Direct answer
Regulation 5 of the revised MARPOL Annex V bans the discharge of all garbage into the sea from fixed and floating platforms engaged in the exploration, exploitation, and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources, and from every other ship when it is alongside or within 500 m of such a platform. The only discharge the regulation permits is comminuted or ground food waste, capable of passing through a screen with openings no greater than 25 mm, and only when the platform is located more than 12 nautical miles from the nearest land. Plastics, domestic waste, cooking oil, incinerator ash, operational waste, animal carcasses, fishing gear, e-waste, and cargo residues stay banned in the 500 m zone in all circumstances, with no distance that unlocks them. The regulation reaches offshore supply vessels, anchor-handling tug supply vessels, and standby vessels for as long as they sit inside the 500 m radius; once they leave it, they revert to the ordinary ship regime in Regulation 4. The provision sits beside Annex I Regulation 39, which imposes the parallel oil-discharge rules on the same units.
What Regulation 5 says
The title is exact: “Special requirements for discharge of garbage from fixed or floating platforms.” It is the fifth regulation of the revised Annex V adopted by Resolution MEPC.201(62) in July 2011, in force 1 January 2013, sitting between Regulation 4 (discharge outside special areas) and Regulation 6 (discharge within special areas). The number and title were verified against the consolidated revised Annex V text; the same numbering appears in the IMO garbage portal and in flag-state and port-state reproductions of the Annex. The regulation is short, two paragraphs, and it reads as a near-total prohibition with one carve-out.
Paragraph 1 sets the prohibition. The discharge into the sea of any garbage is prohibited from fixed or floating platforms engaged in the exploration, exploitation, and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources, and from all other ships when alongside or within 500 m of such platforms. That single sentence does two jobs at once. It names the units the regulation reaches, and it draws the 500 m perimeter around each of them inside which every ship, not just the platform, is caught.
Paragraph 2 carries the exception. The discharge into the sea of food wastes may be permitted only when they have been passed through a comminuter or grinder, and only from fixed or floating platforms located more than 12 nautical miles from the nearest land, and from all other ships when alongside or within 500 m of such platforms. The comminuted or ground food waste must be capable of passing through a screen with openings no greater than 25 mm. Nothing else may be discharged. The construction is deliberately closed: paragraph 1 bans everything, paragraph 2 reopens a single door for one waste type under three stacked conditions, and the silence on every other category means the ban stands.
The two conditions in paragraph 2 are cumulative, not alternative. The food waste must be ground to pass a 25 mm screen, and the platform must be located more than 12 nm from the nearest land. Fail either and the discharge is unlawful. A platform 8 nm offshore cannot discharge even perfectly comminuted food waste; a platform 30 nm offshore still cannot discharge food waste that has not been through the grinder. The “more than 12 nautical miles” wording attaches to the platform’s location, not to the ship’s track, which is a real difference from Regulation 4, where the distance is measured from the discharging ship to the nearest land while the ship is en route.
Why the regulation treats platforms separately
A platform is a stationary or semi-stationary point source. A ship moves; a platform sits. Garbage discharged from a transiting ship disperses along a track, while garbage discharged from a fixed installation accumulates in one patch of sea, concentrated around the legs, the moonpool, and the supply-boat berth. The drafting committee that built the revised Annex V treated that concentration as the reason for a stricter rule. Around a producing field there is also a cluster of activity: the platform itself, one or more supply boats running stores and equipment, an anchor handler, a standby or emergency response and rescue vessel, sometimes a flotel. Each is a garbage generator, and each sits in the same small box of water for days or weeks. A 3 nm comminuted-food-waste rule, fine for a ship passing through, would let that cluster dump continuously into one location. Regulation 5 closes that off.
