The recent collision of a cargo ship with an oil tanker in the North Sea, releasing jet fuel and harmful chemicals into the sea has caused understandable alarm and significant concerns for wildlife, especially given the collision’s proximity to several conservation areas.

As the impacts on nature will become clearer over the coming weeks, this collision serves as a reminder of the dangerous environmental risks of shipping. While this sudden and tragic incident has received widespread attention in UK news, other more general ship-source pollution is an ongoing issue and the true scale of the sector’s environmental impacts is often overlooked and underestimated perhaps because it is ‘out of sight’ of most people.

In November 2024, the EU passed a new Directive to amend the 2005 Directive on ship-source pollution, forming part of a broader maritime safety legislative package. This directive is focused on widening the scope of polluting substances, updating the framework of administrative penalties and increasing the capacity of Member States to address pollution. The overarching aim of this new legislation is to comply with amendments that have been made to the international convention for the prevention of pollution from ships (MARPOL). Since MARPOL was adopted in 1973, six technical annexes have been introduced to cover pollution from oil, noxious liquid substances in bulk, harmful substances in packaged form, sewage, garbage, and air pollution. Only the first two substances were covered under the 2005 Directive, and this amendment therefore extends the scope of the legislation to include illegal discharges of sewage, garbage and harmful substances in packaged form. To address air pollution, the amendment also includes illegal discharges of exhaust gas system residue, which is a permitted alternative for emissions reductions under MARPOL.

While the UK still implements legislation relating to the 2005 Directive, it had transposed those MARPOL amendments into law through a series of statutory instruments [1], something the EU has not yet been able to do in full.

But while there is broad alignment between the UK and EU in transposing MARPOL agreements (aside from the annex on air pollution), the new Directive widens the divergence in administrative and criminal sanctions between the two. The 2024 Directive strengthens the legal framework for administrative penalties, with an aim to ensure a more consistent and dissuasive approach across EU waters. It also corresponds to the EU’s 2023 Environmental Crime Directive, which introduced criminal sanctions for severe environmental offences including illegal ship-source pollution [2].

However, developing frameworks for penalties is only one stage in addressing ship-source pollution – effective detection and enforcement is also paramount. A 2025 report from the European Court of Auditors warned that ship-source pollution is still a major concern in the EU, with over three quarters of its seas estimated to have problems. The report found that EU tools are often underutilised, member states often fail to act on alerts, and penalties that are given occur tend to be too low to be dissuasive from further breaches of law. A 2024 study from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) has also found significant problems with air pollution from shipping in North Atlantic waters in the UK and EU.

The new Directive acknowledges these shortcomings and emphasises the need for developing capacity of Member States to effectively detect, verify and penalise illegal pollution incidents. For example, it aims to increase the use of satellite surveillance such as the CleanSeaNet service to identify pollution incidents. The UK is no longer able to access these EU tools and approaches, which the preamble to the Directive claims are more effective than Member States attempting to address ship-source pollution in isolation, especially as incidents can be transboundary.

Nonetheless, increased cooperation could be on the horizon with the ICCT’s proposed North Atlantic Emission Control Area, which would impose stricter regulations on emissions in the territorial waters and exclusive economic zones of the Faroe Islands, France, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This proposal, which aligns with the MARPOL annex on air pollution, will be submitted to the IMO for approval likely in Spring 2025.

[1] These instruments were: The Merchant Shipping (Prevention of Air Pollution from Ships) Regulations in 2008, The Merchant Shipping (Prevention of Pollution by Sewage from Ships) Regulations and The Merchant Shipping (Prevention of Pollution by Garbage from Ships) Regulations in 2020, and The Merchant Shipping (Carriage of Dangerous Goods and Harmful Substances) Regulations in 2024.

[2] For further detail on this topic, the IEEP UK has recently published a report and held a webinar on the EU’s Environmental Crime Directive and its implications for UK and EU divergence on environmental crime

Photo by Nilantha Ilangamuwa on Unsplash