Sri Lanka after the X-Press Pearl caught fire and partially sank. The vessel was coming from India to Sri Lanka with 1,377 containers on board, 422 of which contained nurdles of various polymers. The nurdles, included burnt and melted nurdles dispersed over 300 kilometres of the Sri Lanka coastline. The clean-up is on- going with the high concentrations already removed.


Once in the ocean, low density nurdles (polypropylene polyethylene) float on the surface, allowing them to spread over large areas by wind and currents. Some will wash up on beaches, others will continue to circulate in ocean currents. The impacts on marine life are wide, the main ones being ingestion, leaching of additives and acting as vectors for persistent organic pollutants, microbes and invasive (micro) organisms. Nurdles, like all plastics, persist in the environment. Their small size and dispersion over large areas makes clean-up laborious and expensive. It is accepted that only a portion of spilled nurdles can be found and removed despite best efforts. The persistence of nurdles and impossibility to completely remove them from the environment


clearly supports regulating carriage conditions to reduce the risk of spills.


The work of the PPR Correspondence Group on plastic pellets


Norway led the Correspondence Group (CG) through three rounds of discussion and commentary. The main discussion points in the third round included:


- Refinement of the wording of packaging, notification, and stowage recommendations to be issued as a Circular by the Subcommittee on Carriage of Cargoes and Containers (CCC) as an immediate and interim measure.


- Whether to make carriage conditions mandatory and how to do so. Three options for mandatory regulation were discussed and participants were asked which option they favoured.


Draft interim guidelines – discussion of the elements of the proposed CCC Circular


The CG as a whole strongly supported recommendations that would be immediate and temporary pending mandatory requirements. The recommendations are intended to be issued as a Circular by the IMO Subcommittee on Carriage of Cargoes and Containers and the CG work was to prepare a draft to be further discussed within a PPR 10 working group and subject to changes that may be made by the CCC.


Following the first and second rounds, the primary measures to reduce risk of spills were widdled down to:


- Packaging requirements/ recommendations for plastic pellets within the freight container;


- Requirements/


recommendations for notifying the carrier so that containers containing plastic pellets can be identified quickly to aid in recovery;


- Stowage requirements/ recommendations for containers containing plastic pellets.


The Report • June 2023 • Issue 104 | 119


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