environmentally certified vessels
Reduce type and scale of required shoreside waste offload/disposal capabilities
Increase Navys return-on-investment by ensuring widest application of proven environmental system
throughout Fleet
Accelerate development of remote monitoring & distance support concepts
Reduce permitting & cost barriers to vessel scrapping
Safety, Health, and Quality of Life
Reduce safety & health risks by minimizing ship-to-ship environmental system hardware & control variations
& using common human interface
Reduce training/retraining requirements (especially inter-deployment burden) by minimizing platform-specific
system operating & maintenance variations
Provide more time for primary rating by reducing environmental-related collateral duties
Reduce shipboard workload devoted to waste management & other environmental compliance
Reduce risk of shipboard experimentation with untested/unproven equipment

garner the support needed from Congress, the
Administration, other Federal agencies, and the
states to craft and implement national
environmental standards that apply specifically
to Navy vessels throughout all U.S. waters.
TOTAL OWNERSHIP COST
New ships and submarines are being
designed and procured on the basis of
performance specifications and TOC. This
requires careful analyses and trade-offs across a
vessels projected life cycle, from concept
development to disposal. There are many
variables to consider and many opportunities to
compare costs and savings that could be
encountered while the vessel is being designed,
built, operated, maintained/upgraded, and
disposed of. The TOC analysis may, for
example, indicate that up-front investments in
pollution abatement and other environmental
systems are warranted to meet anticipated
environmental requirements over the life of the
vessel, relying on future cost avoidances to
offset the higher costs incurred today.
A high degree of environmental systems
commonality will have significant payoffs
during the acquisition phase because it will
promote commercial competition, minimize
exposure to sole-source supply constraints, and
provide procurement efficiencies (technical
documentation applicable to an entire class or
more than one class, reduced contract
administration burden, contract options for
additional units, etc.). The more vessels in a
class and the more classes that can be covered
by a particular environmental system, the greater
the cost savings (avoidance) that will accrue. A
single or very limited number of environmental
system designs, especially where open-system
architecture (OSA) is applied to environmental
system design, will also simplify Fleet-wide
installation, configuration management, logistics
support, and environmental capability ugrades.
Other benefits were identified in Table 2.
It is important to recognize, however,
that the minimum TOC for an environmental
system or capability may be attained only by
increasing a cost element at a particular phase of
the vessels life cycle. For example, the cost of
the current backfit of the new Navy-developed
oily waste ultrafiltration system on later DDG 51
Class ships will not only ensure routine
compliance with todays oil discharge
restrictions (thereby avoiding regulatory
violations), but also compliance with anticipated
lower discharge limits around the world (thereby
avoiding the need to integrate and backfit more
advanced technology on these ships sometime in
the future).
SAFETY, HEALTH, AND QUALITY OF
LIFE
The Navy recognizes that new Sailors
are more environmentally aware and concerned
than past generations and, indeed, an added
component to the Navy's mission is a strong
commitment to protecting the marine
environment. There is enthusiasm on board
ships and submarines for minimizing the adverse
environmental impact of operating the vessel
and its various systems. On the other hand, the
Navy is having to focus more attention on
quality-of-life and other Sailor-retention issues,
so it is becoming even more important to
minimize the environmental management
burden on ships force. Shipboard waste
management is often a collateral duty that takes
the Sailor away from his primary functions. Not
only are waste sorting, collection, and handling
duties typically unpleasant, but in times of
significant manning reductions, they are an
added responsibility for the Sailor.
Environmental equipment and systems should
share similar designs, configurations, and
arrangements within a class or, hopefully,
throughout the Fleet. Procedures for their
operation and maintenance will reflect diverse
experience on different platforms and in
different operating scenarios, thereby providing
Sailors with standardized and familiar
environmental responsibilities from ship to ship.
For example, the design, technical
documentation, and logistics support for several
solid waste processing machines developed by
the Navy in the mid-90s and installed throughout
the surface Fleet are identical on every ship.
Another example is the backfit kits the Navy
developed to convert shipboard air-conditioning
and refrigeration (AC&R) plants to use non-
chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, where the
opportunity was taken during design to automate
and standardize the plants monitoring and
control subsystems using programmable logic
controllers (PLCs), thereby substantially
reducing and simplifying the Sailors role in
efficiently operating and maintaining the plants.
Another major benefit of environmental
systems commonality is in the area of training.
The Navy is exploring ways to reduce the
training burden on Sailors to reduce their
workload at sea and in port. The Navy is
especially interested in reducing inter-
deployment training requirements to provide
Sailors with more personal time. Common
environmental systems within a vessel class and
across classes will eliminate different operator
and maintenance training requirements for hull-
unique systems. For example, blackwater is
managed on different surface ships by holding,
incineration, or biological treatment; the
technological differences among these
approaches to wastewater management are
reflected in their operation, maintenance,
cleaning, and interfacing with other ship systems
and, therefore, in associated Sailor training
requirements. Commonality will also make
distance support (remote equipment/system
monitoring and maintenance planning) more
feasible.
How Do We Achieve Commonality?
Fleet environmental systems
commonality must be a major goal of ship and
ship systems design and acquisition processes.
The degree of commonality that can be attained
within a vessel class or across classes will
depend on several major factors, including:
Whether the environmental system is to be
backfit, forward-fit onto new construction,
or incorporated into a new ship or
submarine design (e.g., a blackwater
vacuum-collection system is not generally
a practical backfit).
The size, configuration, and arrangement
of the system (e.g., a large modern thermal
destruction system for solid wastes that
incorporates automated materials
handling, staging, and preprocessing may
be suitable for an aircraft carrier but not
for a small surface combatant).
The specific technology involved in terms
of process and product, automation,
manpower required, etc. (e.g., a solid
waste baler that produces large 1000-lb
bales of paper and cardboard that must be
mechanically lifted and stored on board is
a manpower- and space-intensive waste
management option that could be
considered only for large-deck ships).
The type and extent of interfacing with
other ship systems (e.g., a ship-wide
piping and pumping system to collect
blackwater, graywater, and oily waste and
deliver these waste streams at appropriate
feed rates to a newly installed centralized
incinerator would require extensive
connections, compartment penetrations,
and probably an incinerator fuel supply).
The first step in exploring the potential
for commonality in a shipboard environmental
system is to thoroughly characterize the
environmental problem and identify any
variations encountered on a single vessel or from
one vessel to another, both within a class and
from one class to another. Numerous factors
may have to be considered, depending on the
nature of the environmental problem and
shipboard issues. Examples of Navy-side
variations can include:
Vessel type and features (e.g., dry-bilge
design, large crew, available deck space).
Unique shipboard systems (e.g., aircraft
launch catapults) or maintenance/repair
capabilities (e.g., hazardous materials used
for aircraft maintenance).
Time of day (e.g., mealtime trash, peaks in
the use of toilets and showers, reduced
visibility at night).
Geographic location (e.g., increased use of
air-conditioning and showers in hot
climates, waste discharge restrictions in
the internationally designated special
areas, travel through whale breeding
areas).
Mission (e.g., littoral peacekeeping,
resupply, covert operations) and
deployment scenarios (underway time,
distance from shore, ports visited).
Weather and sea conditions (e.g., deck
runoff, inclined operation of
environmental equipment).
Special hazards (e.g., storage of
ammunition, fuels, food supplies).
Survivability and damage control
requirements(e.g., fire, flooding, and
chemical, biological, and radiological
(CBR) attack).
Health and safety risks to crew.
Access to shoreside waste offload and
disposal capabilities.
New environmental issues associated
with new or upgraded weapons systems,
HM&E equipment, or propulsion systems.
Factors such as these are identified and
evaluated to determine whether a one-size-fits-
all mitigation approach to a particular
environmental problem will work for the entire
Fleet or at least a single class of vessels, or
whether different variations or solutions are
required according to vessel type, class, mission,
etc. For example, do sewage incinerators make
sense for both a surface combatant equipped
with a vacuum-CHT (VCHT) system that
generates 1,200 gallons/day of blackwater and
an aircraft carrier that could generate as much
180,000 gallons/day? Are the
cost/weight/complexity tradeoffs for CHT
versus VCHT systems the same for all ship
classes? Can a solid waste incinerator that can
accommodate the quantity of trash generated on
an aircraft carrier fit into a destroyer? Will the
relatively small projected manning for the
DD 21 Class demand a fundamentally different,
multi-stream waste handling concept than the
waste management systems being implemented
for DDG 51 Class new construction or the
LPD 17 Class? How can the Navy efficiently
address shipboard environmental problems, in
terms of avoiding the proliferation of class- or
ship-unique environmental solutions, while
major decisions are pending for new propulsion
concepts (electric drive, ICR gas turbine, etc.)
for future surface combatant classes, while new
missions (payloads, manning, increased littoral
presence) are being contemplated for
submarines, and while Smart Ship successes
are being gradually transitioned into the Fleet?
If different approaches appear to be required,
the challenge becomes to determine whether and
how the differences can be minimized to attain
as much commonality as possible (such as
through scale-up, modularity, or
decentralization).
Fully characterizing a Fleet
environmental problem entails:
Defining the Navys requirements in terms
of mission and operations; environmental
laws, regulations, and policies; safety,
health, and quality of life; and TOC.
Pursuant to acquisition reform trends,
establishing shipboard performance and
interface specifications for the
environmental solution.
Identifying and analyzing the gap between
the Navys needs and the commercial state
of the art (which encompasses vessels of
the USCG, merchant fleet, allied navies,
and passenger cruise lines) in terms of
technology, shipboard compatibility, and
cost.
