Toxic spills threaten marine ecosystem, by Mohamed Larbi Bouguerra (Le Monde diplomatique

On 20 May 2021 fire broke out aboard Singaporean container ship X-Press Pearl ten nautical miles off the coast of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The 186-metre Chinese-built vessel, which had entered service just four months earlier, was owned by Singapore-based X-Press Feeders, one of the world’s biggest container shipping groups. The fire burned for 12 days before firefighters put it out. Attempts were then made to tow the vessel to port to salvage its remaining cargo, but it sank on 17 June, still carrying 348 tonnes of heavy fuel oil and 50 tonnes of diesel – a toxic bomb now lying on the seabed near Sri Lanka’s most populous city.

This shipwreck produced a new type of spill that combines toxic chemicals and plastic pellets, threatening the entire ecosystem with harmful long-term chemical effects. It’s a consequence of the growing volume of maritime freight transport and ever-larger ships.

The X-Press Pearl was carrying 187 tonnes of lead, copper and aluminium (1), along with 1,486 shipping containers, 81 of which contained hazardous materials (including caustic soda and nitric acid). Also on board were 210 tonnes of methanol, urea (a fertiliser), 9,700 tonnes of epoxy resin and a container of lithium batteries (2). There were a further 28 containers with 1,680 cubic metres of industrial plastic pellets, equivalent to 84bn 5mm microbeads, sometimes referred to as ‘mermaid tears’ (3).

A huge tide of these pellets – the largest ever seen – was carried towards Sri Lanka’s coast. As plastic is not biodegradable, its impact will be long-lasting. ‘There’s an acute phase and a chronic phase – visible and invisible damage,’ says Meththika Vithanage, an environmental scientist at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Colombo. Modelling suggests this pollution will affect not only all of Sri Lanka’s coastline but also Indonesia, Malaysia and possibly Somalia. The X-Press Pearl’s containers were destined for the Sri Lankan packaging industry, which would have melted and moulded the low-density polyethylene (LDPE) pellets to make a variety of cheap but hard-to-recycle products, such as plastic bottles and bags.

Heavily polluted air inhaled

While the ship burned, people in Colombo inhaled huge amounts of heavily polluted air containing hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, fine particles, dioxins and heavy metals (4). As the disaster coincided with the start of the monsoon season, salvage and recovery had to wait till November 2021 and were interrupted by the 2022 rainy season. This February, the stern of the vessel was hauled onto a transport ship by the Shanghai Salvage Company, a division of the Chinese transport ministry.

The disaster was caused by a leaky container of nitric acid, a powerful oxidant used to make explosives and fertilisers, which reacts explosively on contact with metals and can spontaneously ignite fuels, paper and wood. Although the crew detected the leak on 11 May, no port was willing to assist the X-Press Pearl ‘due to a lack of specialised equipment’.

It’s almost impossible to list all of this chemical cocktail’s impacts on the environment, the fishing industry, biodiversity and tourism, let alone its long-term effects. With Sri Lanka then under lockdown, suffering record inflation of 69.8% and in the midst of a political crisis that led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation in July 2022, there was little state support for assessing the damage as a preliminary to legal action.

On 25 May 2021 explosions had been heard aboard the X-Press Pearl and containers began falling into the sea. Soon, a tide of pellets began washing onto the beaches, including the idyllic Sarakkuwa beach, until ‘you couldn’t see the sand any more,’ says Muditha Katuwawala, founder of the environmental organisation Pearl Protectors (5). The layer of microbeads, two metres deep in places, became known as plastic dunes. Civil society, scientists and the military tried to clean the beaches with limited resources. The task was Sisyphean: beaches that had been cleaned one day were covered in microbeads again the next morning.

As the Sri Lankan disaster shows, micro- and nanoplastics represent an all-encompassing environmental threat affecting society, the environment, health, economies and the food chain

When this type of disaster occurs far from wealthy countries and causes few immediate victims, it attracts little attention from Western media; their indifference contributes to what Agnès Sinaï has called ‘a collective blindness in the face of widespread ecological unsustainability’. While extraordinary in its scale, the X-Press Pearl disaster is far from unique. A month later, on 21 June 2021, there was an accident in the engine room of the Liberian-flagged MSC Messina, 480 nautical miles off the Sri Lankan coast with 38 containers on board. The crew managed to extinguish the fire, though one mariner lost his life. In September 2020 a similar accident had occurred aboard the MT New Diamond, 38 miles from Sri Lanka. That fire was brought under control, but a Filipino sailor died and 270,000 tonnes of Kuwaiti crude oil spilled into the sea.

Given the vast and ever-increasing size of vessels, even a small incident can quickly turn into a catastrophe. On average, merchant ships report two fires a month on board. Unsurprisingly, cases of pollution from toxic plastic microbeads have increased since the leak of 150 tonnes of pellets in Hong Kong in 2012. In 2020 alone, there were several such spills: 743 million microbeads were discharged into the Mississippi and 13 tonnes into the North Sea. The full scale of losses on the high seas remains unclear because international regulations do not classify plastic as hazardous and so do not require shipowners to declare containers lost at sea. Between October 2020 and January 2021, 3,000 containers were lost in the Pacific alone. The World Shipping Council’s estimate of average annual container losses is 1,566 (6).

Fallout three years on

Three years on, the X-Press Pearl disaster remains the largest of its kind in maritime history. Its effects were exacerbated by the hazardous nature of the chemicals involved and the quantity of plastic pellets burned in the fire; these pyroplastics release carcinogenic compounds such as benzene and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons. Many Sri Lankans who relied on fishing lost their jobs; others had their nets damaged by the chemical spill. The chemical pollution severely affected coral reefs. Just a month after the accident, the scale of the impact on marine life became evident as carcasses washed up on the coast: dozens of dolphins, six whales, hundreds of flying gurnards and over 250 turtles, whose shells looked burned or discoloured. According to Vithanage, deaths among these species are likely to be five times the number of bodies washed ashore. Thousands of fish were found with stomachs and gills full of pellets. In the previously fish-rich Negombo lagoon, the sea turned bright green, as urea accelerated the growth of algae, which killed marine life. The concentrated sludge cleared from the beaches by volunteers heated up in the collection containers, indicating the presence of chemical reactions. All in all, the pollution caused by the disaster far exceeded the debris picked up on the beaches.

How can we stop such events causing the destruction of coastlines and ecosystems? The increase in maritime traffic and the complex mixture of chemicals transported demand urgent action to avoid another X-Press Pearl incident. The International Maritime Organisation estimates over half the goods transported by sea may be environmentally hazardous (7).

A first step would be tougher controls on transporting toxic and hazardous chemicals by sea; these are increasingly shipped in the same vessels as hydrocarbons, metals and wood. The cocktail created by an accident is much harder to clean up than an oil spill; as it’s heavier than water, it forms underwater layers and mobile toxic plumes. However, it’s also vital to address the problem at source by tackling plastic production. This May, delegates from 175 nations gathered at UNESCO headquarters in Paris to discuss reducing the 350 million tonnes of plastic produced annually. The month before, the world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Aramco, and TotalEnergies had begun constructing a plant in Jubail, Saudi Arabia, capable of producing one million tonnes of polyethylene a year (8).

Towards a global treaty

A ‘historic’ resolution was passed on 2 March 2022 at the fifth UN Environment Assembly, expressing the intention to draft a binding international treaty on plastic pollution, including at sea. Negotiations are expected to conclude by the end of 2024, leading to a global treaty in 2025. The discussions were severely hampered in Paris by the delaying tactics of oil- and gas-producing states and plastic producers, but in the end a mandate was given to an intergovernmental negotiating committee to produce a draft agreement by this November. Developing countries, which are the main victims of plastic pollution, want industrialised nations to fund the concrete measures required by the final treaty.

As the Sri Lankan disaster shows, micro- and nanoplastics represent an environmental threat that is potentially all-encompassing, as it affects the environment, society, economies, health and the food chain. Persisting with business as usual would mean an almost threefold increase in the quantity of plastic waste in aquatic ecosystems by 2040 (9).