This paper presents an environmental impact assessment of important air emissions produced by the hull subsystem of an oil tanker over a typical life cycle of twenty five years. This assessment makes use of a novel framework for ship life cycle analysis which considers the ship as a system that may be detailed into major subsystems and further into system elements for which:(a) inputs,(b) processes, and (c) outputs, are identified and elaborated. Four important ship life cycle stages are taken into account in this framework; namely the shipbuilding stage, ship operation, major maintenance activities and finally ship dismantling. Emissions inventories for all identified processes are first developed and subsequently the impacts to the environment and human health are estimated by applying standardized and widely accepted impact assessment techniques. much knowledge on the real impacts of shipping to the environment and human health although there is a large amount of scientific effort put on the quantification of ship emissions (ie developing emission inventories for shipping by applying top-down or bottom up techniques). It is without any doubt that air pollution is a major threat to both humans and ecosystems. Exposure to air pollution is now considered by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the world’s largest single environmental health risk, causing 1 in 8 of total global deaths, or 7 million deaths in year 2012 (WHO, 2014). Explicitly for the case of shipping, there is evidence showing that PM emissions are responsible for approximately 60,000 premature deaths annually (Corbett et al., 2007), most of them occurring near populated coastlines in East Asia, Europe and South Asia.