Even though acquisition reform
guidance emphasizes the use of COTS
equipment and systems wherever possible,
NAVSEA has always assessed industry products
and developmental programs in deciding
whether it is necessary to embark on in-house
development of Navy-specific shipboard
environmental solutions. Many NAVSEA
studies over the years have focused on or
considered surveys and assessments of
commercial markets. NAVSEAs experience
over several decades, however, has been that
COTS environmental equipment typically does
not function reliably or is otherwise not well
suited for use on Navy vessels. Nevertheless, a
close examination of maritime and non-maritime
industry capabilities is always the starting point
for defining what the Navy needs to do to solve
the Fleets environmental problems as
effectively and cost-efficiently as possible.
In addition to the Navy-side factors
identified above, the type and degree of
commonality that the Navy can achieve or
specify also depends on industry-side
opportunities and constraints, including:
Commercial state of the art for land-based
and marine environmental technologies.
Projected private sector environmental
R&D plans and schedules.
Industry standards and specifications.
Industry interest in a limited Navy market
and/or the commercial marketability of
Navy-tailored environmental solutions.
R&D programs and plans at other Federal
agencies.
Under todays DoD/Navy acquisition reform
environment, NAVSEA is focusing on the
application or development of several important
RDT&E tools to explore and incorporate
commonality for shipboard environmental
systems, including:
Identification of industry products,
capabilities, and technology developments
(e.g., through various types of
announcements in the Commerce Business
Daily (CBD)), especially as they relate to
actual or potential maritime applications.
Navy laboratory and shipboard evaluation
and demonstration of commercial
environmental components and systems.
Development of Navy performance and
interface specifications based on
 environmental laws and regulations, Fleet
operational requirements, and technology
readiness.
Open system architecture (OSA), wherein
the Navy decides for an environmental
system the appropriate level to break the
system between a Navy-controlled side
(e.g., to ensure that compartment and
utility constraints on different ship classes
do not create needless variants of the
overall system) and an open side that
can accommodate competing components
from different manufacturers and vendors
(e.g., to avoid reliance on sole-source
supply of a critical component) (see
Figure 3).
Exploration of quality-assurance/quality-
control (QA/QC) approaches for ensuring
commonality of best management
practices aboard ship, e.g., a Navy
Environmental Management System
(EMS) based on internationally
recognized EMS principles.

Industry/Navy Defined Architecture

Standard Interfaces

Physical Interfaces:
Geometric [size, weight, CG]
Foundations, connections, piping, etc.
Functional Interfaces:
Power consumption
Cooling water and air flow
Data Interfaces, Control, Monitoring
Human Factors
Design Standards
Survivability/Vulnerability:
Shock/Vibration/EMI/EMC
Fatigue, corrosion, environmental Industry chooses the
Implementations
OSA Concept Requires No GFE

FIGURE 3. Generic Open System Architecture (OSA) Design Approach for a Shipboard System

NAVSEAs shipboard environmental RDT&E addressing commonality for two Fleet

process is flexible enough, especially when environmental problems that involved different
supported by research sponsored by the Office legal drivers, acquisition rules, waste stream
of Naval Research (ONR), to identify and features, and industry capabilities.
develop the optimum Navy product for any
specific environmental need and to ready it for
transition to the Fleet. Several examples of
shipboard environmental systems commonality
achieved through NAVSEA RDT&E have been
presented earlier. There follows a brief
description of the different approaches taken in
ILLUSTRATIVE RDT&E
APPROACHES TO
COMMONALITY
There is no single, best way to achieve
environmental equipment/system commonality
across the Fleet. Because the Navy has such a
wide variety of ships in terms of size, mission,
space arrangements, manning, countries/ports
visited, etc., there is no master template that will
define the degree of commonality for a
particular environmental system or how to
achieve it. This is especially true because of the
wide variety of environmental issues that the
Navy has to address, including trash, liquid
effluents, hull antifouling coatings, protected
marine animals, hazardous materials, air
emissions, and shipboard paints. The following
two examples illustrate fundamentally different
strategies the Navy has employed to develop a
high degree of shipboard environmental system
commonality.
Solid Waste Processing Equipment
Navy ships generate substantial amounts
of solid wastes, primarily paper, cardboard,
metal, glass, and plastics. The overall solid
waste volume is a function mainly of the number
of crew members. Ships cannot hold solid
wastes for more than a few hours or days
(depending on the type of ship and operations)
without introducing unacceptable space
conflicts, fire risks, sanitation concerns
(cleanliness, odor, etc.), or other quality-of-life
issues. During the 1980s and early 1990s,
NAVSEA thoroughly investigated commercial
trash processing devices for reducing the volume
of solid wastes and determined that no
commercial products met all of the Navys
demanding shipboard requirements. Naval
vessels are exempt from MARPOL 73/78, which
through its Annex V imposed restrictions on the
discharge of solid wastes, but the Convention
requires signatory nations to ensure that their
public vessels comply to the extent reasonable
and practicable. Cooperation between
Congress and the Navy in implementing
MARPOL Annex V resulted in U.S. legislation
that applied to solid waste management
specifically on Navy ships, whereby plastics
discharge was banned worldwide, but certain
physical forms of processed non-plastic trash
could be discharged subject to the ships
distance from shore.
