Brent Spar Campaign

On 30 April 1995, Greenpeace activists occupied the Brent Spar oil platform in the northeast Atlantic. Their protest was directed against Shell UK Exploration and Production and its plans to dump the toxic platform into the sea. Media coverage of the protest was widespread, and calls for boycotting Shell-owned gas stations occurred in many European countries. The public pressure led Shell to reverse their initial decision, and the company agreed to recycle the platform on-shore for the construction of a new ferry terminal. The Brent Spar campaign had an enormous effect on public awareness the issue of off-shore dumping and strongly influenced the passing of a 1998 regulation administered by the Oslo-Paris Commission (OSPAR) that permanently banned dumping steel off-shore oil rigs at sea. However, Greenpeace lost some of its credibility in the course of the campaign when it had to admit to having publicized wrong calculations about the amount of toxic waste on board the oil platform. Even so, the case strengthened demands to require the oil industry to follow stricter environmental impact standards.