The plastic goods that fall off ships by the ton

Hello and welcome to The Associated Press Climate Watch newsletter. I’m Ingrid Lobet , climate editor, and I wanted to direct your attention to some outstanding environmental investigative work from the AP this week.

Acting on a tip about a marine accident that sent garbage spilling into the ocean, science reporter Christina Larson, investigative reporter Helen Wieffering and video journalist Manuel Valdes dug in and found that more than 20,000 shipping containers have fallen from international cargo ships in the last decade and a half.

This sentence from their story struck me:

“The World Shipping Council , an industry group, reports that on average about 1,500 (containers) were lost annually over the 16 years they’ve tracked — though fewer in recent years.”

In coastal Washington State, in Sri Lanka and beyond, the journalists showed us the detritus washing up on the world’s shorelines: bicycle helmets, Hot Wheels, plastic turkey decoys, squirt guns and “Crocs — so many mismatched Crocs.”

The story started with a tip from a marine ecologist about a single lost shipping container discovered off the coast of California. Larson wondered how often these giant, metal containers are lost at sea, what the environmental impacts were globally, and who, if anyone, is responsible for tracking them or cleaning up.

Among their findings: many lost containers don't even show up in a tally by the World Shipping Council when the shipping line involved doesn't belong to the industry group. And even the WSC's count -- the most complete available -- relies on self-reporting. For example, the 1,300 containers that slid off a cargo ship called the Angel last year as it sank off the coast of Taiwan aren’t in last year’s count, despite the large spill.??

Researchers mapped the flow of garbage from another vast container spill in the Pacific, that of the vessel ONE Apus, all the way to coastal Washington state and to a national wildlife refuge for millions of seabirds near the Hawaiian Islands.

In the story, we hear from Hemantha Withanage in Sri Lanka, who remembers how volunteers collected thousands of dead fish, “gills stuffed with chemical-laced plastic, and nearly 400 dead endangered sea turtles, more than 40 dolphins and six whales, their mouths jammed with plastic,” after a fire broke out aboard a ship called the X-Press Pearl carrying plastic pellets and chemicals. “It was like a war zone,” Withanage said.

Cargo ships have gotten much, much larger in recent decades and the marine insurer Gard published a study earlier this year that showed 9% of ultra-large ships had lost containers, compared to just 1% of smaller vessels.

Gard found accidents often linked to cargo that has been inaccurately labeled, weighed or stored. For example, the Sri Lanka spill was the result of a fire that likely started from a poorly stacked container that was leaking nitric acid."

“The long-term impact of adding on average more than a thousand containers each year to the world’s oceans — by the most conservative estimates — remains unknown," Larson, Wieffering and Valdes reported.

The AP audience has been letting us know there is strong interest in reporting on plastic. This investigative piece adds to a growing body of our work, not least the ongoing treaty talks on a possible international treaty on plastic pollution. The problem highlighted so well here – shipping containers going overboard before anyone has ever used the goods inside – is a little different from the problem of discarded plastic. But to the ocean and the life it contains, it’s probably all the same.?

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? Climate Solutions?

Tugboat powered by ammonia sails for the first time, showing how to cut emissions from shipping

The global shipping industry, with all the packages we order, is responsible for some 2-3% of all emissions that are changing the climate. That percentage may not sound like a lot, but it is. Shipping’s share of the problem has prompted teams around the world to try to find a way to transport freight without all this pollution. Now some former MIT students have developed a technology they think may work. They tried it on some smaller devices and scaled up to an old tugboat. They launched it and are generating considerable interest from large international shippers.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. We’ll be back next week. For questions, suggestions or ideas please email [email protected]?

This newsletter was written by Douglas Glass , an editor for climate and environment, and produced by climate engagement manager Natalia Gutiérrez .?

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