It has been estimated that container ships lose over 10,000 containers at sea each year (usually during a storm). One famous spillage occurred in the Pacific Ocean in 1992, when thousands of rubber ducks and other toys went overboard during a storm. The toys have since been found all over the world; and scientists around the world have used the incident to gain a better understanding of ocean currents. Similar incidents have happened before, with the same potential to track currents, such as when Hansa Carrier dropped 21 containers (with one notably containing buoyant Nike shoes). In 2007, MSC Napoli was beached in the English Channel, and dropped hundreds of containers, most of which washed up on the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site.

Friendly Floatees and science

Friendly Floatees are plastic bath toys marketed by The First Years, Inc. and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements including those of a consignment of Friendly Floatees washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992.

The consignment, which was manufactured in China for The First Years Inc., departed from Hong Kong on a container ship destined for Tacoma, Washington, U.S.. On 10 January 1992, during a storm in the North Pacific Ocean close to the International Date Line, twelve 40-foot (13.3 m) containers were washed overboard. One of these contained 28,800 Floatees, a child’s bath toy which came in a number of forms: red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. At some point, the container opened and the Floatees were released. Although each toy was mounted in a plastic housing attached to a backing card, subsequent tests showed that the cardboard quickly degraded in sea water allowing the Floatees to escape. Unlike many bath toys, Friendly Floatees have no holes in them so they do not take on water.

Seattle oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who were working on an ocean surface current model, began to track their progress (see picture above). The mass release of 28,800 objects into the ocean at one time offered significant advantages over the standard method of releasing 500–1000 drift bottles. The recovery rate of objects from the Pacific Ocean is typically around 2%, so rather than the 10 to 20 recoveries typically seen with a drift bottle release, the two scientists expected numbers closer to 600. They were already tracking various other spills of flotsam, including 61,000 Nike running shoes which had been lost overboard in 1990.

Ten months after the incident, the first Floatees began to wash up along the Alaskan coast. The first discovery consisted of ten toys found by a beachcomber near Sitka, Alaska on 16 November 1992, about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from their starting point. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham contacted beachcombers, coastal workers, and local residents to locate hundreds of the beached Floatees over a 530 mile (850 km) shoreline. Another beachcomber discovered twenty of the toys on 28 November, and in total 400 were found along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Alaska in the period up to August 1993. This represented a 1.4% recovery rate. The landfalls were logged in Ingraham’s computer model OSCUR (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), which uses measurements of air pressure from 1967 onwards to calculate the direction of and speed of wind across the oceans, and the consequent surface currents. Ingraham’s model was built to help fisheries but it is also used to predict flotsam movements or the likely locations of those lost at sea.

Using the models they had developed, the oceanographers correctly predicted further landfalls of the toys in Washington state in 1996 and theorized that many of the remaining Floatees would have travelled to Alaska, westward to Japan, back to Alaska, and then drifted northwards through the Bering Strait and become trapped in the Arctic pack ice. Moving slowly with the ice across the Pole, they predicted it would take five or six years for the toys to reach the North Atlantic where the ice would thaw and release them. Between July and December 2003, The First Years Inc. offered a $100 US savings bond reward to anybody who recovered a Floatee in New England,Canada or Iceland. More of the toys were recovered in 2004 than in any of the preceding three years. However, still more of these toys are predicted to have headed eastward past Greenland and make landfall on the southwestern shores of the United Kingdom in 2007.

Bleached by sun and seawater, the ducks and beavers had faded to white, but the turtles and frogs had kept their original colours.

Two children’s books have been written about the ducks, and the toys themselves have become collector’s items, fetching prices as high as $1,000.

Waste does not neccesarily mean dumping.

Though it was originally assumed that most oceanic marine waste stemmed directly from ocean dumping, it is now thought that around four fifths of the oceanic debris is from rubbish blown seaward from landfills, and urban runoff washed down storm drains.