This happened with MSC Napoli in 2007 - there were stories of people scavenging motorbikes from containers!<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Napoli" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Napoli</a><p>And earlier this year too - cigarettes this time:<p><a href="http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/11031368.Cornish_smokers_on_standby__14_tonnes_of_cigarettes_wash_up_on_Devon_coast/" rel="nofollow">http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/11031368.Cor...</a><p>I'm lucky enough to live in Cornwall and I'd never heard of the lego thing, very interesting!
> No-one knows exactly what happened next, or even what was in the other 61 containers,<p>WHAT?<p>I imagined every container to have tracking and identification numbers so the owners could know roughly where it is at all times; and so that various government agencies could prevent import of things not allowed in their countries. A quote a bit later on kind of supports that.<p>> She says the ship's manifest - a detailed list of everything in the containers - shows a whole range of Lego items, not all sea-themed. After all this time "it's the same old things that keep coming in with the tide", particularly after a bad storm.<p>I'm surprised about how many containers are lost.<p>> About 120m containers carried on world's oceans in 2013<p>> 2011 survey by World Shipping Council estimated an average of 675 containers lost at sea each year between 2008-10<p>> 2014 survey says average annual loss between 2011-13 was approximately 2,683 containers<p>2,500 containers out of 120m is a small number, but still. How would you design a pinger suitable for shipping containers so that they could be located after being dropped overboard?<p><i></i>EDIT<i></i> I should have said that this pinger thing is just a thought experiment. Obviously most containers are no lost, and most of the ones that are are not toxic / valuable enough to bother with. (But thanks to the posters below)
<i>Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them</i>[1] by Donovan Hohn is a great book about a container of toys lost in the Pacific in 1992 and their subsequent travels around the world.<p>Oceanographers have since learned about currents from tracing them.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Duck" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Duck</a>
This was a surprisingly relevant story for me - I'm just decompressing after a "Marine Hackathon" held over the weekend in Singapore [1]. It was an all-too-brief glimpse into the vast container transshipment business, and the operations of the enormous port here : The quantities of goods that flow through the port is amazing [2]. i.e. more than 1 20 foot container per second 24/7/365.<p>[1] : <a href="http://www.upsingapore.com/smart-port-hackathon/" rel="nofollow">http://www.upsingapore.com/smart-port-hackathon/</a>
[2] : <a href="http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/singapore-port-handles-326m-teu-of-containers-in-2013.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/singapore-port-hand...</a>
Was I the only one that thought it was appropriate to place a photo containing a number of Lego life vests at the top of the article?<p>As a side note: Though a small fraction of the total transported, 675 containers a year floating around the ocean scares the bejesus out of me as an offshore sailor. The fact that many are partially submerged and flow with currents that are unpredictable makes the idea of crossing the channel quite harrowing for anybody without a steel hull.
side note: is the title correct grammar? As someone who grew up with "Legos" plural and subsequently had the correct "Lego" plural beat into me by the Internet, now this curveball.<p>Don't Lego "keep" washing up? Why would Lego "keeps" washing up? Is it an amorphous blob like an oil spill? Seems to me more like fish.
It very much reminds me of Glass Beach, near Fort Bragg California...<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_California)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_Califo...</a>
Kernow bys verkeyn!<p>(Sorry I couldn't resist it. I never thought I'd see a story on here about my home.)<p>I've never heard to Lego story either, plenty of other things get washed up, but I've never seen or heard of Lego.
If you thought all the rocks, seashell fragments, and hot sand made walking barefoot on the beach difficult before...<p>Certain ocean currents make some beaches more likely to accumulate interesting detritus than others, including Asian tsunami debris, lost shipping, and the occasional lonely shoe or boot with human foot remains still inside. That last one happens more often than you might think.
Reminds me of when I was a kid on the coast of Maine. Rowed out to a small island and found scattered amongst the rocks over a large area hundreds of GI-Joe parts. Mostly just parts/broken pieces, as if someone put an entire collection inside a box and blew it up. Still to this day have no idea how or why those were there.
Reminds me of the Hansa Carrier incident: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansa_Carrier" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansa_Carrier</a><p>The idea that a ton of lost sneakers helped to illustrate ocean currents blew my mind as a kid.
I have seen plastic degrade significantly when left outside for just a year or so. How long will Legos last floating in the ocean? At least in a usable or recognizable form. Some of those pieces look pristine. And do animals eat them?
More people should see this as an alternative way of providing a solution.<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/58461689" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/58461689</a>