Russ Lewis has picked up strange things along the coast of Long Beach Peninsula in Washington state over the years: Hot Wheels bicycle helmets with feather tufts, life-size plastic turkey decoys made for hunters, colorful squirt guns. And Crocs, so many mismatched Crocs. If you find a single Croc shoe, you might think somebody lost it on the beach, he said. "But, if you find two, three, four and they're different—you know, one's a big one, one's a little one—that's a clue." These items aren't like the used fishing gear and beer cans that Lewis also finds tossed overboard by fishers or partygoers. They're the detritus of commercial shipping containers lost in the open ocean, the AP reports.
Most of the world's raw materials and everyday goods that are moved over long distances are packed in large metal boxes the size of tractor-trailers and stacked on ships. A trade group says some 250 million containers cross the oceans every year, but not everything arrives as planned. More than 20,000 shipping containers have tumbled overboard in the last decade and a half. Their varied contents have washed onto shorelines, poisoned fisheries and animal habitats, and added to swirling ocean trash vortexes. Most containers eventually sink to the sea floor and are never retrieved. Cargo ships can lose anywhere from a single container to hundreds at a time in rough seas.
Experts disagree on how many are lost each year. The World Shipping Council reports an average of 1,500 containers were lost over the 16 years it's tracked. Others say the real number is much higher, as the shipping council data doesn't include the entire industry and there are no penalties for failing to report losses publicly. Much of the debris that washed up on Lewis' beach 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, per the AP.
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Researchers mapped the flow of debris to several Pacific coastlines thousands of miles apart, including Lewis' beach and the Midway Atoll, a national wildlife refuge for millions of seabirds near the Hawaiian Islands that also received mismatched Crocs. Scientists and environmental advocates say more should be done to track losses and prevent spills. "Just because it may seem 'out of sight, out of mind,' doesn't mean there aren't vast environmental consequences," said marine biologist Andrew DeVogelaere of California's Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, who has studied the environmental impact 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. Lewis wonders about the debris he doesn't see wash up, saying, "What's going to happen when it gets down deep and, you know, it just ruptures?"
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