In trying to identify suitable solid waste
processing technologies for its ships, NAVSEA
had to consider several critical constraints:
Extremely short, legislatively driven
compliance deadlines for equipment
procurement and installation.
The different ship operations/deployment
scenarios (e.g., typical underway time,
ability to hold waste, and time in
discharge-restricted waters).
The need for solid waste management
solutions for all surface combatants, from
frigates to aircraft carriers.
The widely varying capacities of ships to
hold solid wastes for offloading, and the
typical waste reception and disposal
facilities available in ports around the
world.
The labor-intensive nature of shipboard
solid waste collection and transport within
the ship and thus the need to minimize any
additional manning burden to sort,
process, and handle wastes that were
previously discharged overboard.
The shipboard space available for
installing and operating solid waste
processing equipment on existing ships.
The need and ability to process more than
one type of solid waste in a single
machine given the different materials,
forms, sizes, food content, machinery
requirements for size reduction, and
processing and post-processing hazards
for each.
Significant safety, health, and quality-of-
life (sanitation, odor, etc.) implications of
holding and processing solid wastes.
The need to minimize the cost of
procuring, installing, operating,
maintaining, and logistically supporting
the solid waste processing systems.
After evaluating commercially available
solid waste processing systems, NAVSEA
determined that a Navy-developed suite of solid
waste processing machines, based on
conventional mechanical size-reduction
processes, offered the optimal balance among
legal requirements, shipboard and operational
suitability, development and acquisition time,
and costs. Commonality was a major driver and
result of NAVSEAs deliberations. The solution
was four small, self-contained processing
machines that could meet the waste generation
rates and distributed locations needed by the full
range of ship sizes through multiple installations
(see Figure 4).
The respective processing capabilities
and sizes of the Large Pulper, Small Pulper,
Metal/Glass Shredder, and Plastics Waste
Processor were chosen such that the smallest
ships wastes could be processed by a small
group of machines that would meet the ships
space availability and manning constraints,
while the largest ships waste volume would not
require so many machines as to be impractical in
terms of installation or cost. In all cases, the
capacity, reliability, and logistics support of the
processing equipment had to be such that
through some combination of redundancy,
durability, and repairability, no ship would be
forced to hold unacceptable amounts of
unprocessed trash or illegally discharge
unprocessed trash while underway.

FIGURE 4. Surface Fleet Solid Waste Processing Equipment (Large Pulper, Small Pulper,
Metal/Glass Shredder, and Plastics Waste Processor) Is Identical on Every Ship
 For these solid waste processing
machines, commonality was achieved at several
levels. At the level of the ships functional
environmental capability, a flexible suite of four
basic processing machines meets the diverse
solid waste management needs of every surface
ship. At the system level, each ship class
receives as many of each machine as needed to
meet its waste generation rate. System-level
commonality across the Fleet is also derived
from other features of NAVSEAs solution:
The installation of whatever combination
of Large Pulpers and Small Pulpers is
needed to meet the ships pulpable-waste
generation rate and available deck space.
The Large Pulper and Small Pulper are
geometrically similar and operated the
same.
These equipments are procured and
supported to Navy drawings.
In addition to these facets of commonality that
are external to the system, there are internal
commonality features, including:
The use on all machines of a common
PLC.
The Plastics Waste Processor system itself
consists of four subsystems (Compress-
Melt Units, Closed-Loop Cooling Units,
Plastics Shredders, and Heat Sealers) that
can be combined in various ways to meet
target processing rates and space
limitations.
The Metal/Glass Shredder and Plastics
Shredder are identical designs, although
the same actual machine cannot be used
alternately for both waste streams because
there is no practical way to remove all
plastic debris from the shredder to avoid
plastic being illegally discharged in the
bags of shredded metal and glass.
Because this was a Fleet-wide backfit
program that responded to an externally-
established timetable, the quickest and most
cost-effective way to outfit ships with the
required new waste management capabilities
was to design equipment to Level III drawings,
enforce rigid configuration control, and equip
every ship with identical machines.
Oily Waste Treatment Systems
There are several important differences
between solid wastes and oily wastes (primarily
bilgewater) generated on Navy ships that relate
to the type of shipboard solution needed and,
therefore, to the nature of cross-platform
commonality:
Unlike solid wastes, bilgewater generation
is not directly related to crew size, but
rather to the type of ship and the particular
systems thereon.
The discharge quality requirement is
driven by one overriding legal
requirement: a worldwide maximum limit
of 15 ppm of oil.
Whereas Navy ships did not have solid
waste processing capabilities prior to the
development of the suite of equipment
described previously, all Navy surface
ships are already equipped with bulk oil
separation technology (parallel-plate
gravity OWSs).
