Abstract
In May 2021, the M/V X-Press Pearl cargo ship caught fire 18 km off the west coast of Sri Lanka and spilled ∼1680 tons of spherical pieces of plastic or "nurdles" (∼5 mm; white in color). Nurdles are the preproduction plastic used to manufacture a wide range of end products. Exposure to combustion, heat, and chemicals led to agglomeration, fragmentation, charring, and chemical modification of the plastic, creating an unprecedented complex spill of visibly burnt plastic and unburnt nurdles. These pieces span a continuum of colors, shapes, sizes, and densities with high variability that could impact cleanup efforts, alter transport in the ocean, and potentially affect wildlife. Visibly burnt plastic was 3-fold more chemically complex than visibly unburnt nurdles. This added chemical complexity included combustion-derived polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. A portion of the burnt material contained petroleum-derived biomarkers, indicating that it encountered some fossil-fuel products during the spill. The findings of this research highlight the added complexity caused by the fire and subsequent burning of plastic for cleanup operations, monitoring, and damage assessment and provides recommendations to further understand and combat the impacts of this and future spills.
Highlights
In May 2021, the M/V X-Press Pearl cargo ship caught fire 18 km off the west coast of Sri Lanka and spilled ∼1680 tons of spherical pieces of plastic or “nurdles” (∼5 mm; white in color)
Within 5 days of the fire, white opaque nurdles (∼5 mm) as well as irregularly shaped dark plastic pieces, both smaller and larger than the nurdles that spilled from the ship, reached the Sri Lankan shore (Figures S1−S4)
Nurdles are the preproduction plastic used to manufacture a wide range of end products
Summary
Chronic “nurdling” of coastlines is part of an ongoing global trend of plastic entering the ocean and has been recognized as a potential problem since the 1970s when oceanographers first identified nurdles in coastal waters.[32−37] Unlike past nurdle spills though, this spill released burnt plastic, a type of litter that has only recently been documented in the ocean,[13] posing uncertainties for (i) the response activities, (ii) the fate and transport of the plastic, and (iii) the potential impact on wildlife (Figure 4). Aquatic organisms have been documented to actively and passively interact with and ingest plastic.[44−52] Because of its variable appearance, the burnt plastic may resemble different types of prey and be ingested and translocated, differently affecting how wildlife interact with the plastic.[53,54] Adding to this, the quantity of smaller burnt pieces could increase due to the plastic’s brittleness, creating a fraction of plastic of reduced size that could be more harmful in some cases or egested more efficiently in other cases.[55,56] during the fire, the plastic was exposed to carcinogenic combustion products and developed additive degradation products[57] as revealed by GC×GC analysis, potentiating the burnt plastic as a vector with unknown bioavailability for carcinogenic PAHs and other pollutants.[58−67] Collectively, these features differentiate this spill from past nurdle spills and warrant investigation of how the toxicity varies along the burnt nurdle continuum
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