North Sea

It was a stormy grey day in 1987 when a young environmental scientist found himself wearing a survival suit with a set of homemade sampling contraptions trailing in the ocean on an inflatable boat in the Baltic Sea. He was hunting a waste stream much of the world had never heard of: oilfield waste. Working at that time for the environmental group Greenpeace, Marco Kaltofen was racing after a stunning realisation: that in many offshore oil and gas settings, oilfield waste is simply being dumped right into the ocean. Fast-forward almost four decades, and an analysis by DeSmog shows that companies have been legally dumping toxic and radioactive oilfield waste into the North Sea — Europe’s arm of the North Atlantic — for decades, with largely unknown consequences for a sensitive and beloved marine environment.