Current National Laws Pertaining to Controlling Discharges from Ships and dumping at Sea

A new situation arose when the Suez Canal was nationalised in 1956 and tanker traffic to the west increasingly used the longer route round the Cape of Good Hope. This released the
tanker builders from the size constraint imposed by passage through the Canal, and in 1962 the first Japanese supertanker "Tokyo Maru" was launched. Some pessimists saw large oil carriers as floating time bombs and indeed in 1967 the inevitable happened when the Torrey Canyon ran aground off the south-west coast of England, releasing its cargo of nearly 120 000 t of crude oil. Almost overnight this changed the public perception of oil as a pollutant and it focused on the large volumes that could reach the sea from a single incident.