What Happens to Decommissioned Container Ships?

After years of use in the international trade routes around the world, decommissioned container ships find a final resting place with a purpose off the coast of Texas.

Due to the recent popularity of repurposed shipping containers, we are all familiar with what happens when a container has been retired from the international trade circuit. However, we recently found ourselves wondering what happens to a retired container ship. While researching the answer to this query, we discovered one unique method Texas Parks and Wildlife has employed to decommission these ships while enhancing our nature world.

Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Ships-to-Reef Program

In order to promote aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico, Texas Parks and Wildlife has established the Ships-to-Reefs program. This program takes decommissioned container ships, as well as other ship types, and sinks them off the coast of Texas so that the natural ecosystem can turn them into artificial reefs. Since the Gulf of Mexico has relatively few naturally occurring reefs and it is teeming with thousands of species of plants and animals that need hard surfaces to cling to in order to complete their life cycles, this program gives these species the environment they need to thrive be establishing man-made reefs.

To see how many reefs have been created through the Ships-to-Reefs program, check out this map of their locations.

Decomissioned Container Ship Named ‘The Kraken’

In late January of 2017, the Texas Parks and Wildlife’s Artificial Reef Program sank a 371-ft cargo vessel, named The Kraken, 67 miles off the coast of Galveston. Before the sinking, all the fuel, oil, and hazardous materials were cleaned off the container ship to ensure it was safe to become a new home for underwater life. Read Texas Parks and Wildlife’s official press release: “Release the Kraken“.

As we know, container ships are very large vessels. Their large mass makes them great structures for this kind of program. Watch the video above to see the Kraken sink and start its life as a part of the underwater ecosystem.