Plastic Waste Drifts Ashore After MSC Boxship Sinks
With monsoon season getting into full swing off India's southwest coast, salvors are gearing up to manage the risk of fuel and plastics pollution from the sunken boxship MSC Elsa 3, which went down off Kerala on May 25. So far, little if any of the boxship's bunker fuel has come ashore, but local sources report washed-up reefer containers and snowdrifts of white plastic pellets - the hallmark of a modern container ship casualty.
In the wake of the MSC ELSA 3 sinking in Kerala several beaches in the Kochuveli, Thumba, and Vettukad areas in the Thiruvananthapuram district are covered in #nurdles.
— Shaunak Modi (@Pugdandee) May 28, 2025
Cleaning them is going to be painstaking. I hope their spread is tracked by the government. #oilspillindia pic.twitter.com/98wSutlZK4
On Saturday, the feeder MSC Elsa 3 was under way from Vizhinjam to Kochi with a cargo of 640 containers on board. It developed a severe list, and the crew abandoned ship in time to escape a capsizing. They were promptly rescued by the Indian Coast Guard and Indian Navy, and all survived.
MSC Elsa 3 went down with about 85 tonnes of diesel and 370 tonnes of fuel oil on board. The shipowner has hired T&T Salvage to mitigate the pollution risk and recover lost containers from the shoreline, and that effort is already under way, officials from the Mercantile Marine Department of Kochi (MMD) told media on Wednesday.
According to the MMD, the vessel lost about 100 containers when it went down, and about 50 of them have washed up in and around the Kollam region. The ship is leaking a small quantity of fuel oil, and the Indian Coast Guard is applying dispersants to reduce the spread.
The responders are planning to empty the fuel tanks of the wreck to reduce the risk of further pollution. The oil recovery operation is already under way, and the salvors hope to complete the work by July 3. Operations to clean up the wrecked containers on shore are also in progress and should be finished by the end of this week, the MMD said.
The reports of raw plastic nurdles on the beach present a new hurdle. The tiny microscopic pellets are hard to clean up, and tend to intermingle with sand, sometimes reemerging months or years later. Birds and other wildlife often mistake the pellets for food and ingest them, along with any toxins that the pellets may have absorbed from the surrounding environment. The world's largest plastic spill, the release of 1,680 tonnes of nurdles off Sri Lanka in 2021, continues to pollute beaches and reefs near Colombo after years of cleanup.