THOUSANDS OF SHIPPING CONTAINERS LOST AT SEA EACH YEAR, CAUSING HAZARDS

Fri 04 October 2024:

Some 250 million containers cross the oceans every year, but not everything arrives as planned — more than 20,000 shipping containers have tumbled overboard in the last decade and a half, according to the World Shipping Council (WSC), an industry group.

“Their varied contents have washed onto shorelines, poisoned fisheries and animal habitats, and added to swirling ocean trash vortexes. Most containers eventually sink to the sea floor and are never retrieved,” said The Associated Press (AP) in its report on Thursday about the data.

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Cargo ships can lose anywhere from a single container to hundreds at a time in rough seas. Experts disagree on how many are lost each year. WSC reported that, on average, about 1,500 were lost annually over the 16 years they’ve tracked, though fewer in recent years.

Others say the real number is much higher, as the shipping council data doesn’t include the entire industry and there are no penalties for failing to report losses publicly, according to the report.

Researchers mapped the flow of debris to several Pacific coastlines thousands of miles apart, including Lewis’ beach and the remote Midway Atoll, a national wildlife refuge for millions of seabirds near the Hawaiian Islands that also received a flood of mismatched Crocs.

Scientists and environmental advocates say more should be done to track losses and prevent container spills.

“Just because it may seem ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ doesn’t mean there aren’t vast environmental consequences,” said marine biologist Andrew DeVogelaere of California’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, who has spent more than 15 years studying the environmental impact of a single container that was found in sanctuary waters.

“We are leaving time capsules on the bottom of the sea of everything we buy and sell – sitting down there for maybe hundreds of years,” he said.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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