Earth’s surface is about 70 percent water. Our blue planet is more ocean than anything else. And here’s another fact: About 80 percent of consumer goods–nearly all the stuff we buy in stores and online–are transported by ship. Combined, that means lots of junk ends up overboard during long voyages between landmasses. “We are all connected to the ocean, even if you’re just going to the store and buying some clothes,” says Andrew DeVogelaere, a research ecologist with the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
It’s difficult to know exactly how much stuff ends up in the vast blue, says Jessica Conway, a response specialist for NOAA’s Marine Debris Program. However, she points to one 2020 study that estimated about 23 million metric tons of plastic waste reached waterways in 2016. There are many sources of marine debris, she notes. Regular run-off carries trash from streets and landfills alike out to sea. Major storms and floods push big influxes of human-made stuff off-shore. Fishing, drilling, and other marine industries leave trash in their wake like lines, nets, and other equipment. And then, of course, shipping containers fall off of cargo ships, triggering spills.
Varying fates befall every lost bit of artificial detritus at sea. Some things entangle wildlife. Others get inadvertently eaten, and end up lodged in the digestive tracts of aquatic animals or circulating in the food web as microplastics. Some bulkier items like appliances and empty vessels block channels, causing navigational difficulties and economic disruption, says Conway. Lots of plastics end up floating near the surface in gyres like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And some stuff gets beached. Here are some of the oddest things to ever wash up on sandy shores.
Friendly Floatees
In 1992, some 28,000 rubber duckies, turtles, beavers, and frogs fell from a cargo ship during a storm in the North Pacific. The bath toys breached containment and ended up free-floating in the biggest bathtub of all, circulating around the world’s oceans. They made their way to coastlines as distant as Australia, Indonesia, Chile, Hawaii, and Alaska. Some even passed through the Bering Strait, traversed the Arctic Sea, and landed on the shores of the UK.
Oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham tracked their journeys, made predictions, and used the minor environmental catastrophe as a way to study Earth’s ocean currents. Other marine debris have also provided valuable information, including a 1990 cargo ship incident that sent more than 60,000 Nike shoes into the sea and disposable lighters washed up in East Asia.
A lot ‘o Legos
Five million Legos were lost when a cargo ship nearly capsized off the southwest coast of England in 1997, in an event known as the Great Lego Spill. They’ve been washing ashore British and European beaches since.
In a terribly ironic twist, many of the millions of plastic block bits were molded to resemble sea creatures or otherwise nautically themed. There are flippers, scuba tanks, lifeboats, seaweed, octopuses, and more. Among the cargo was also more than 50,000 plastic sharks, but unlike some of the lighter play pieces, the sharks don’t seem to float. Only one has been recovered so far, according to the Lego Lost At Sea, a social media group that tracks the pieces, and it was dredged up from the depths by a fisherman.
One BIG Lego
Beginning in 2007, there’ve been several instances of a giant Lego-esque figurine appearing in the tide or on the beach in various countries (The Netherlands, the U.S., Japan, and the UK–to name a few). Though initially mysterious, all of the incidents are believed to be the work of an anonymous artist dubbed “Ego Leonard” who plants his figurative sculptures at public seasides (or releases them directly into the ocean) in an act of performance art.
Other instances of purposefully planted, attention-grabbing beach wash-up include a fake dragon skull installed on a UK beach known for fossil finds in 2013. It was a viral marketing tactic for Game of Thrones season 3.
Garfield phones
For 35 years, hauntingly broken novelty landline phones shaped like beloved comic cat Garfield, kept washing ashore in Brittany, France. The source of the niche devices was a mystery for decades, until a local man remembered a shipping container lodged in a nearly inaccessible sea cave. Finally, the French were able to track down the source of all those garish Garfields. Unfortunately, as of 2019, they still haven’t been able to clean up the cave.
Cigarettes
The stray cigarette butt polluting the sand on a summer getaway isn’t so out of place. But when thousands of packs and complete cartons come ashore, that’s a different story. In 2014, a Danish cargo ship dumped 500 shipping containers into French waters. Inside at least one of them were cartons and cartons of Marlboro cigarettes. UK authorities reported removing 11 million cigarettes from one single beach during a cleanup effort in southwestern England. And just two years later, the same thing seems to have happened again. The cigarettes were no longer fit to smoke, but the UK customs agency reportedly incinerated them to generate electricity.
Medical waste
Heaps of medical waste, including needles, syringes, and pill bottles washed up on Mid-Atlantic beaches in September of this year–temporarily shutting down popular swimming beaches in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. Weeks on from the incident, investigatory authorities have yet to publicly identify the source of the hazardous debris.
Yet it’s not the first time that medical waste has polluted beaches. In 2019, a similar wash-up occurred in Pakistan. And in 2008, a dentist was charged for illegally dumping trash bags full of needles and other waste into an inlet on the Jersey Shore.
In the most recent case, though the responsible party has yet to be found, Conway says it’s not hard to imagine how something like this could happen. “There is a lot of mismanagement in how we handle waste, and there’s a lot of opportunity for waste to be released into the environment just in transit,” she explains. It’s possible that the medical waste was aboard a cargo ship or trash barge for transportation elsewhere, as many places, like islands low on land space, ship their trash on the ocean.
Beach wash-ups can be local environmental fiascos, and it takes lots of effort to clean up tons of hazardous medical waste from nature’s sandbox. In a way though, it’s the best-case scenario for marine debris, says DeVogelaere. “If something comes to shore, it can be removed,” he explains. In contrast, the stuff that sinks is stuck there. DeVogelaere has spent about two decades monitoring one of 15 shipping containers lost in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Initially, the container fell into the deep sea and crushed everything beneath it. Over the years, it’s attracted an idiosyncratic animal community, different from everything around it.
20 years on, and there’s almost no degradation happening to the container itself, while it alters its surroundings. Looking at it, “you’d think, ‘oh, this could have fallen in here last year’,” he says. Aside from the hyper-local impacts, DeVogelaere’s concern is that containers lost along consistent shipping routes year after year could be creating “stepping stones” for invasive species in the deep sea–allowing creatures to leapfrog from one spot to the next. The deep sea is poorly studied, he notes. “We don’t even know the names of a lot of these things… we’re impacting a whole ecosystem that we don’t even understand.”
