The company behind the Suez Canal blockage once spilled 28,800 plastic toys into the ocean in the 1990s

• 28,800 plastic toys were mysteriously dumped into the ocean in the 1990s, prompting a big investigation.
• They were eventually traced back to a ship operated by Evergreen Marine.
• Evergreen Marine is the company behind the Ever Given, the vessel currently blocking the Suez Canal.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

A boat operated by the Evergreen Marine Corp., the company behind the vessel currently blocking the Suez Canal, once released 28,800 plastic toys into the Pacific Ocean by accident in the 1990s – and they were still washing up on shores around the world 15 years later.

The plastic toys included 7,200 red beavers, 7,200 green frogs, 7,200 blue turtles and 7,200 yellow ducks, according to the journalist Donovan Hohn, who wrote a book about it.

The boat was eventually confirmed to be the Ever Laurel, a boat operated by the Evergreen Marine Corp.

But the origin of the plastic toys remained unknown for years until Hohn pieced it together. He later explained the phenomenon in his book, titled “Moby-Duck: The true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea.”

After the spillage, hundreds of the toys were found on shores around the world, prompting a scientific investigation.

Two oceanographers, Jim Ingraham and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, fed the coordinates of the plastic-toy sightings into their ocean current surface simulator, and traced the drift patterns back to the North Pacific.

They had been using the simulator to reconstruct drift routes for 200 Nike sneakers which had previously been lost to sea when a shipment of 80,000 shoes went overboard.

Using these coordinates and cross-referencing it with records, Hohn pieced together the history of the contamination back to the Ever Laurel, a ship operated by the Evergreen Marine, which had left Hong Kong on January 6, 1992 and arrived in Tacoma, Washington, on January 16.

-Dr Elizabeth Bruton (she / her) 🏳️‍🌈 (@lizbruton) January 4, 2019

The toys continued to be spotted for years, with the most recent sighting in the UK in 2007.

Evergreen Marine was back in the news this week for being the company behind the Ever Given, the container ship that has blocked the Suez Canal since Tuesday. The blockage is estimated to be costing the global economy an estimated $400 million per hour.

The ship’s owner, Japanese company Shoei Kisen, said Friday that it was sorry for the disruption, and said it hoped to free the vessel on Saturday, according to Nikkei Asia.