Japan has come out heavily in favour of open-loop scrubbing, telling IMO today that when both human health and the marine environment are taken into account, burning HFO with a scrubber is a better choice than simply burning 0.50%S fuels alone. The key reason for this, they said, was due to the ability for scrubbers to remove airborne particulate matter (PM) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH).