Plastic pellet spill on Spain beaches leaves ‘impossible’ clean-up job
MILLIONS of tiny plastic pellets have washed up on Spanish beaches, leaving volunteers with an almost impossible clean-up job as politicians trade blame over a stuttering official response to the cargo spill.
Sometimes known as “mermaid tears” or “nurdles”, the pellets measure about five millimetres each and lie scattered across vast stretches of coastline in north-western Galicia.
“There are millions on the ground all around – it’s as if there had been a hailstorm,” one volunteer on a beach near La Coruña told reporters.
The pellets appeared after several containers fell from a Liberian-flagged cargo ship last month off the coast of neighbouring Portugal, the Spanish government said. At least one of the containers was full of sacks of the lentil-sized pellets, which are used to produce everyday items from water bottles to shopping bags.
The minute plastics pose a major threat to wildlife as they can be mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other creatures, or become fragmented into nanoparticles that contaminate the marine ecosystem.
Noia Limpa, an environmental group, said that residents around the Noia and Muros estuary in Galicia began to report sightings of sacks and loose pellets before Christmas.
In some places, volunteers have worked with town or village councils to attempt to co-ordinate the clean-up operation.
The scenes of residents using household items to help clean up the beaches revived memories of Galicia’s worst environmental catastrophe, the 2002 spill of 63,000 tons of fuel oil that forced the closure of Spain’s richest fishing grounds.
Meanwhile, Galicia’s regional government has been criticised for failing to act on the latest crisis until last Friday, just before the end of Spain’s extended Christmas period.
Ana Pontón, the leader of the Nationalist Galician Bloc, the region’s main opposition party, accused Galicia’s president Alfonso Rueda of “hiding information and failing to act in the face of an environmental tragedy”.
Mr Rueda, of the conservative People’s Party, accused the opposition of seeking electoral gain from the spill ahead of a regional ballot next month that he is a strong favourite to win.
He has also accused Spain’s Leftwing national government of concealing information about the spill. That claim was denied by Madrid, with officials from the transport ministry saying that they had informed Galicia’s government of the problem on Dec 20.
Teresa Ribera, Spain’s minister for ecological transition and a deputy prime minister, said on Sunday that she had offered assistance to the regional government on the proviso that it declare a coastal emergency – a bureaucratic necessity for the central government to intervene.
Yesterday, Mr Rueda said he would accept all help available to clear up the plastic pollution.
“The regional government is working while the opposition plays electoral politics and the central government has just appeared on the horizon,” he said.