The components of the Navy shipboard
solid waste stream have not changed
significantly over the years, but the
change to gas-turbine propulsion over the
last 20 years has resulted in significantly
reduced bilgewater generation rates that,
in turn, increases oil and contaminants
concentrations in the bilgewater. These
higher oil concentrations, combined with
the increased shipboard use of detergents
and other oil-emulsifying substances that
end up in the bilges, degrade the operation
of the gravity OWSs to the point where
the ability to meet the 15-ppm oil limit is
in jeopardy.
An evaluation of potential technologies
to separate oil from bilgewater concluded that
the most effective approach is to retain the
OWSs already installed throughout the Fleet
(which typically remove >98% of the oil in the
influent) and polish the OWS effluent with a
different technology capable of consistently
removing the residual oil down to 15 ppm or less
and coping with a wide range of contaminants.
Ceramic ultrafiltration membranes used in a
cross-flow filtration process were found to
present the best combination of effectiveness,
reliability, scalability, and shipboard
compatibility. These membranes essentially
allow water, but not oil, to pass through, thereby
concentrating the oily waste and producing an
environmentally acceptable effluent for
discharge. Although ultrafiltration membranes
had been used commercially for other
applications, no membrane systems had been
used for processing oily wastewater. The Navy
had to develop its own systems for its unique
military shipboard environment, mindful,
however, of the need to eventually have
production systems commercially manufactured
for installation in the Fleet. This presented the
Navy with the opportunity to strategically plan
the design of these systems to address as many
ship classes as possible with the fewest
variations in hardware, software, operations,
installation, and logistics.
Shipboard bilgewater generation rates
across the surface Fleet were analyzed to
determine the most widely-applicable processing
(flow) rates for oily waste membrane-
ultrafiltration treatment systems. Prototype and
Figure 5. Three-Membrane Oily Waste Ultrafiltration-Membrane Systems on
USS Carney (DDG 64) and USS Rushmore (LSD 47)
Engineering Development Model (EDM) units
were developed and tested at 10 gpm
incorporating one particular commercially
supplied membrane to demonstrate that this is a
viable technology for shipboard application. In
response to the very successful laboratory and
shipboard evaluations, an initial (Block 1)
system performance and interface specifications
package was provided for incorporation into
Arleigh Burke (DDG 51) Class ships beginning
with DDG 89 (see Figure 5). An improved
(Block 2) system was installed and evaluated on
USS Rushmore (LSD 47), with the result that
space and weight have been reserved on the new
San Antonio (LPD 17) Class for oily waste
membrane treatment systems.
At the time the 10-gpm treatment
system was designed, there was only one
technically acceptable commercial membrane
available. Membrane technology has evolved
significantly since that time and Navy laboratory
testing indicated that there are now several
commercial products that can potentially meet
the Navys requirements. The availability of
ultrafiltration membranes from more than one
supplier promises continuing technology
improvement, as well as protection against
membrane supply interruptions. At the same
time, however, it presented the Navy with the
challenge of designing a treatment system that
can accommodate alternative membranes
without periodic hardware changes. A recent
market survey of ultrafiltration membranes
found lengths varying from 30-47 inches,
diameters varying from 0.37-5.75 inches, and
surface areas varying from 0.2-120 ft2. Physical
and performance characterization of these
alternative membranes by the Navy indicated
that an OSA design approach could be used to
define interface standards for a common housing
that could hold a reasonable range of the
identified membranes, allow them to perform as
intended, and interface to the rest of the
treatment system through standardized
connections. This membrane module was
developed and proven and can be used in any of
a family of Navy-designed membrane systems to
accept membranes from different manufacturers.
Alternative commercial membranes must all
meet the same performance specifications, limits
on their physical dimensions, and connection
interfaces. The module also offers an
engineering strategy for providing Navy shock
and vibration protection for COTS membranes.
The use of different commercial membranes
will, therefore, be invisible in terms of the
systems appearance, operation, and
maintenance.
Consistent with the latest acquisition
Figure 6. Twelve-Membrane Oily Waste Ultrafiltration-Membrane System for Large Ships
guidance, a performance and interface
specifications package was prepared for the
10-gpm membrane treatment system. The
decision was made to prepare a separate
performance and interface specification for the
membrane module that will provide common
logistics supportability for this critical
component across all treatment systems in this
family of systems and across all platforms. The
performance specification for each treatment
system will reference the membrane module
specification. The Sailor-replaceable membrane
modules supplied to the ship may contain any
commercial membrane that meets the Navys
standalone membrane performance and interface
specification.
The 10-gpm system design was scaled
up to a 50-gpm flow rate for application on
aircraft carriers and other large ships. This
system uses 12 ultrafiltration membranes,
packaged in the standard modules, compared to
the 3 membranes in the 10-gpm system. The
actual membranes used in the 10-gpm and
50-gpm systems are the same commercial
membranes procured through the membrane
module specification. This commonality
shortened the development time and increased
confidence in the performance of the 50-gpm
system. Space and weight have been reserved
on the new aircraft carrier CVN 77 and on the
next-generation CVN(X) Class of aircraft
carriers for 50-gpm membrane treatment
systems (see Figure 6).
