Camber Sands, UK
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Andy Dinsdale began walking the coast of southern England in search of ‘sea heart’, a hardy mahogany species carried by ocean currents from the rainforests of Central and South America.
While searching for an expert on plastic pollution, he accidentally became an expert on plastic pollution.
Over the past 20 years, Dinsdale has watched Camber Sands, a two-mile stretch of golden sand and dunes, transform from one of Britain’s most cherished beaches to the front line of an escalating environmental crisis.
But he wasn’t prepared for what he saw in early November. When Dinsdale and the citizen scientist group Strandliners scoured the beach to investigate pollution, they discovered something strange. A surprising number of black plastic pellets were scattered across the sand.
Millions of biobeads – peppercorn-sized plastic pellets used at some wastewater treatment plants to grow bacteria that help break down pollutants during the final stage of the cleaning process – washed up in the English Channel after a mechanical failure days earlier at a water treatment plant more than 55 miles upstream from the coast.
An estimated 10 tonnes, or up to 650 million beads, spilled into the sea, mixed with sand, slipped into streams and invaded the salt marshes of the adjacent Rye Harbor Nature Reserve, one of the UK’s most ecologically important coastal wetlands. The spill was one of Britain’s worst environmental disasters in years.
After Mr Strandreiner and local councilors raised the alarm, on November 10, Southern Water, the private utility that owns the plant, accepted responsibility for the October 29 accident and said it was “deeply disappointed.”
News of the spill sparked a massive volunteer effort, with up to 100 people a day on the beach in the early days of the cleanup, working with kitchen sieves, colanders and buckets.
Southern Water has since been working with local authorities and independent contractors to deploy cleaning crews to the site. Although the company promises to cover all cleaning costs, some consumers are concerned that the cost will end up being passed onto their utility bills.
Southern Water said it believed 80 per cent of the beads had been recovered from shore as of November 11, but acknowledged that future storm surges could wash up more beads on shore.
“These biobeads will be here forever,” Dinsdale said as he walked along the shoreline on a bitterly cold but sunny day.
“What’s scary to us is that they’re so small that when people walk by them, they just think it’s a piece of seaweed or a piece of stone or gravel.”
Barbara Plumb, who lives a few miles away, was sifting through wind-swept sand Tuesday morning.
“Our beaches are just being used as garbage dumps,” Plum said, explaining that she felt compelled to volunteer. He told CNN he hopes increased oversight will put pressure on companies.
“Companies will probably have to be forced to change. They will probably choose the cheapest option, which could include the use of plastic.”
Environmentalists advocate replacing plastic biobeads in wastewater treatment plants with natural, plastic-free alternatives such as sand and pumice. These options are porous, effective, and, unlike their plastic counterparts, pose less of a threat to the long-term environment if lost.
Mr Dinsdale said an ideal world would be plastic-free, but acknowledged that was not realistic.
“We use[plastics]in many situations that save lives, but when used in the wrong place, they can have devastating effects on the environment. And in this case, with wastewater treatment construction, it wasn’t on the list of possibilities for what could happen to the environment.”
Southern Water, citing the manufacturer, claims the beads are inert and non-toxic. But experts and conservationists have questioned the beads, saying they came from a factory built in the 1990s. At the time, post-consumer recycled plastics often contained heavy metals such as lead, antimony, and bromine, as well as residual chemical residues. Southern Water told CNN it is looking into the age of beads involved in the spill as part of its own independent investigation.
Researchers are concerned that the biobeads could leach toxins absorbed during wastewater treatment, or pick up pollutants as they drift through the ocean, such as PFAS, often referred to as “forever chemicals” because they do not fully degrade in the environment. When these chemicals are ingested by fish, birds, or seals, they can accumulate in organisms and move up the food chain, including humans.
Amy Youngman, a legal and policy expert at the UK-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency, described the incident as “essentially an oil spill in solid form, but with the addition of chemical toxicity.”
“Wherever pellets wash up on shore, they’re likely to carry chemical contaminants with them, and when animals eat the pellets, they enter the food web and we end up eating them,” she says.
Chris Saunders traveled from 32 miles away to Camber Sands to participate in Tuesday’s cleanup. It was the only day off work this week, but he said he was motivated by the birth of his new grandchild.
“What will my grandchildren inherit? Nothing. The situation is only getting worse every year. Environmental protection regulations are decreasing,” he says.
Southern Water provides water and wastewater services to millions of customers across the south of England and uses biobeads at its five plants. The company told CNN that replacing the biobeads is “under consideration as part of the independent investigation we commissioned into this incident” and that updating the aging system requires investment and regulation. “These are complex decisions,” the spokesperson said.
Asked for comment, regulator OFWAT referred CNN to government agency the Environment Agency (EA).
EA told CNN that if biobeads are lost and the environment is contaminated, it will “investigate and take necessary enforcement action.” The EA added that it was working with the water sector on a project investigating “the impact of microplastics produced by wastewater treatment operations”.
The influence appears to be spreading beyond the UK.
In late October, Surfrider Foundation Europe volunteers reported finding black biobeads on the coast of northern France between Cap de Grinet and Wissant. According to the Belgian environmental group Proper Strand Roper, biobeads have since started appearing on Belgian beaches, affecting Ostend and De Haan as well.
In the UK, the biobead spill is not an isolated incident.
In 2010, the South West Water Works’ steel mesh on Cornwall’s Truro River cracked, releasing around 5.4 billion biobeads, leaving beaches and estuaries littered with pellets for years, according to a report by the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition. In 2017, deposits of biobeads were discovered along the coasts of Dorset and Devon, with research finding millions of tiny plastic pellets embedded in sand, streams and estuaries. These biobeads also landed in camber sand.
Sussex remains highly concerned about the threat these tiny beads pose to Rye Harbor Nature Reserve. Rye Harbor Nature Reserve is an important salt marsh and wildlife habitat, known for its rare bird species and is home to more than 4,350 species of flora and fauna, including 300 rare and endangered species.
Henri Brocklebank, conservation director at conservation charity Sussex Wildlife Trust, told CNN that the wetlands are carefully managed to act as a “dinner plate” for the birds.
“These (biobeads) look like tiny seeds, so it’s not a huge leap of the imagination to think that these are ingested by rare birds that have traveled literally thousands of miles to get here,” she said, adding, “Having plastic here completely contradicts everything we’ve done to protect them.”
Plastic kills up to one million seabirds every year, along with hundreds of thousands of marine mammals and turtles. A recent study by the US nonprofit Ocean Conservancy found that ingesting just three pieces of plastic the size of a sugar cube can kill 90% of seabirds such as Atlantic puffins, and even small amounts can threaten turtles and other marine mammals.
The latest biobead spill highlights the broader plastic problem along Europe’s coasts, and the global crisis of plastic pollution.
In all, up to 23 million tonnes of plastic enters aquatic ecosystems every year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which is equivalent to 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic being dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes every day.
At Camber Sands, we feel that a global crisis is deeply local. Volunteers armed with sieves and combs continue their painstaking efforts to combat an industrial spillover that could have far-reaching effects.
“We don’t know how many there are yet, and we don’t know which beaches they’ll hit next,” Dinsdale said.