The 500 m figure is not arbitrary. It mirrors the safety zone that coastal states establish around offshore installations under Article 60(5) of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which caps installation safety zones at a 500 m radius measured from the outer edge of the installation unless a generally accepted international standard authorizes more. By pinning the garbage perimeter to the same 500 m, Regulation 5 aligns the pollution rule with a boundary that masters and offshore operators already recognize and that is already charted and broadcast. A vessel that is “in the 500 m zone” for collision-avoidance and entry-permission purposes is in the same zone for garbage purposes.
The units Regulation 5 reaches
The first category is the platform itself: any fixed or floating platform engaged in the exploration, exploitation, and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources. The phrase is wider than a drilling rig. It catches the jack-up and the semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit while they drill; the fixed steel or concrete production platform bolted to the seabed; the tension-leg platform and the spar; the floating production storage and offloading unit and the floating storage unit while on station; and the accommodation and processing units associated with a field. The trigger is the mission, “exploration, exploitation and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources,” not the structural type. A unit doing that work is a platform for Regulation 5 whatever its hull form.
“Associated offshore processing” is the phrase that pulls in the production and storage units, not just the drilling units. A rig that only bores the hole is plainly engaged in exploration or exploitation. An FPSO that separates oil, gas, and water on its topsides and stores the crude is engaged in associated offshore processing, so it is a platform under Regulation 5 even though it never turns a drill bit. The same logic catches a floating liquefied natural gas unit on a gas field and a processing platform that takes production from satellite wells. The work the unit does over the reservoir, not the way it is built, decides whether Regulation 5 applies.
“Seabed mineral resources” is the scope limiter. The regulation is written for the offshore hydrocarbon industry and for seabed mining; it reaches platforms working oil, gas, and seabed minerals. A structure that is not engaged in seabed mineral work is not a Regulation 5 platform. An offshore wind turbine foundation, a wave-energy converter, an aquaculture platform, or a research buoy is not “engaged in the exploration, exploitation and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources,” so the special platform regime does not reach it, and the ships around it follow the ordinary Annex V rules. This matters as offshore wind expands: a service operation vessel jacked up against a wind turbine is not in a Regulation 5 zone the way a supply boat against an oil platform is. It works to Regulation 4 or Regulation 6 depending on where it sits.
The 500 m ship category
The second category is the one that catches the operator off guard: “all other ships when alongside or within 500 m of such platforms.” This is not a platform rule that happens to mention ships. It is a discharge rule that binds any ship, of any flag, type, or size, for as long as that ship is alongside or inside the 500 m perimeter of a Regulation 5 platform. A 200,000 dwt tanker loading at an offshore terminal that qualifies as a platform, a 2,000 GT supply boat berthed at the rig, a 12 m crew transfer craft, and a fishing vessel that strays inside the zone are all under the same prohibition while they are there.
The binding is positional, and it switches on and off with position. A supply boat that leaves the field, steams 5 nm clear, and is now in open water outside any 500 m zone is back under Regulation 4: it may comminute and discharge food waste at 3 nm or more from the nearest land while en route, and it may discharge the other Regulation 4 categories at their own distances. Steam back inside the 500 m circle and the Regulation 5 prohibition snaps back on. A practical master treats the 500 m zone as a hard line on the chart for garbage management, the same way it is a hard line for permission to enter.
There is a subtlety in “alongside.” A ship made fast to the platform, or to a floating storage unit serving the platform, is “alongside” whether or not it is within 500 m of the structure’s center, and it is caught. The drafting joins “alongside” and “within 500 m” so that a ship at the berth cannot argue it is outside the radius. Both conditions are independent triggers; either one is enough.
The food-waste exception in detail
Food waste, Category B in the Garbage Record Book Part I, is the only thing Regulation 5 lets a platform or a 500 m ship put into the sea, and only after it has been through a comminuter or grinder to a particle size that passes a 25 mm screen, and only when the platform is more than 12 nm from the nearest land. Three conditions, all required.