Comparison
Table 3 highlights the major
commonality-related differences between the
illustrative solid waste and oily waste RDT&E
solutions. For the solid waste processing
equipment, scalability was accomplished by
adding additional identical systems. The basic
building block here was at the system level.
The Navy retains ownership (ensures
commonality) of the solid waste processing
equipment through Level III drawings and
configuration control. Any technology upgrade
of any of the four solid waste processing
machines would necessitate complete
replacement of the system. For the oily waste
treatment systems, by comparison, a single oily
waste ultrafiltration system design can
accommodate higher flow rates (bigger ships)
by scaling up its hydraulic characteristics and
increasing the number of membranes while
maintaining a balance among size, reliability,
and maintainability. The building block here
is the core technology component (membrane)
of the system rather than the system itself.
Membrane technology upgrade can be
accomplished relatively simply by substituting
improved membranes in the standard modules,
requiring no system hardware modifications.
Commonality is implemented through Navy
ownership of the performance requirements and
the system-to-ship and selected component-to-
system interfaces.

TABLE 3. Elements of Shipboard Environmental Systems Commonality

Trash Processing Machines
Cross-Platform Functional Solid waste stream sorted & processed into
Environmental Capability identical physical forms for identical disposal
on every ship.
System Level Suite of four waste-specific processing
machines (technologies) for all ships.
Design and Procurement Navy-supplied (Level III) drawings &
documentation.
Contractors provided with Navy-built
prototypes.
Scalability External (system level): multiple stand-
alone systems.
Internal (component level): for Plastics
Waste Processor, major subsystems can be
used in varying combinations to
accommodate space constraints & waste
generation rates.
Shipboard Compatibility Flexibility to locate multiple machines near
waste generation sources.
Each type of machine has identical operation,
documentation, & human interface from ship
to ship.
Configuration Traditional drawings & parts control.
Management
Upgradeability System level replacement (high cost).
Oily Waste Ultrafiltration System
Identical technology for all ships.
All small-ship variants identical & all
large-ship variants identical.
Navy performance & interface
specifications package for each
flowrate.
Open-system architecture that accepts
comparable commercial membranes.
Internal (core-component level):
single system design with different
flow rates & additional membrane
modules.
Navy standardized membrane
interfaces accommodate alternative
commercial membranes.
Single system installed adjacent to
Oil/Water Separator.
Automated & unmanned.
System interface control.
Core-component interface control.
Navy-demonstrated performance
specification for core component
(membrane).
In-place plug-and-play installation
of improved membranes (low cost).
 One of the most useful R&D tools for
achieving commonality is OSA and it is being
phased into NAVSEAs shipboard
environmental RDT&E program. OSA
principles were not explicitly adopted in the
low-flow (10-gpm) oily waste ultrafiltration
system design process from the start in order to
produce an early performance and interface
specifications package for the Fleet. As
mentioned, however, the design has been
upgraded to allow component interchangeability
as the state of the art in ultrafiltration
membranes advances. OSA design principles
have been factored into the development of a
high-flow (50-gpm) system variant for large
ships. This OSA-based commonality will allow
the Fleet to receive the latest advanced
membranes without having to redesign, re-
engineer, or replace their oily waste treatment
systems. In contrast, the simple mechanical
processes (compressing, grinding, crushing)
employed in the solid waste machines are not
likely to see technological advances that could
be adopted without removing the existing
equipment and installing newer systems. The
solid waste processing machines cannot be
upgraded in-place to significantly improve their
performance, i.e., their OSA break is at the
system level compared to a component-level
OSA break for the oily waste treatment systems.
What is the Commonality Challenge?
Ideally, a pollution control system for a
particular waste stream would be identical on
every ship. This would minimize TOC, provide
a completely familiar training, operating, and
maintenance experience for Sailors as they move
from ship to ship, and streamline logistics
support. Until recently, this was achievable
because the Navy traditionally designed
shipboard environmental equipment itself and
produced Level III drawings for build-to-print
production contracts, thereby ensuring clones
of the Navys successfully tested design.
Acquisition reform has provided the Navy with a
new procurement paradigm, however, that
focuses on performance specifications instead of
hardware specifications and drawings and more
readily enables insertion of industry innovation.
If, for example, the Navy tells industry that it
needs to obtain a black box of certain
dimensions that will accept a certain effluent of
a certain composition at a certain flow rate and
that will produce an effluent of a certain quality,
the Navy no longer has absolute control over the
hardware, software, or perhaps even the
technology that will be offered. This could
result in a proposed system that the Navy knows
will not work properly or that the Navy will
have to test in some manner to confirm its
acceptability thus performance verification and
testing requirements are key. It may also
complicate logistics support where different
solutions are provided for different ship classes
black boxes. Furthermore, the full service
contractor acquisition approach prevents the
Navy from providing (as GFE), specifying, or
even recommending particular shipboard
environmental systems. This provides greater
flexibility to industry in innovating and meeting
the Navys operational and TOC requirements
for new platforms, but the Navy relinquishes its
ability to impose traditional military
specifications and technologies on ship
designers and builders. As the Navy transitions
from traditional Navy Level III drawings and
configuration control to a more industry-
centered acquisition partnership, there must be
sufficient market base and life-cycle buy-in by
industry to ensure that environmental
commonality is not obtained at the expense of
system performance, reliability, safety, crew
burden, or other Navy concerns. A corporate
NAVSEA perspective on shipboard
environmental RDT&E will help ensure the
broadest and most cost-effective environmental
systems commonality across existing and new
platforms and thus minimize environmental
impacts on the Fleet.
