MSC Susanna

On 10 October 2017, the MSC Susanna was in the port of Durban (South Africa) when it was caught in a storm that caused 2 containers loaded with 49.5 tonnes of polyethylene (PE) plastic pellets to fall overboard.

The spill affected around 300 km of the South African coast between Durban and Richards Bay. Drift models were used to identify accumulation areas.

No response operations were organised at sea.

Onshore clean-up operations began on 26 October 2017 and lasted until 17 July 2019. However, monitoring visits in November and December 2019 revealed the need for further clean-up operations, which lasted until November 2020.

After two years of clean-up operations, daily plastic pellet recovery rates plateaued at 50 g of pellets per operator per day (at the start of clean-up operations this rate was 380 g of pellets per operator per day). This value of 50 g of pellets per operator per day was used as the endpoint value to stop clean-up operations at the various sites.

In total, clean-up efforts resulted in the collection of 35.8 tonnes of plastic pellets by over 1,000 workers, corresponding to more than 1.1 million hours, based on the work of a single clean-up company.

A share of the plastic pellets collected was recycled into garden furniture, while others were sent to landfill.

To our knowledge, no assessment of the impact of this spill is currently available. The South African authorities asked fishermen to check the stomach contents of fish in order to identify any potentially significant ingestion of plastic pellets, but no reports or data are currently available on these observations.

The South African authorities, clean-up contractors and ITOPF concluded that it was impossible to recover all the plastic pellets spilled by the MSC Susanna due to their very wide dispersal and the low yield of clean-up operations.