The comminution standard is the same 25 mm screen used in Regulation 4 and Regulation 6. The test is whether the ground waste can pass through a screen with openings no larger than 25 mm, not whether the original scraps were smaller. A galley grinder rated to that screen, maintained and running, is the compliance device. The 25 mm threshold is a balance: small enough that the discharged particles disperse and break down quickly rather than washing back as recognizable food scraps, large enough that a marine macerator can hit it without exotic machinery. The 2017 Guidelines for the implementation of Annex V (Resolution MEPC.295(71)) carry the same screen test for food waste across all three discharge regulations, so a single grinder serves the platform under Regulation 5, the supply boat under Regulation 4 once it clears the zone, and the same vessel under Regulation 6 if it works a special area.
The 12 nm distance is the harder gate. It is measured to the platform’s location, and most fixed production platforms on a continental shelf sit inside 12 nm of a coastal baseline or an offshore island. A platform 6 nm off a coast can never discharge food waste under Regulation 5, however well it grinds; the distance condition is never met, so paragraph 2 never opens, and the paragraph 1 prohibition is absolute for that installation. Only platforms genuinely far offshore, deepwater units on the outer shelf and beyond, sit far enough out that the food-waste door opens at all. For the near-shore majority, Regulation 5 is in practice a total discharge prohibition and the only lawful route for every gram of garbage, food waste included, is retention and landing ashore.
Why only food waste, and why the other categories stay banned
The exception is limited to food waste because food waste is the one shipboard category that breaks down naturally in seawater on a timescale of days to weeks and does not persist or accumulate the way plastics, glass, metal, and synthetic operational waste do. The same reasoning runs through the whole Annex: plastics (Category A) are banned everywhere because they persist for decades; food waste (Category B) is the category given the most discharge latitude because it is biodegradable. Regulation 5 keeps that logic but tightens the geography around a point source.
Everything that Regulation 4 would let a transiting ship discharge at distance, incinerator ash at 12 nm, animal carcasses at 100 nm, floating dunnage at 25 nm, non-HME cargo residues at 12 nm, is banned absolutely inside the 500 m zone. There is no distance trigger for those categories in Regulation 5 at all. A supply boat carrying drill-pipe dunnage cannot drop it in the field even though a cargo ship 30 nm away could ditch the same dunnage under Regulation 4. The dunnage comes back to the rig store or to the boat and ashore. The asymmetry is intentional: the regulation concentrates the rule on the patch of sea where a stationary installation and its support fleet would otherwise dump repeatedly into one place.
Worked compliance scenarios
Consider a jack-up drilling rig 6 nm off a coastline. Regulation 5 paragraph 1 bans all garbage discharge. Paragraph 2 cannot help because the rig is not more than 12 nm from the nearest land, so the food-waste door never opens. The lawful answer for galley waste, accommodation waste, drill-floor operational waste, and everything else is total retention: segregate into the Garbage Management Plan categories, store, and backload to the supply boat for delivery to a port reception facility. The supply boat berthed against the rig is inside 500 m and under the identical prohibition; its own galley waste is retained too.
Now move the same rig to a deepwater location 40 nm offshore. Paragraph 2 opens for one category. The rig may run its galley food waste through the comminuter and discharge it if it passes the 25 mm screen; the supply boat alongside may do the same with its food waste while it is in the zone. Plastics, domestic waste, cooking oil, ash, and operational waste still go nowhere overboard. The compliance burden drops by one stream, food waste, and only that stream.
Take a third case: an anchor-handling tug supply vessel finishes a rig move and departs the field. While it was within 500 m of the rig, Regulation 5 governed. Once it is 4 nm clear of any platform and proceeding on passage, no 500 m zone applies and the vessel is on Regulation 4: comminuted food waste at 3 nm or more from the nearest land while en route, uncomminuted at 12 nm or more, the other categories at their Regulation 4 distances, all subject to the en-route condition. The single vessel changes regime by crossing the 500 m line, and the deck log and the Garbage Record Book must reflect which rule applied to each discharge.
