MAERSK chartered 8,600-TEU Liberian-flagged Toconao has been linked to a spill of 1,050 bags of plastic nurdles on Spanish beaches from six overboard containers lost December 8 off Portugal, reports Fort Lauderdale's Maritime Executive.
The ship was sailing the stormy Bay of Biscay from Algeciras to Rotterdam. It operates between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe currently managed by Columbia Shipmanagement of Singapore.
There is no word about what else was in the boxes, but one of them contained 1,050 bags of the nurdles (less than five millimeters in size). Each sack is reported to hold 55 pounds of the nurdles.
Greenpeace estimates that are 22,500 nurdles per pound which means there could have been nearly 1.3 billion nurdles in the container.
Maersk told the Associated Press that the vessel's owners hired multiple cleanup specialists to support the efforts to remove the plastics from the beaches.
Most of the plastic has been found on Spanish beaches in Galicia as well as some in Asturias, although some reports are saying traces of it have reached the beaches of France.
There have been called to regulate or outlaw their shipment. France threatened legal action when the plastics began washing up on the beaches of Brittany. Sri Lanka faced a similar problem when the feeder ship X-Press Pearl burnt and sunk off Colombo. They have been cleaning nurdles from their beaches ever since.
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