List of waste sites made public 5 years after MSC Zoe lost 342 containers in Wadden Sea

Over five years after the MSC Zoe lost 342 containers during stormy weather on the North Sea, the government will finally publish a list of 6,000 places on the seabed where waste may still be present. The government has blocked publication of the list for years, but repeated appeals to the Open Government Act by a Leiden student organization and years of legal battles have finally brought the data out in the open, NOS reports.

The MSC Zoe disaster happened on 1 January 2019. Some of the lost containers burst open. Rijkswaterstaat, Natuurmonumenten, fishermen, and volunteers at beach cleanups have collected large amounts of junk in the years since. But experts estimate that about a quarter of the waste, about 800,000 kilograms, is still in the sea.

The government labeled the remaining waste as “litter” and made no targeted effort to clean it up, much to the outrage of the Wadden Sea Association. Ellen Kuipers of the association is delighted that the list will finally be made public. “We are very happy with that because now we can search more specifically,” she told Omrop Fryslan. “Even if it is five years later, things will definitely have changed on the seabed.”

The shipping company behind MSC Zoe had the list drawn up shortly after the disaster. It scanned 3,000 square kilometers of sea area with sonar for lost cargo and identified 6,000 objects on the seabed. Minister Cora van Nieuwenhuizen informed parliament that the list existed on 24 June 2019, but refused to make the data public because it could contain “confidential company data.”

Since then, the students of the Leiden Advocacy Project on Plastic (LAPP), which helps non-government organizations with issues surrounding plastic, have repeatedly asked the government for the information by appealing to the Open Government Act. It finally had success.

The CleanupXL project - a collaboration between the North Sea Foundation, the Frisian Environmental Federation, the Duik de Noordzee Schoon Foundation, and several salvage companies - will use the list to try and track down and clean up the remaining 800,000 kilograms of waste from the seabed.

Kuipers also hopes that this will set a precedent for future disasters. “The shipowner and the government must immediately make public what exactly is in those containers and where they are located. The impossible impact on the environment should be part of this,” she said. “This is really an important ruling.”