A Crime That Long Wasn’t: Intentional Dumping of Waste Offshore

In public policy and popular imagination, the sea has long been treated as a bottomless trash can.

The vastness of the oceans and the impression (as the old and erroneous saying goes) that “dilution is the solution to pollution” has for centuries given humans the license to dump virtually anything offshore. Oil, sewage, corpses, weapons, chemicals, garbage, and even at-sea superstructures like oil platforms disappear into the oceans, as if swallowed …