Most world trade takes place by goods and raw materials being packed into containers and loaded on board large ships. An estimate reads that 250 million containers cross the seas every year, according to the news agency AP.
But not all the containers arrive. More than 20,000 containers have gone overboard in the last 15 years. The diverse content has drifted ashore, poisoned fish and animal habitat and contributed to pollution.
Most are never found
Most of the containers sink to the bottom and are never found. Container ships can lose one container or several hundred in rough conditions at sea.
The experts do not agree on how many containers disappear. The industry organization The World Shipping Council has recorded an average of 1,500 lost containers each year for the past 16 years.
Others claim that container losses are much higher as The World Skipping Council does not include all ships. It is also risk-free to report a loss.
Major environmental consequences
On the coast of Long Beach in Washington, Russ Lewis has found a myriad of container contents along the beaches. Now the plastic shoe Crocs is appearing in large quantities. They come from the container ship One Apus, which lost almost 2,000 containers on its way from China to California.
Court documents show that the ship was loaded with large quantities of bicycle helmets, thousands of Crocs shoes, electronics, batteries and 54 containers of fireworks.
Researchers believe more must be done to track and prevent the loss of containers.
– Even if they are out of sight and mind, there are still major environmental consequences, says marine biologist Andrew DeVogelaere to AP.
For 15 years, he has studied the environmental impact of a single container that was found on an untouched seabed.
– We leave time capsules on the seabed with everything we buy and sell – they stay there for perhaps hundreds of years, he says.
Nitric acid, plastic pellets and baby harnesses
This year’s summer winds carried thousands of plastic pellets ashore near Colombo, Sri Lanka. It happens three years after a big fire on board the container ship X-Press Pearl. It burned for several days before the ship sank a few miles from the coast.
The disaster led to more than 1,400 damaged shipping containers ending up in the sea, which released billions of plastic pellets, also known as “nurdles”. In addition, the containers contained thousands of tonnes of nitric acid, lead, methanol and sodium hydroxide – all toxic to marine life.
Hemanta Withanage remembers how the beach close to home smelled of burnt chemicals. Volunteers collected dead fish and birds that were covered in chemically coated plastic. In addition, almost 400 endangered turtles, 40 dolphins and six whales had died with their mouths full of plastic.
Clean-up crews wearing full-coverage protective suits went out to the water’s edge with hand strainers to try to collect the lens-shaped plastic pellets.
Only received a fraction of compensation
The coastal area was closed to commercial fishing for three months. The 12,000 families who depend on fishing for a living have only received a fraction of the 72 million dollars they are entitled to, according to Hemantha Withanage.
He is the founder of the Sri Lankan NGO Center for Environmental Justice.
– Last week it was very windy, and the beaches were again full of plastic, he told AP in mid-June.
When the use of container ships took off 50 years ago, the cargo capacity was only a tenth of today’s increasingly large ships. The insurance company Allianz estimates that the world’s capacity of container ships has doubled in the last two decades.
Larger ships lose more containers
The larger the ships, the less room for maneuver. In February, the insurance company Gard published a review of the cases they have had. It shows that 9 per cent of the largest ships have experienced losing containers. Among the smaller ships, only 1 percent have done the same.
The most quoted figures on lost shipping containers come from the World Shipping Council. The members of the council account for around 90 percent of global container traffic. They themselves report their losses in an annual survey.
Through 16 years of collected data until 2023, the group reported an average loss of 1,480 containers annually. The latest figures show that 650 containers were lost in 2022 and only around 200 last year.
Critical to self-reporting
Elisabeth Braw, senior researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, emphasizes that self-reporting does not give the full picture. Last year’s report, for example, did not include the 1,300 containers from the cargo ship Angel that sank near the port of Kaohsiung in Taiwan. The ship’s operator is not a member of the World Shipping Council.
The United Nations Maritime Organization, IMO, will tighten the regulations around reporting. Next year, ships must report losses both to the nearest coastal state and the authorities where the ship is registered. But there are no punitive measures in the new regulations.
– We encourage them and explain how important it is, but we cannot be the police, says the head of security in IMO, Alfredo Parroquín-Ohlson.
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