Spain investigates spilage of millions of plastic pellets

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Millions of tiny plastic pellets are washing up on the shores of northern Spain prompting local authorities to declare an environmental emergency on Tuesday. 

Officials believe the plastic comes from a shipping container which fell off a transport vessel last month.

The regional governments of Galicia, which has borne the brunt of the pollution, and neighbouring Asturias, asked Spain’s national government to help. On Monday, Spanish state prosecutors opened an investigation.

Prosecutors fear that the pellets could have toxic properties and said there are indications that they had also been found on French shores.

“These little balls of plastic are an environmental problem because fish confuse them with fish eggs and eat them and they enter the food chain … and end up on our dinner tables,” Cristobal López, spokesperson for the Spanish environmental group Ecologistas en Acción, told The Associated Press from a beach in Galicia.

The spill was first reported to authorities on 13 December, when hundreds of thousands of tiny white balls began washing up on Spain’s Atlantic shoreline.

Spain’s government representative for the Galicia region said that the container ship Toconao, sailing under a Liberian flag, lost six shipping containers off the coast of Portugal, some 80 kilometres to the west of Viana do Castelo.

One of the six containers contained 1,000 sacks of pellets, with each sack holding 25 kilograms of the tiny plastic balls used in the fabrication of plastic products, the government representative said.

Greenpeace and other environmental groups calculate the total amount of pellets lost to be in the millions. They say that the pellets represent a danger for marine and human life since they can break down into even smaller microplastics that can be consumed by fish that are later caught by fishermen.

“The contamination of the oceans and ecosystems with plastics is one of the biggest problems faced by humanity,” Spain’s minister for the environment, Teresa Ribera, said. “So the spilling of such an important quantity of plastics requires close oversight and to determine if the transport company and shipping company exercised the proper precautions.”

Volunteers and workers have organized to clean up the beaches and coasts of the area, which depends on a large fish and shellfish industry. Galicia’s marine coastline was devastated by an oil spill from the Prestige tanker in 2002.