LONG BEACH, Wash. (AP) — From clothes to metals used for manufacturing, most of the world’s everyday goods and raw materials moved over long distances are packed in large metal boxes the size of tractor-trailers and stacked on ships. Millions of containers cross the oceans every year. Not everything gets to its destination.
The Associated Press looked at what happens to the thousands of shipping containers that fall off ships and are lost at sea.
Why do shipping container spills happen?
Sometimes hundreds of shipping containers are lost at once in storms or wrecks. Sometimes just a few containers go overboard.
The fact that ships have been getting bigger over recent years has contributed to the problem.
“On the modern big ships, it’s like a high-rise building,” said Jos Koning, a senior project manager at MARIN, a Netherlands-based maritime research organization that studies shipping risks.
Today’s largest cargo vessels are longer than three football fields. Cranes are used to lift containers and stack them in towering columns. When the industry took off some 50 years ago, ships could hold only about a tenth of the freight that today’s huge ships carry.
Greater size brings heightened risks. The largest ships are more difficult to maneuver and more prone to rolling in high waves. There’s a greater chance that any single box could be damaged and crushed. Such accidents can send a container stack cascading into the sea.
Accidents are often linked to cargo that has been inaccurately labeled, weighed or stored.
But cargo ship operators don’t have the capacity to verify all container weights and contents, and must rely on information that shippers provide.
In a pilot study, the National Cargo Bureau, a nonprofit that works with the U.S. Coast Guard to inspect seagoing cargo, found that widespread mislabeling and improper stowage meant that nearly 70% of shipping containers arriving in the U.S. with dangerous goods failed the bureau’s safety inspection.
“Despite all these problems, most of the time it arrives safely,” said Ian Lennard, president of the National Cargo Bureau.
How often do shipping container spills happen?
There’s no clear answer.
According to one trade group, at least 20,000 shipping containers have tumbled overboard in the last decade and a half. But tracking efforts are fragmented and incomplete. A few shipwrecks and disasters grab headlines, like the March crash of a cargo ship into a Baltimore bridge. But much less is known about how often containers are lost piecemeal or away from major ports.
The most widely cited figures on lost shipping containers come from the World Shipping Council. The group’s membership, which carries about 90% of global container traffic, self-reports their losses in a survey each year.
Over 16 years of collected data through 2023, the group said an average of 1,480 containers were lost annually – but fewer in recent years. Their recent figures show 650 containers were lost in 2022 and only about 200 last year.
But spills involving shippers that aren’t members of the council aren’t included in the tally. For example, not included in the 2023 total were 1,300 containers that sank near a Taiwanese port with the cargo ship Angel.
What happens to containers that go overboard?
Marine biologist Andrew DeVogelaere of California’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary has spent 15 years studying the environmental impacts 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.
“The first thing that happens is they land and crush everything underneath them,” said DeVogelaere.
Debris that washed ashore in Long Beach, Washington, matched items lost off the giant cargo ship ONE Apus in November 2020. When the ship hit heavy swells on a voyage from China to California, nearly 2,000 containers slid into the Pacific.
Court documents and industry reports show the vessel was carrying more than $100,000 worth of bicycle helmets and thousands of cartons of Crocs, as well as electronics and other more hazardous goods: batteries, ethanol and 54 containers of fireworks.
Researchers mapped the flow of debris to several Pacific coastlines thousands of miles apart, including in Washington state and the remote Midway Atoll, a national wildlife refuge for millions of seabirds near the Hawaiian Islands.
In Sri Lanka, the consequences linger three years after a massive fire aboard the X-Press Pearl sank the container ship a few miles offshore.
The disaster dumped more than 1,400 damaged shipping containers into the sea — releasing billions of plastic manufacturing pellets known as nurdles as well as thousands of tons of nitric acid, lead, methanol and sodium hydroxide, all toxic to marine life.
Hemantha Withanage remembers how the beach near his home smelled of burnt chemicals. Volunteers soon 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. “It was like a war zone,” he said.
Cleanup crews wearing full-body hazmat suits strode into the tide with hand sieves to try to collect the lentil-size plastic pellets.
The waterfront was closed to commercial fishing for three months, and the 12,000 families that depend on fishing for their income have only gotten a fraction of the $72 million that Withanage, founder of Sri Lanka’s nonprofit Centre for Environmental Justice, believes they are owed.
There’s still an impact. This year’s summer winds washed thousands of plastic pellets ashore.
Why are some shipping container losses not reported?
Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a maritime intelligence company that’s tracked thousands of marine accidents on container ships over the past decade, told AP that underreporting is rampant. Marine insurers, which are typically on the hook to pay for mishaps, likely have access to more complete data on losses – but no laws require that data to be collected and shared publicly.
World Shipping Council president Joe Kramek said the industry is researching ways to reduce errors in loading and stacking containers, as well as navigating ships through turbulent waters
Earlier this year, the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization adopted amendments to two global ocean treaties aimed at increasing transparency around lost shipping containers. Those changes, expected to take effect in 2026, will require ships to report losses to nearby coastal countries and to authorities where the vessel is registered. But with no enforceable penalties, it remains to be seen how extensively operators will comply.
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Larson and Wieffering reported from Washington, D.C. Bharatha Mallawarachi contributed reporting from Colombo, Sri Lanka.
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This story was supported by funding from the Walton Family Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Christina Larson, Helen Wieffering And Manuel Valdes, The Associated Press