A trade group says some 250 million containers cross the oceans every year — but not everything arrives as planned.

Most containers eventually sink to the sea floor and are never retrieved. Cargo ships can lose anywhere from a single container to hundreds at a time in rough seas.

The disaster dumped more than 1,400 damaged shipping containers into the sea — releasing billions of plastic manufacturing pellets known as nurdles as well as thousands of tons of nitric acid, lead, ...