MARPOL 73/78
1973 international marine environmental convention
The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, 1973 as modified by the Protocol of 1978, or "MARPOL 73/78" (short for "marine pollution") is one of the most important international marine environmental conventions. It was developed by the International Maritime Organization with an objective to minimize pollution of the oceans and seas, including dumping, oil and air pollution.
The original MARPOL was signed on 17 February 1973, but did not come into force at the signing date. The current convention is a combination of 1973 Convention and the 1978 Protocol, which entered into force on 2 October 1983. As of January 2018, 156 states are parties to the convention, being flag states of 99.42% of the world's shipping tonnage.
All ships flagged under countries that are signatories to MARPOL are subject to its requirements, regardless of where they sail, and member nations are responsible for vessels registered on their national ship registry.
Provisions
MARPOL is divided into Annexes according to various categories of pollutants, each of which deals with the regulation of a particular group of ship emissions.
Annex I
MARPOL Annex I came into force on 2 October 1983 and deals with the discharge of oil into the ocean environment. It incorporates the oil discharge criteria prescribed in the 1969 amendments to the 1954 International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution of the Sea by Oil (OILPOL). It specifies tanker design features that are intended to minimize oil discharge into the ocean during ship operations and in case of accidents.
The public source identifies “MARPOL 73/78” as 1973 international marine environmental convention. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around MARPOL, international and marine.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q651219. VIAF identifies the subject as 177814521. The Library of Congress control number is n82256197. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1978, 1983 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “MARPOL 73/78” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.