A fourth case shows the trap. A standby vessel holds station 300 m from a producing platform 18 nm offshore, on a multi-day emergency-response watch. It is inside the 500 m zone the whole time, so Regulation 5 governs every discharge. Because the platform is beyond 12 nm, the standby vessel may comminute and discharge food waste; it may not discharge anything else. The master who assumes “we are 18 nm out, Regulation 4 distances apply” is wrong on two counts: the vessel is in a 500 m zone, so Regulation 5 not Regulation 4 governs, and even Regulation 5’s single allowance is food waste only.
The offshore supply and standby fleet
The offshore support fleet, platform supply vessels, anchor-handling tug supply vessels, standby and emergency response and rescue vessels, multi-purpose support vessels, dive support vessels, and well-stimulation craft, spends much of its working life inside the 500 m zone of a Regulation 5 platform. For these vessels Regulation 5 is not an occasional encounter; it is the default discharge regime of the job. A platform supply vessel running a 36 hour rotation between a shore base and a field 25 nm out is under three different regimes in one trip: alongside the quay it is at a port reception facility and discharges nothing to sea; on passage outside any 500 m zone it is on Regulation 4; and on field arrival, the moment it comes inside 500 m of the platform, it is on Regulation 5.
The operational answer most companies adopt is to manage these vessels to the strictest rule they will meet and retain all garbage for shore landing, treating the food-waste allowance as a fallback rather than a routine. That removes the position-dependent judgment from the crew. A vessel that always retains never has to decide, in a busy field with the rig 11 nm or 13 nm offshore, whether the 12 nm gate is open for food waste; it lands everything. The offshore support and marine operations sector built its garbage routines around this conservatism well before Annex V was revised, because the commercial reality of a fixed shore base makes backloading the path of least resistance.
The standby vessel is the sharpest case because it does not move. An emergency response and rescue vessel positioned within 500 m of a platform to meet the safety-case requirement may sit there for weeks. It generates galley and accommodation waste continuously and has no en-route condition it could ever satisfy, because it is holding station, not transiting. Regulation 5 is the only regime it knows on that station, and unless the platform is beyond 12 nm and the food waste is comminuted, the vessel retains everything. The economics of frequent backloading from a standby vessel are part of why offshore field logistics plans the supply-boat rotation to clear the support fleet’s garbage on the same runs that bring stores.
Crew transfer and walk-to-work vessels
Crew transfer vessels serving offshore work, and the larger walk-to-work service operation vessels with motion-compensated gangways, also spend their operational time alongside or within 500 m of an installation. Where the installation is a seabed-mineral platform, Regulation 5 governs their discharge; where it is an offshore wind structure, it does not, and they follow Regulation 4. The crew of a multi-field vessel that services both oil platforms and wind turbines is, on paper, switching garbage regimes as it switches client structures. In practice the same retain-everything policy covers both and removes the need to track which structure type triggers which regulation.
Interface with offshore oil-and-gas operations
Regulation 5 is one piece of a larger pollution-prevention envelope around an offshore installation, and an environmental officer on a platform manages several MARPOL annexes at once. The garbage envelope under Regulation 5 runs alongside the oil envelope under Annex I Regulation 39, the sewage envelope under Annex IV, and the air envelope under Annex VI. The unit complies with each in parallel; none displaces another.
The cleanest parallel is between Annex V Regulation 5 and Annex I Regulation 39. The two regulations target the same class of units, “fixed or floating platforms engaged in the exploration, exploitation and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources,” using nearly identical application language, and they divide the waste streams between them. Regulation 5 handles garbage: galley food waste, accommodation domestic waste, drill-floor and deck operational waste, packaging, plastics. Regulation 39 handles oil and oily mixtures: machinery-space bilge, sludge, and oily drainage, which it caps at an oil content of 15 ppm without dilution and to which it applies the Regulation 12 sludge-tank and Regulation 14 oil-filtering-equipment requirements so far as practicable. A surveyor checking an installation works both: the garbage segregation and backload records against Regulation 5, the oily-water separator and oil-discharge records against Regulation 39.