Several other trends will present both
challenges and potential rewards for
environmental systems commonality:
Continuing pressures to reduce TOC.
Reduced manning for new and some
existing platforms.
Offloading of maintenance
responsibilities from ships force to shore
activities and/or contractors.
 Greater automated operation and
monitoring of shipboard systems
(especially CBM capabilities).
Reduced training requirements for Sailors.
Enhanced interoperability and technology
sharing with allied navies, which tend to
face stricter environmental requirements
than the U.S. Navy.
Changing ship and submarine deployment
scenarios, to which system reliability,
maintainability, and logistics
supportability must be geared.
New DoD/Navy self-regulation
privileges, whereby the feasibility and
cost of shipboard environmental controls
are increasingly factored into U.S.
regulatory schemes.
Expanded application of the OSA design
philosophy.
In the future, it is unlikely that the Navy will be
able to impose such rigid environmental systems
commonality across the Fleet as was done for
the solid waste processing equipment. The
major challenges now are to achieve this degree
of commonality across a ship class without
Level III drawings and associated configuration
control and, more importantly and more
difficult, to achieve a high degree of
commonality across ship classes. To help create
the foundation for meeting these challenges,
commonality objectives are being integrated into
all new NAVSEA environmental RDT&E
initiatives from the outset. For example,
membrane interchangeability is being designed
into a new shipboard oily waste treatment
system that combines a commercial bulk-oil
separator with ultrafiltration membranes, which
can replace the Navys existing 10-gpm gravity
parallel-plate OWS within the same footprint.
Non-oily wastewater ultrafiltration treatment
systems currently being developed will also
incorporating OSA principles. Nevertheless,
commonality will increasingly become a routine
system design and systems engineering goal that
will enhance naval force operations and ensure
access to international and foreign waters and
ports worldwide.
CONCLUSIONS
As Navy vessels become increasingly
subject to expanding environmental laws and
regulations in the U.S. and abroad, shipboard
waste management and other environmental
problems demand more and more of the Fleets
attention. An individual warship must be able to
efficiently, safely, and affordably manage its
own solid, liquid, and other wastes to operate
effectively as part of an integrated naval force.
This must be accomplished while avoiding the
need to discharge wastes where prohibited,
moving to unrestricted waters where discharge is
allowed, putting into port (where adequate land-
based waste disposal facilities are not always
available around the world), or creating
unacceptable safety and health risks to the ship
or its crew by holding wastes where discharge is
not allowed or mission-compatible. As the
Fleets mission and presence expand in littoral
waters and in areas designated by the IMO for
special environmental restrictions (e.g., the
Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf),
environmental problems become more of an
operational impediment.
The Navys goal is to equip its ships, to
the extent possible, with the capability to treat or
destroy wastes on board, rather than having to
discharge them overboard, transfer them at sea
to support ships, or offload them in port to
pierside receiving facilities or barges for
shoreside disposal. Achieving this in the most
cost-effective and operationally compatible way
requires consideration of the similarities and
differences among the different classes of
vessels and even among hulls of the same class.
All Navy ships and submarines have certain
basic waste management needs, regardless of
their platform and mission differences. These
basic needs include collection, temporary
storage, volume reduction, and disposal of solid
and liquid wastes. Certain vessels may have
additional special environmental problems (e.g.,
aircraft catapult effluent, seawater cooling
system chlorine discharge) attributable to their
size, unique weapons or machinery systems,
operating profiles, or other features.
The key to minimize the environmental
compliance component of the Fleets TOC and
to maximize the Fleets operational flexibility is
to standardize shipboard environmental
systems as much as possible across the wide
range of vessels. Environmental systems
commonality is a powerful tool for minimizing
the Fleets environmental compliance burden
and cost, but it requires the rigorous application
of forward-looking engineering and cost
techniques that objectively consider the various
environmental related trade-offs over a vessels
entire life cycle. The maximum degree of
commonality may not, in fact, be the best
answer in every case (e.g., because it would
entail the cost-prohibitive upgrade or
replacement of legacy systems), but certainly for
the design of future vessels it offers
opportunities to minimize environmental related
TOC while preserving the Fleets ability to
perform its mission worldwide without
hindrance from environmental restrictions.
