Improving Response to Marine Cargo Container Spills in Canada
The ocean faces growing challenges from pollution, habitat loss, industrial development, and climate change. If that wasn’t enough, shipping threatens to crowd the oceans and degrade the health of the ecosystem through the impact of cargo container spills and the debris they create.
Surfrider Foundation Canada focuses on addressing several key coastal environmental issues, including plastics reduction, ocean protection, beach access, coastal preservation and water quality. Most relevant to the issue of marine cargo container spills is our work on ocean protection and defending the oceans from challenges threatening the vitality of coastal and marine ecosystems.
The full environmental impact of container spills is hard to determine. The immediate ramifications of spills which occur in nearshore environments are most tangible: solid waste polluting shorelines, entanglement and injury to fauna, and navigational hazards to boaters from floating debris. However spills on the open ocean also have damaging consequences for shoreline and coastal ecosystems. Containers and their cargo, particularly plastics, can persist in the marine environment for decades if not centuries, circulating in ocean currents, absorbing pollutants, eventually making landfall or remaining trapped on the seafloor indefinitely.
Surfrider Foundation Canada chapters have been on the frontlines of marine debris mitigation efforts in British Columbia (B.C.) for many years, including container spill response. In 2016 the Hanjin Seattle lost 35 empty containers near the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait. Fragments of containers, and their plastic foam insulation, lined the west coast of Vancouver Island. Response was slow and the debris was spreading, so Surfrider Pacific Rim Chapter mobilized volunteers, liaising with various government agencies and First Nations partners to execute debris removal efforts. Seven months later, some compensation was eventually obtained from Hanjin but it was in no way commensurate with the scale of the work required.
More recently, on October 22, 2021, 109 containers were lost from the Zim Kingston cargo ship close to where the Hanjin Seattle spill happened 5 years earlier. Surfrider volunteers immediately began liaising with the Canadian Coast Guard and the B.C. Marine Debris Working Group. Our network has a long history of collaboration and we had volunteer resources ready to deploy within days of the initial spill. Unfortunately, it was weeks before Surfrider volunteers were tasked to support the shoreline cleanup efforts, by which point king tides had re-floated much of the spilled debris, distributing it over an increasingly large geographic area. Furthermore, wind and wave action had already disintegrated some of the debris. Without a public manifest of lost cargo, and given the extensive stretch of coastline affected, we had serious concerns about how to accurately identify and monitor the spread of the debris in order to hold the responsible parties accountable for the full cost of cleanup.
Both these spill events demonstrated many gaps within Canada’s spill response regime related to marine cargo containers. Much more needs to be done to improve the effectiveness of the response to this issue on Canadian coastlines
On March 31, 2022 Surfrider Foundation Canada was invited to give testimony to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans (FOPO) on the topic of marine cargo container spills. Video of our testimony can be viewed here: https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2/20220401/-1/36757 (Surfrider Foundation Canada testimony begins at 12:03pm)
To mitigate the impact of container spills in the coastal environment it is essential to implement solutions to prevent spills from happening. However, when they do occur, Surfrider Foundation Canada has provided three recommendations for the committee to consider:
Recommendation 1: Increase spill response capacity in relation to marine cargo container spills.
Spill response assets need to include the knowledge, skills, and equipment necessary to address cleanup in rugged Canadian coastal environments. This necessarily includes consultation and engagement of coastal First Nations and the established networks of marine debris removal experts represented by the B.C. Marine Debris Working Group.
Recommendation 2: Implement a marine debris monitoring and management plan that adequately addresses all forms of marine debris impacting coastlines.
Including a strategy for coastwide annual cleanup and monitoring to inform upstream solutions to marine pollution.
Recommendation 3: Provide greater transparency of the contents of marine cargo container spills and increased accountability to the parties that are responsible.
Require ships’ manifests to accurately identify carried goods, including packing materials, and develop a framework for making responsible parties accountable for cleanup costs.
For a full copy of Surfrider Foundation Canada’s written brief, please visit the committee website.