The line between the two annexes is the line between garbage and oil, and it occasionally needs a judgment. Oily rags, used oil absorbents, and oil-contaminated operational waste are operational waste, Category F garbage, banned in the 500 m zone under Regulation 5 and retained. The oily water that the separator processes is Annex I, capped at 15 ppm under Regulation 39. Sludge is Annex I. A drum of waste oil is Annex I cargo for disposal. The platform’s waste-management plan maps every stream to one annex or the other so nothing falls between them.
What neither Regulation 5 nor Regulation 39 governs
Produced water, the water that comes up the well with the hydrocarbons, and displacement and offshore-processing drainage are governed by neither Regulation 5 nor Regulation 39 but by the coastal state’s offshore regime. In the North East Atlantic that is the OSPAR framework, with its dispersed-oil-in-produced-water performance standard; on the US outer continental shelf it is the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the Environmental Protection Agency National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System framework. Garbage and machinery-space oily water sit under MARPOL; the production-stream water sits under the offshore regulator. An environmental officer who treats produced water as a Regulation 39 oily mixture, or galley waste as something the offshore regulator covers, has mapped the streams to the wrong instruments. The offshore drilling and wells and subsea and offshore installation practice areas turn on getting these boundaries right.
Documentation and record-keeping
A platform subject to Regulation 5 keeps a Garbage Record Book and a Garbage Management Plan on the same terms as a ship of comparable size, because the revised Annex V applies the documentation regime to fixed and floating platforms regardless of tonnage where they carry persons or operate as installations. Every food-waste discharge under the Regulation 5 exception is logged with date, time, position, estimated quantity, and the responsible person’s signature, the same fields a ship records for an at-sea discharge. The position entry is what an inspector checks against the 12 nm condition: a discharge logged at a position less than 12 nm from the nearest land is a Regulation 5 violation on its face.
The supply boat and standby vessel keep their own Garbage Record Books, and their entries must show the regime each discharge fell under. A food-waste discharge logged while the vessel was within 500 m of a platform is a Regulation 5 entry, lawful only if the platform was beyond 12 nm; the same discharge logged on passage outside the zone is a Regulation 4 entry, lawful at 3 nm or more while en route. The two are not interchangeable, and a port state control officer cross-checks the logged positions against the field’s coordinates and the vessel’s movements. An entry that places a food-waste discharge inside a 500 m zone around a near-shore platform is a deficiency regardless of how the rest of the book reads.
The platform’s Garbage Management Plan names the comminuter and its screen rating, the segregation scheme, the storage arrangements for retained garbage, and the backload procedure to the supply boat and onward to the port reception facility. Where the platform sits inside 12 nm, the plan documents that no garbage, food waste included, goes overboard and that the entire output is landed. That single line, “all garbage retained for shore disposal,” is the compliant operating posture for the near-shore majority of installations.
Enforcement and inspection
Enforcement of Regulation 5 falls to flag states over their own units and to coastal and port states over installations and vessels in their waters. A port state control inspection of an offshore support vessel includes the Garbage Record Book, the Garbage Management Plan, the comminuter’s condition, and the segregation in the garbage room, the same checks applied to any ship under Annex V. The platform-specific overlay is the position check: an inspector who finds a food-waste discharge logged inside a 500 m zone, or anywhere short of a 12 nm platform location, has a documented violation.
Detection of unlogged discharge around an installation uses the same tools as elsewhere in the Annex: cross-checking Garbage Record Book entries against reception-facility receipts and against the vessel’s movement record, coastal observation of debris tracing to a field, and aerial or satellite surveillance of the field area. A producing field is a small, fixed, well-surveilled patch of sea, easier to watch than an open ocean track, and debris recovered around the legs of a platform is readily traced to the cluster of units working there. The concentration that makes the regulation strict also makes a breach easier to localize.
