Parts of the X-Press Pearl still lie on the seafloor off Sri Lanka. The ship broke in two; while some wreckage was removed, debris and cargo remain. Microplastics have entered fish, and toxic residues contaminate nearby waters. Heavy metals, nitric acid remnants, and plastic nurdles continue to wash ashore. Fisheries haven’t recovered. It didn’t sink into silence. It sank into people’s lungs, their nets, their daily lives.
Jude Celanta, a fisherman near Negombo, remembers the disaster clearly: “I saw a huge ball of fire coming out of the ship, and then the beach was covered with oil, dead turtles and shipping containers. I kind of felt it was the end of the world.”
“There’s no fish since then. We’ve never had the same amount of fish that we used to catch. My son is also considering leaving the country.”
His hands, once calloused from nets, are now idle. His son is applying for a visa to Canada.
I spoke with Leana Hosea, an award-winning environmental journalist of Sri Lankan heritage and founder of Watershed Investigations, who along with the Ocean Reporting Network Fellow, Saroj Pathirana, first obtained and analysed the ship’s black box transcript. Hosea’s reporting, based on leaked documents and chemical testing, helped reveal how the disaster unfolded and why no one stopped it.
“It was one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s history,” she told me. “Yet I felt it didn’t get the coverage it deserved, because it happened during COVID, and because it happened to a small developing country. With several ongoing compensation cases, there are the legal challenges and the difficulties of getting information from the shipping industry.
“There’s now a second influx of nurdles onto Sri Lanka’s coastlines, believed to be from the MSC Elsa 3, a cargo ship which caught fire and sank off the coast of Kerala, India, on May 25, 2025. So the X-Press Pearl disaster is not one of a kind and shipping pollution is not as rare or insignificant as you might think.”
This is not just about Sri Lanka. It is about us. The laws we permit. The seas we sacrifice. A treaty to stop plastic nurdle pollution is being drafted. Nations could mandate better fire detection. Ports could be required to accept hazardous cargo. None of that will happen without pressure.
So long as a ship can sail under one flag, burn under another, and be buried by a third. The ocean pays. The polluters sail on.
The X-Press Pearl will not be the last. It could be the one we finally learn from.
Tomorrow, they will still be there, the women, the sieves, the plastic that will not go away. Tomorrow, even more nurdles will wash ashore.