NAVSEAs shipboard environmental
RDT&E program is rapidly applying
standardization and commonality objectives to
the development of Navy-unique and Navy-
tailored environmental systems and to the test
and evaluation of COTS environmental
products. This will help ensure that the Navy is
a smart buyer of shipboard environmental
solutions, whether they are COTS products or
Navy developmental items. These
environmental solutions will balance
component, system, platform, and battle force
commonality considerations such that a naval
force of any size and composition can perform
its mission without undue concern for
environmental compliance requirements and
with minimal intrusion of environmental duties
into shipboard life.
REFERENCES
Koss, L., Environmentally Sound Ships of the
21st Century Proceedings of the ASNE
Maritime Environmental Symposium, 1992.
Markle S.P. and S.E. Gill, T-AKE: Acquiring
the Environmentally Sound Ship of the 21st
Century, ASNE Day 2001 Proceedings, April
30, 2001.
Markle, S.P., S.E. Gill, and P.S. McGraw,
Engineering the Environmentally Sound
Warship for the Twenty-First Century Naval
Engineers Journal, May 1999.
Murphy, L.P., C.E. Traugh II, B.J. Hillers, A.H.
Ramsey, and H.L. Nestle, Navy Shipboard Oily
Wastewater Secondary Treatment: Evolution
from Need Identification to Procurement of
Ultrafiltration Membrane Systems Using
Performance Specifications and Open System
Architecture, ASNE/SNAME Marine
Environmental Engineering Technology
Symposium Proceedings, May 31, 2001.
Naval Sea Systems Command, U.S. Navy
Shipboard Solid and Plastics Waste
Management Program Plan 1993.
Nickens, A.D., J.F. Pizzino, and C.H. Crane,
Environmental Compliance: Requirements and
Technology Opportunities for Future Ships
Naval Engineers Journal, May 1997.
Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to the
President and the Congress, 2001.
Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition,
Technology, and Logistics), DoD Directive
5000.1, The Defense Acquisition System,
October 23, 2000.
Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition,
Technology, and Logistics), DoD Instruction
5000.2, Change 1, Operation of the Defense
Acquisition System, 4 January 2001.
Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition,
Technology, and Logistics), Assistant Secretary
of Defense (Command, Control,
Communications, and Intelligence), and
Director, Operational Test and Evaluation
memorandum Mandatory Procedures for Major
Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) and
Major Automated Information System (MAIS)
Acquisition Programs (DoD 5000.2-R Interim
Regulation) 4 January 2001.
U.S. Department of the Navy, Report to
Congress: U.S. Navy Ship Solid Waste
Management Plan for MARPOL Annex V
Special Areas November 1996.
U.S. Department of the Navy, Report to
Congress: U.S. Navy Submarine Solid Waste
Management Plan for MARPOL Annex V
Special Areas December 1997.
Carl M. Adema is the Program Manager of the
Navys Shipboard Environmental Protection
RDT&E Program at the Naval Sea Systems
Command. He directs the research and
development of shipboard waste treatment
technology so that the U.S. Navy will have an
environmentally sound ship in the 21st Century.
He has 28 years of experience in conducting and
managing environmental research and
development efforts. He has designed and
developed shipboard systems and procedures for
the treatment of shipboard wastes. He holds two
patents and has written several papers on
shipboard waste management and treatment.
Mr. Adema received his Bachelor of Mechanical
Engineering degree from Kettering University
(previously General Motors Institute) and his
Masters Degree in Business Administration from
Michigan State University.
Anthony T. Rodriguez is the Deputy Program
Manager of the Navys Shipboard
Environmental Protection RDT&E Program at
the Naval Sea Systems Command. He assists in
the direction and execution of the research and
development of shipboard waste treatment
technologies aimed at attaining an
environmentally sound ship of the 21st Century.
Mr. Rodriguez has over 17 years of experience
leading and executing shipboard environmental
research and development efforts for shipboard
liquid and solid waste treatment systems,
hazardous material management, and ozone
depleting substance reduction. He has
contributed to the engineering of numerous
environmental systems installed on Navy ships
and has received several Navy awards in
recognition of his achievements in
environmental ship design. He has authored
numerous papers on the development of naval
waste treatment technologies. Mr. Rodriguez
received his Bachelor of Science in Engineering,
specializing in Environmental Engineering from
the University of Central Florida.
Christopher H. Crane has over 22 years of
experience in environmental and health
programs. He is a Senior Scientist at Geo-
Centers, Inc., where he has provided technical,
programmatic, and documentation support for
Navy headquarters shipboard environmental
RDT&E programs since 1989. Previous
experience encompasses 10 years of technical
and management support for headquarters-level
energy, environmental, health, and defense
programs at the Department of Energy,
Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, Federal Emergency
Management Agency, Defense Nuclear Agency,
and Navy. He also worked for 1 year in the
industrial engineering department of a chemical
products company, focusing on waste
management and mass balance projects. He
holds a Bachelor of Science (Honors) in
Chemistry and Business Studies from the
University of Salford (previously Salford Royal
College of Advanced Technology) in England
and was a volunteer fire and rescue technician
and officer for 11 years.