Penalties follow the implementing law of the enforcing state. The unit’s flag-state criminal and administrative regime applies, and where the coastal state asserts jurisdiction over installations on its continental shelf, its own offshore-pollution penalties stack on top. The commercial exposure for a producing field is severe enough that operators run their garbage to the conservative retain-everything standard well inside what Regulation 5 strictly requires, treating the food-waste allowance as a margin rather than a working practice.
Relationship to special areas and polar waters
Regulation 5 is a standalone location-specific rule, but it does not switch off when a platform sits inside a special area or in polar waters. Where a platform is in a special area, the Regulation 6 special-area regime and the Regulation 5 platform regime both bear on the units in the field, and the stricter rule prevails for each category. In a special area the food-waste discharge allowance is already 12 nm rather than 3 nm; combined with the Regulation 5 platform condition that the installation be beyond 12 nm and the 500 m perimeter, the practical posture is the same conservative retention. A platform in Antarctic waters, where the Polar Code prohibits all garbage discharge, has no food-waste door at all, because the Polar Code prohibition is absolute and overrides the Regulation 5 exception.
The general rule for stacked regimes is that the most restrictive applicable provision governs each waste category, and a platform operator applies whichever of Regulation 5, Regulation 6, and the Polar Code yields the tightest result for the stream in hand. For food waste near a near-shore platform in a special area, every one of those rules points the same way: retain and land. The regulations rarely conflict in outcome around a platform; they converge on retention.
Common errors in applying Regulation 5
The first error is reading the 12 nm distance as a ship-track distance. It is not. The 12 nm condition attaches to the platform’s location, “platforms located more than 12 nautical miles from the nearest land,” not to where the discharging ship happens to be. A supply boat 13 nm from land but alongside a platform that sits 8 nm from land cannot discharge food waste, because the platform, not the boat, must be beyond 12 nm.
The second error is treating the 500 m zone as advisory. It is a hard discharge boundary. A vessel inside 500 m of a Regulation 5 platform is on Regulation 5 for every category, regardless of its own size, flag, or the distance of the field from land. The ordinary Regulation 4 distances do not apply inside the zone.
The third error is assuming the food-waste exception lets other categories out at distance. It does not. Regulation 5 names food waste and nothing else. Incinerator ash, dunnage, operational waste, and cargo residues that Regulation 4 would permit at their own distances are banned absolutely inside the 500 m zone, with no distance that unlocks them.
The fourth error is mapping the wrong waste stream to the wrong annex. Galley and accommodation waste, packaging, and operational waste are Annex V Regulation 5; machinery-space oily water, sludge, and oily drainage are Annex I Regulation 39; produced water is the coastal-state offshore regulator’s, not MARPOL’s at all. A waste-management plan that routes any of these to the wrong instrument fails an audit even if the physical handling is sound.
The fifth error is assuming an offshore wind or aquaculture structure carries a Regulation 5 zone. It does not. The regulation reaches platforms engaged in seabed mineral work; structures outside that scope leave the ships around them on the ordinary Regulation 4 or Regulation 6 rules.
How Regulation 5 differs from Regulation 4 and Regulation 6
Regulation 4 governs the ordinary case: a ship in open water outside special areas, where comminuted food waste goes at 3 nm or more, uncomminuted food waste and non-HME cargo residues at 12 nm or more, floating dunnage at 25 nm or more, animal carcasses at 100 nm or more, all subject to the en-route condition, all measured from the discharging ship to the nearest land. Regulation 6 tightens that for the eight special areas, where only comminuted food waste at 12 nm or more and tightly conditioned non-HME cargo residues survive. Regulation 5 is neither of those; it is a position overlay that bites wherever a seabed-mineral platform sits.
