From SCDigest's On-Target e-Magazine
April 20 , 2011
Global Logistics News: Where is Your Stuff from Asia? Maybe at the Bottom of the Ocean, Changing the Habitat
Unlikely Find by Marine Sanctuary Leads to Carrier-Funded Research Project; Container Looks Perfect after Seven Years in the Briny Deep
SCDigest Editorial Staff
A freak discovery of an ocean shipping container has led to a study on how the thousands per year that fall off cargo vessels might be impacting the oceanic ecosystem.
A recent segment on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program featured an interview with NPR reporter Christopher Joyce and Dr. Andrew DeVogelaere, a biologist at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary south of San Francisco.
SCDigest Says: |
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| Who knows what your lost containers are doing down at the bottom of the sea. Maybe we will soon find out. |
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What Do You Say?
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According to DeVogelaere, several years ago scientists from the sanctuary were in a boat using a robotic submarine when they made a surprising find: a yellow, 40-foot shipping container, standing upside down with one corner stuck into the ocean floor.
The scientists marked the location and other information, and eventually they were able to tie the container to the merchant vessel Med Taipei, which had earlier lost 15 containers in a storm off Monterey Bay.
It turns out there are a lot more than 15 shipping containers in the briny deep - tens of thousands of them actually.
DeVogelaere told PBS that on average, about 10,00 containers fall off of ships every year. While that number may be high, the general consensus is several thousand containers are lost to the sea each year, adding up to tens of thousands over the decades. Naturally, they cluster around the paths taken on the key shipping lanes, and contain an incredibly wide range of goods, from benign to potentially toxic. The shipping container the sanctuary found was full of tires, as it turned out.
The discovery led the sanctuary to ask some pertinent questions around how these thousands of metal boxes might be impacting the environment and sea life. It appears no one has really studied the question, in part because the majority of containers are lost in ocean depths that would preclude getting a submarine or divers down there to take a look.
DeVogelaere said that "What nobody has really thought of before was the trash that we're leaving across the Pacific and other oceans every time we lose these containers. And to drop hard substratum along certain routes could create stepping stones or highways of trash, you know, as the years accumulate and these things really don't disintegrate."
Interesting point - along with the possibility that carriers or shippers might have some environmental liability for this logistics trash at some point.
(Global Supply Chain Article Continued Below)
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The sanctuary worked with the ocean carrier to fund a program to study the impact of some of the containers dumped in Monteray Bay, and just recently made a return trip to the container that the sanctuary team had originally found, using another robotic submarine.
