EU in legal fight against plastic pellet plague
Ecaussinnes-D’Enghien – Buried in the soil, dotting riverbanks and bobbing in streams: a Belgian town has waged a years-long fight against creeping pollution from plastic pellets – which the EU now has in its sights.
A spectacular spill of microplastics on Spain’s Galician coast cast a spotlight on the problem late last year, after a container filled with “nurdles” fell from a cargo ship and its contents washed ashore.
The images of locals sifting through the sand to weed out the tiny polluting pellets felt all too familiar in Ecaussinnes. The town is home to Belgium’s second-largest petrochemical complex and microplastic pollution has been a problem here for decades.
About the size of a lentil and made from fossil fuels, nurdles are a little-known building block used to manufacture nearly all plastic products. According to European Commission data, up to 184 000 tons of pellets per year – 20 truckloads each day – are dispersed into the EU environment.
Arnaud Guerard, a local government official in charge of environmental matters, blames pollution in Ecaussinnes on “dysfunction” in the industrial zone where the French giant Total Energies produces more than a million tons of the pellets per year. Total Energies said it has taken steps to rectify the situation: using a watertight pipeline to move pellets, a giant blower to clear them off the outside of trucks, and regular cleanings.
Lucie Padovani, of the Surfrider Foundation environmental group, said the pellets cause “insidious and chronic pollution throughout Europe”.
Once out in nature, nurdles “are extremely hard to recover: they are non-biodegradable and break down into even smaller microparticles,” said Natacha Tullis, of the Pew Charitable Trust. “This has a serious impact on the environment.”
The town has resorted to legal action, which is ongoing.
In October the European Commission put forward a proposal for large companies to toughen both preventative and clean-up measures. Meantime, Belgian EU lawmaker Saskia Bricmont hopes a law on environmental crimes, set for final approval on Tuesday, could enable sanctions against the negligence behind the nurdle blight. –