Communities Around the World Find Plastic Pellets in Their Local Waterways – Inside Climate News

This spring, citizen scientists across the country and the globe participated in the International Plastic Pellet Count, collecting small, usually round so-called “nurdles” on the shores of their local waterways.

Today, a report detailing the findings of the citizen scientists was published: participants at 200 sites in 14 countries counted nearly 50,000 plastic pellets on the banks of lakes, rivers and on coasts.

Volunteers, sometimes armed with sieves but usually just their fingers, picked out as many as possible in 10-minute intervals at each site. Around 68 percent of counts found at least one pellet. 

The global effort was designed to raise awareness about plastic pollution, especially for pre-production plastic, which comes in the form of pellets, flakes and powders, among others. 

The pellets are sometimes released into waterways by manufacturing plants. In other instances, they are accidentally discharged while being transported to plants and factories. A train derailment in upstate New York in early 2024 caused a train car full of polypropylene pellets to end up in the Hoosic River, spilling nurdles into the waterway. Pellets were still being recovered months after the derailment.

“There’s certainly some hot spots right outside plastic pellet plants, or in places where we knew that major spills had occurred, but they’re just getting everywhere,” said Lisa Frank, executive director of Environment America, one of the groups that organized the count, and vice president and D.C. director of the Public Interest Network. “Because once they spill, they wind up in the waterways and can be transported all around the world.”

In March, two boats collided in the North Sea, releasing thousands of plastic pellets into the water, some of which ended up on shores in England.

The plastic pellets are known to harm wildlife, including fish, and are very hard to remove from the environment due to their small size. California is the only state that has passed a law detailing the need to “implement a program for the control of discharges of preproduction plastics.” But some communities have taken things into their own hands. 

In 2017, Diane Wilson, a Texas fisherwoman from the small town of Seadrift in the Gulf Coast, filed a lawsuit against Formosa Plastics Corp., which had been releasing plastic pellets into local waterways for years. Two years later, she won and was awarded a settlement in the form of a $50 million trust fund, which will support research and environmental education, among other initiatives. 

“It’s almost like crumbs, and you can follow it,” Wilson said. “If you’re around a plastic plant, it will take you right up to their discharge.”

For this count, Wilson easily found the most. She described going down to the banks of Cox Creek and collecting the pellets on the shore and floating on top of the water, all while avoiding the local alligators. She and another volunteer found around 18,000 pellets in 10 minutes at the creek, near a plastic plant in Point Comfort, Texas.

“They’re just all over the place,” Wilson said. “I could go down there right now and get the

same amount.”

The total amount of pellets found in Texas was 23,115—more than five times the amount found in California, which had the second-highest total in the country. 

Other communities are just discovering the impact plastic pellets are having on their waterways. Julie Silverman is the Lake Champlain Lakekeeper with the Conservation Law Foundation, and advocates for protecting and restoring the lake, which is situated between New York and Vermont, and extends past the Canadian border. 

After hearing about a lawsuit that the nonprofits Three Rivers Waterkeeper and PennEnvironment won against Styropeck USA, a Pennsylvania plastics manufacturer, over its contamination of the Ohio River watershed with plastics (largely pellets), Silverman became curious about the amount at Plattsburgh City Beach in New York, where researchers had found plastic pellets. 

Silverman said that the first time she looked, she was shocked to find plastic pellets on such a seemingly pristine beach. 

“It was pretty mind-blowing,” she said.

For the international count, Silverman said she and another volunteer collected around 288 plastic pellets at that beach in a 10-minute increment. She knelt in the sand, picked them up and counted them by hand, separating the pellets from foam pieces and BB gun pellets. 

Many participants found that the public had little awareness of this type of plastic pollution. Hannah Tizedes, a community manager for the 5 Gyres Institute, one of the groups that helped organize the count, led around 20 volunteers in an effort to count pellets in Michigan along the banks of the Clinton River, ultimately finding around 3,000 in total. She said that all but one of the volunteers had never heard of this type of pollution. 

“People were taking photos and sending it to their friends,” said Tizedes. “They were just baffled by the amount that were present in our area.”

Some efforts have been made to reduce this type of pollution at the federal level. U.S. Reps. Mike Levin (D-Calif.), and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) and U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, hoping to require the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to address the issue of pre-production plastic pellet pollution. The bills have stalled in committee in both the House and Senate.