For many years, large quantities of waxy yellow or white clumps have been washing up on beaches all along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coast. These clumps are solidified paraffin wax. Paraffin wax is a by-product of heating or distilling crude oil. When transported by cargo ship, it is heated and piped into the ship’s storage tanks. When the tanks are emptied at the destination port, paraffin residues remain clinging to the storage tanks and pipes. This residue was routinely being washed out to sea when ships rinsed out their tanks to clean them.
Paraffin stranding incidents remained an ongoing problem for coastal communities. Paraffin pollution can be harmful to both humans and sea-life which is why KIMO has been lobbying hard to change the laws governing the discharge of paraffin at sea – a legislative issue covered by the MARPOL Convention.
Over the past decade, there were numerous cases of paraffin contaminating European beaches. Incidents have been reported on the coasts of Denmark, England, France and the Netherlands. Paraffin has also polluted beaches in the Baltic Sea. Big pollution events were already reported in the early 1990s along the coasts of Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. In one case, up to 8 tons of paraffin wax were released by a single tank-washing and stranded on a German beach in 1992, while in 1993 a single pollution event was estimated to have killed more than 2,000 birds in the northern part of the Netherlands.
Birds such as fulmars, cormorants and kittiwakes ingest small pieces of paraffin as food. Symptoms of contact with the substance are similar to damage from mineral oil. The plumage hangs together so that cold sea water reaches the skin. The birds can barely stay afloat. They die of exhaustion or hypothermia.
Previously, there were no rules about dumping paraffin other than a restriction that a ship’s tank washing practices had to occur more than 12 nautical miles from land. Paraffin and other floating substances were not on a list of materials that are generally prohibited from being discharged.
In Denmark, at least 10 coastal municipalities were affected by this pollution between 2009 and 2020. The total costs for clean-up was over DKK 10 million. This was thankfully reimbursed to the municipalities by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency. A single incident in April 2016 affected more than 50 km of coastline and required the removal of 200 tonnes of contaminated material (paraffin and sand).
KIMO made a decade long effort to raise the issue from the local level to the highest levels of decision making. Through lobbying National governments and bodies such as OSPAR and HELCOM, the case finally was supported by the 15 countries cooperating through OSPAR and taken up by the marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and the international law of the sea (MARPOL) was amended.
Since 1 January 2021 ships are required to wash out their tanks and discharge the washing water in specialised facilities in port rather than at sea. Tank washings are now more rigorously regulated.
The ministry of the environment in Denmark reported in January 2023, that no local municipalities requested reimbursements for cleaning paraffin substances from beaches in 2021 or in 2022. These are early days but we are quietly hopeful that this means our lobbying efforts have paid off and that the regulatory changes are working to prevent this type of pollution in the North Sea.