The structural difference is the measurement point and the permitted set. Regulation 4 and Regulation 6 measure distance from the moving ship and permit several categories at graded distances. Regulation 5 measures distance from the stationary platform, permits exactly one category, food waste, and only when the platform is beyond 12 nm, and bans every other category outright inside 500 m. It is the only Annex V regulation whose trigger is proximity to a fixed structure rather than the ship’s own position relative to land. An officer who internalizes that one difference, “near a platform, only ground food waste, and only if the platform is well offshore,” has the working rule.
The Regulation 5 regime can be stricter than Regulation 4 even far from land. A ship 20 nm offshore under Regulation 4 may discharge incinerator ash, dunnage, and non-HME cargo residues at their distances; the same ship, if it comes inside 500 m of a platform 20 nm offshore, may discharge only comminuted food waste and nothing else. Distance from land does not relax Regulation 5; only leaving the 500 m zone does.
Limitations
This article describes Regulation 5 of the revised MARPOL Annex V as a reference for offshore operators and inspectors, not as a substitute for the regulation text or the ship’s and platform’s own management plans. Several limits apply.
The 12 nm and 500 m figures and the 25 mm screen test are the conditions in the revised Annex V adopted by Resolution MEPC.201(62) and the 2017 implementation guidelines in Resolution MEPC.295(71). Where this summary and those instruments differ, the instruments govern. An operator deciding a discharge works from the current consolidated Annex V text and the unit’s approved Garbage Management Plan, not from a reference article.
The scope of “fixed or floating platform engaged in the exploration, exploitation and associated offshore processing of seabed mineral resources” is a regulatory characterization that can turn on the unit’s exact operating state. An FPSO on station is a platform; the same hull on passage is a ship. A mobile drilling unit drilling is a platform; the same unit under tow between fields is a ship under tow. The transition points are matters of flag-state and coastal-state interpretation, and a borderline unit confirms its status with its administration rather than reasoning it out from the hull form.
The coastal-state offshore regime that governs produced water and the installation safety zone, OSPAR in the North East Atlantic, the BSEE and EPA framework on the US shelf, and the equivalent national regulators elsewhere, sits outside MARPOL and outside this article. The garbage rule under Regulation 5 and the oil rule under Annex I Regulation 39 do not displace those national offshore regimes, which carry their own discharge standards, monitoring, and penalties for the production-stream water.
Special-area and polar overlays change the result for a platform inside those areas, and the stricter of the applicable rules governs each category. A platform in the Antarctic has no food-waste discharge route at all under the Polar Code; this article’s general food-waste analysis assumes a platform outside the polar and special-area absolute prohibitions.
See also
- MARPOL Annex V: Garbage from Ships hub article
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 4: discharge outside special areas
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 6: discharge within special areas
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 7: exceptions
- MARPOL Annex V Regulation 10: placards, GMP and record-keeping
- MARPOL Annex V: garbage discharge rules
- Garbage, HME cargo residues and e-waste
- MARPOL Annex I Regulation 39: fixed and floating platforms
- MARPOL Annex I: Oil Pollution Prevention
- MARPOL Convention
- FPSO: floating production storage and offloading
- Offshore support and marine operations
- Offshore drilling and wells
- Subsea and offshore installation
- Polar Code
- Port State Control
- UNCLOS overview for shipping
References
- IMO Resolution MEPC.201(62) (adopted July 2011), Adoption of the revised MARPOL Annex V (entered into force 1 January 2013); Regulation 5, Special requirements for discharge of garbage from fixed or floating platforms.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.295(71) (adopted July 2017), 2017 Guidelines for the implementation of MARPOL Annex V; consolidated Annex V text and the 25 mm comminuted-food-waste screen test.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.277(70) (adopted October 2016, in force 1 March 2018), Amendments to MARPOL Annex V; Garbage Record Book Part I and Part II structure.
- IMO: Prevention of Pollution by Garbage from Ships (MARPOL Annex V) portal.
- Australian Maritime Safety Authority, Marine Notice 01/2022, MARPOL Annex V (Garbage) Discharges.
- United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 60(5), offshore-installation safety zones (500 m radius).