Sri Lankan authorities, locals and environmentalists say they’re deeply concerned about the possible impacts on the country’s marine ecosystem and coastal communities from the sinking of a container ship off the southern coast of India in May, Mongabay contributor Malaka Rodrigo reported in June.
The Liberia-flagged ship MSC Elsa 3 sank on May 25 about 38 nautical miles (70 kilometers) off the coast of India’s Kerala state, reportedly due to ballast system failure.
Indian authorities said they were able to contain the spill of the more than 450 metric tons of fuel oil on board. But among the cargo ship’s 640 containers were hazardous materials, including calcium carbide, used in steelmaking, which reacts violently with water to form flammable gases and poses a risk to the local marine ecosystem.
The cargo also contained nurdles, small pellets used in plastic manufacturing, that soon started appearing on the beaches of India and Sri Lanka.
At the time of Rodrigo’s reporting, nurdles had been spotted on Sri Lanka’s northern shores. Since then, more have washed up on the southern shores, near Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital.
Padma Abeykoon, additional secretary at Sri Lanka’s environment ministry, told Rodrigo that Indian authorities initially alerted the Sri Lankan government about the plastic debris drifting toward its shores because of ocean currents. The pellets arrived on the coast of Mannar, a town in northern Sri Lanka, within a day of the ship’s sinking.
Lahiru Walpita, a bird-watcher in Mannar, was among the first to spot the pellets in early June. “On June 12, I noticed strange white pebbles scattered across the Mannar beach. A closer look revealed they were plastic nurdles, something I sadly recognize from the X-Press Pearl spill,” he told Rodrigo. The X-Press Pearl was another container ship that also sank after catching fire off Colombo’s coast in 2021, releasing toxic chemicals and billions of nurdles into the country’s marine environment.
Walpita told Rodrigo he saw crows and an egret inspecting the pellets but not eating them. “However, seabirds, like little terns and bridled terns feed off the ocean surface while in flight, and I fear they could mistake these pellets for food as they have little time to observe,” he said.
Cleanup of the beaches is ongoing, according to Sri Lanka’s Marine Environmental Protection Agency (MEPA). Volunteer groups have reported collecting nurdles as recently as this week.
The nurdle pollution from the 2021 X-Press Pearl disaster was soon followed by deaths of thousands of marine organisms and fishers losing their livelihoods.
The Indian government has ordered an environmental impact assessment amid ongoing compensation claims for the MSC Elsa 3 spill.
Read the full story by Malaka Rodrigo here.
Banner image of the Liberia-flagged vessel MSC Elsa 3 that sank on May 25 off southern India. Image courtesy of the Indian Coast Guard.
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