Over 10,000 shipping containers get lost at sea every year! 10% have toxic chemicals!

The many goods that humans produce and then sell are shipped across our oceans in giant shipping containers. Imagine being on a ship full of these containers. You’re cruising across the ocean when all of a sudden – for whatever reason you would like to come up with – one of these shipping containers falls overboard. You freak out. You run around to the crew trying to figure out what to do. How to retrieve it. No one seems concerned. Why? Because 10,000 of these containers fall overboard every year. That’s about one every hour.


Until recently, we had little idea what happened to these containers once they were released into the great blue. This obviously depends on just where the container falls off. For example, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute investigated a container that fell into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. It had become a home for a variety of marine wildlife.

This isn’t always the case though. Very few lost containers are every recovered or even reported. There are no legal repercussions for losing them. And about 10% of them contain toxic chemicals that could harm sea life. The containers, being foreign objects, also change the marine environment, in which they settle. This can wreak havoc on the natural ecosystem.

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