The Earth’s surface consists of approximately 70 percent water. Our blue planet is more ocean than anything. And here’s another fact: approximately 80 percent of consumer goods (almost all the things we buy in stores and online) are transported by ship. Combined, this means that a lot of junk ends up overboard during long journeys between landmasses. “We are all connected to the ocean, even if you just go to the store to buy some clothes,” says Andreas DeVogelaerea research ecologist at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
It’s hard to know exactly how much stuff ends up in the vast blue, says Jessica Conwaya response specialist for NOAA’s Marine Debris Program. However, she points it out one study from 2020 that it is estimated that approximately 23 million tons of plastic waste entered waterways in 2016. That is indeed true many sources of marine debris, she notes. Regular drainage carries waste from streets and dumps to the sea. Major storms and floods cause a large influx of man-made items to the coast. Fishing, drilling and other marine industries leave behind waste in the form of lines, nets and other equipment. And then of course shipping containers fall from cargo shipscausing leaks.
Every piece of artificial waste lost at sea meets a varying fate. Some things ensnare wild animals. Others are eaten unintentionally and end up in the digestive tract of aquatic animals or circulate as microplastics in the food web. Some bulkier items, such as appliances and empty barrels, are blocking the canals, causing navigation problems and economic disruption, Conway said. Many plastics eventually float to the surface in gyres such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And some things fail. Here are some of the strangest things to ever wash up on sandy shores.
Friendly floatees
In 1992, some 28,000 rubber ducks, turtles, beavers and frogs fell from a cargo ship during a storm in the North Pacific Ocean. The bath toy broke the containment and ended up floating free in the largest bathtub of them all, circulating around the world’s oceans. They made their way to coastlines as far away as Australia, Indonesia, Chile, Hawaii and Alaska. Some even passed through the Bering Strait, crossed the Arctic Ocean and landed on the coast of Great Britain.
Oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham tracked their voyages, made predictions and used the small environmental disaster as a way to study Earth’s ocean currents. Other marine debris has also provided valuable information, including a 1990 incident involving a cargo ship that killed more than 60,000 Nike shoes into the sea and disposable lighters washed up in East Asia.
Lots of Lego
Five million Legos were lost when a cargo ship nearly capsized off the south-west coast of England in 1997, an event known as the Great Lego disaster. Since then they have been washing up on British and European beaches.
In a terribly ironic twist, many of the millions of plastic block pieces were shaped to resemble sea creatures or have some other nautical theme. There are fins, diving tanks, lifeboats, seaweed, octopuses and more. The cargo also included more than 50,000 plastic sharks, but unlike some lighter game pieces, the sharks do not appear to float. Only one has been recovered so far, according to Lego Lost At Sea, a social media group that keeps track of the pieces. fished from the depths by a fisherman.
One BIG Lego
As of 2007, there have been several examples of a giant Lego-like figurine appearing in the water or on the beach in various countries (Netherlands, the USAJapan, and the United Kingdom– just to name a few). Although initially mysterious, all the incidents are believed to be the work of an anonymous artist named ‘Ego Leonard‘ who plants his figurative sculptures on public shorelines (or releases them directly into the ocean) in an act of performance art.
Other examples of purposefully planted, eye-catching beach growths include a fake dragon skull installed in 2013 on a British beach known for its fossil finds. a viral marketing tactic for Game of Thrones season 3.
Garfield phones
For 35 years, terrifyingly broken new landline telephones in the shape of the beloved cartoon cat Garfield continued to wash up in Brittany, France. The origin of the niche devices was a mystery for decades, until a local man remembered a shipping container located in an almost inaccessible sea cave. Finally, the French were able to track down the source of all those flashy Garfields. Unfortunately, from 2019they still haven’t managed to clear the cave.
Cigarettes
The stray cigarette butt that pollutes the sand during a summer holiday is not so out of place. But when thousands of packages and complete boxes come ashore, that’s a different story. In 2014, a Danish cargo ship dumped 500 shipping containers in French waters. At least one contained boxes and boxes of Marlboro cigarettes. British authorities reported removal 11 million cigarettes of a single beach during a clean-up in south-west England. And just two years later, the the same seems to have happened again. The cigarettes were no longer suitable for smoking, but British customs reportedly burned to generate electricity.
Medical waste
Heaps of medical waste, including needles, syringes and pill bottles, washed ashore Mid-Atlantic Beaches in September this year – temporarily to block popular swimming beaches in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. Weeks after the incident, investigating authorities have not publicly identified the source of the dangerous debris.
Yet this is not the first time that medical waste has polluted beaches. In 2019, a similar wash took place in Pakistan. And in 2008, a dentist was charged for illegally dumping garbage bags full of needles and other waste into a cove on the Jersey Shore.
In the most recent case, although the responsible party has yet to be found, Conway says it’s not hard to imagine how something like this could happen. “There is a lot of mismanagement in the way we deal with waste, and there are many opportunities for waste to enter the environment during transportation,” she explains. It is possible that the medical waste was aboard a cargo ship or garbage ship for transport elsewhere, as many places, such as islands with little land area, ship their waste across the ocean.
Washing dishes on the beach can be local environmental fiascos, and it takes a lot of effort to clean up tons of hazardous medical waste from nature’s sandbox. In some ways, though, this is the best-case scenario for marine debris, DeVogelaere says. “If something comes on land, it can be removed,” he explains. The stuff that sinks, on the other hand, is stuck there. DeVogelaere has spent about two decades monitoring one of the fifteen shipping containers lost in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Initially, the container fell into the deep sea, crushing everything below it. Over the years it has… quirky animal communitydifferent from everything around it.
Twenty years later, there is virtually no degradation of the container itself as it changes the environment. When you look at it, “you think, ‘Oh, this could have fallen here last year,'” he says. Beyond the hyperlocal impacts, DeVogelaere is concerned that containers lost year after year along consistent shipping routes could provide “stepping stones” for invasive species in the deep sea, allowing creatures to jump from one place to another. The deep sea is poorly studied, he notes. “A lot of these things we don’t even know the names of… we’re affecting an entire ecosystem that we don’t even understand.”
