Was going to post this. One of the most fascinating fact-based articles I've read in recent memory.
long and interesting story on the salvage of the failboat.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=1
Wow that's staggering... I wonder what percentage of total containers transported is that.
10,000 of them must fill several square miles... and they're all jam packed with valuables!
Not even one square mile.
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how is this a disaster? the shipping containers themselves are similar to sunken ships and the chinese garbage inside are plastic wrapped so no water gets in and no lead paint leaks out
I am sure most of the cases really are them just falling overboard, no chance of theft or smuggling and then reporting it as such when things turn up missing.
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how is this a disaster? the shipping containers themselves are similar to sunken ships and the chinese garbage inside are plastic wrapped so no water gets in and no lead paint leaks out
Wow. There a whole lot of posters here who clearly don't deal with our oceans on a regular basis. You pretty much take the cake though for cluelessness.... not that it's anything new for you.
This containers are an ecological nightmare. Many contain contaminents and many FLOAT. We're seeing the same problem on the oceans that NASA is seeing in space flight. There's so much crap floating on the oceans that ships are running into it on a very regular basis. Do a little research before spouting off next time (yeah, I know, for you it'd be like pigs flying). In fact, many don't ship back empty - they contain dangerous waste - electronics laden with heavy metals, batteries and the like.
But hey, we could just take BigNate's standpoint of 'who cares, the world's too big for us to effect'. The bald eagles and the fish that we've basically wiped out (ever wonder why you don't see orange roughy and cod on restaurant menus any more, and you're starting to see a lot of tilapia?) might tend to disagree.
I'm no environmentalist. I support drilling for oil, own a nice big truck, and occasionally don't even recycle. However the ignorance shown in many of the posts here is staggering.
who gives a shit about the environment...what about the economic value of the 10K pairs of shoes lost inside each of these containers?
So this is billions lost every year?
Most of the cargo is probably harmless, but I wonder if any might contain hazardous stuff, like phenol or worse? I guess once you dilute it in the ocean it won't cause much harm. Unless the homeopathy people are right. :sneaky:
Hazardous goods have to be declared and I'm sure have additional safety protocol for such things.
Hazardous materials (solids, liquids, gases) are shipped via IMDG code. That code mandates the use of strong containers, specially designed to handle rough shipping conditions.
But NOT specially designed to get thrown around and tossed into the ocean where it sits/floats forever.
China exports lots of raw chemicals (e.g. phosphoric acid). Now, we are talking about dumping a few thousand tons into the OCEAN, but I still would be worried about the overall effects if a bunch of hazmat containers fell off the boat.
Carriers have several plastic waste processing plants. You're supposed to sort your trash and bring all plastics to one of the plants. At each plant, there are machines that look like a big washing machine. You fill the machine with (clean) plastic trash, close the lid, and turning it on causes the heavy iron cylinder to heat up and start melting the plastic. At the bottom is a large iron piston that is also heated and it begins to push up and force the plastic against the top disk with a large amount of force. After the cycle, what you get is a large, thin hockey puck of compressed plastic. They are put on a rack in the room and stored till we get into port.I assume you are talking about now? Back then (late 1970's) if it was in the trash it went over the side.
I don't know how they do it now but when I was in the Navy you could pretty much trail any ship by the trail of bobbing black trash bags in it's wake. On the USS Independence sponson 9 was the "trash sponson" and the place where we were supposed to officially toss trash overboard. We were supposed to poke holes in the bags to aid them in sinking and not toss them if we were within 50 miles of the shore.
Disaster not found. Unless the containers were holding something that is harmful if dumped into the ocean it's not really a disaster if a few end up in the water. While I think they should be doing something to fix the causes that cause them to lose stuff I don't think a container or two of barney dolls falling into the water is national news. There's a war going, why would a container containing something that's not dangerous sinking to the bottom of the ocean be national news? There's a ton of other more important things to talk about.
That's why I was inquired about the percentage.10,000 isn't staggering at all. The big container ships can carry close to 15,000 containers at a time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships
When you think about how many ships there are at any given time, and how many trips they make each year, 10,000 lost is pretty much nothing.
Yea, I doubt that 10,000 is more than (or perhaps even near) one percent total containers.
WTF? It's amazing how much crap nature is able to take from us.
Most of the cargo is probably harmless, but I wonder if any might contain hazardous stuff, like phenol or worse? I guess once you dilute it in the ocean it won't cause much harm. Unless the homeopathy people are right. :sneaky: