NOIA, Spain (AP) – Local authorities declared an environmental emergency Tuesday after thousands of small plastic pellets washed up on the coast of northern Spain and a shipping container fell off a shipping ship last month.
The regional governments of Galicia and neighboring Asturias, which are bearing the brunt of the pollution, have asked Spain’s central government for help. On Monday, Spanish state prosecutors opened an investigation.
Prosecutors are concerned that the pellets may contain toxic substances, and said there was evidence that pellets had also been found on French beaches.
“These little plastic balls are an environmental problem because fish confuse them with fish eggs, eat them, enter the food chain, and end up on our plates,” says Spain’s Environment. said Cristóbal López, a spokesman for the conservation group Ecologista en Acción. Associated Press from a beach in Galicia.
The leak was first reported to authorities on December 13, when hundreds of thousands of tiny white balls began washing up on Spain’s Atlantic coast.
The Spanish government representative in the Galicia region said the container ship Toconao, which was sailing under the Liberian flag, lost six shipping containers off the coast of Portugal, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Viana do Castelo. .
One of the six containers contained 1,000 bags of pellets, with each bag containing 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of small plastic balls used to make plastic products, government representatives said. It is said that it was in there.
Greenpeace and other environmental groups estimate the total amount of pellets lost to be in the millions. They say the pellets are dangerous to oceans and human life because they break down into even smaller microplastics, which can then be ingested by fish caught by fishermen.
“Pollution of our oceans and ecosystems with plastic is one of the biggest problems facing humanity,” said Teresa Rivera, Spain’s Minister of the Environment. “Therefore, a spill of such significant amounts of plastic requires close monitoring to determine whether transport and shipping companies took appropriate precautions.”
Maersk, the shipping company contracted to transport the container, told The Associated Press in an email that the container was lost in deep water on Dec. 8 during a voyage from the port of Algeciras in southern Spain to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He said the Tokonao is a chartered vessel, not part of the Danish company’s fleet, and operates on the company’s route between Northern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea.
“The six containers contained no hazardous materials. One of the containers contained bags containing small plastic pellets used to make food-grade packaging such as water bottles,” Maersk said. he said in a statement. “The vessel owner has appointed multiple cleaning experts to assist in removing the pellets.”
Maersk said it was investigating the cause of the container loss in order to “take the necessary steps to minimize the risk of similar incidents occurring in the future.”
Volunteers and workers are organizing to clean beaches and coastlines in the region, which relies on a large seafood industry. Galicia’s coastline was devastated in 2002 by an oil spill from the tanker He Prestige.
Last October, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, proposed measures to prevent mishandling and spillage of plastic pellets. The measure will need to be debated by the 27 EU member states and the European Parliament, and will come into force 18 months after an agreement is reached.
Jordi Oliva, co-founder of the Good Karma Project, a Spanish NGO dedicated to fighting microplastics in the ocean, said this is the largest single spill of pellets his group has witnessed in Spanish waters. He said it was about scale. He said he hoped the incident would help spur action from EU and national authorities.
Oliva said the pellets would act as sponges for toxins already in the water, turning them into pills that are toxic to the marine organisms that eat them and entering the food chain where they could reach human consumers.
“This adds to the microplastic problem,” Oliva told The Associated Press. “The focus of the discussion must be on who is going to clean this up, not on who is going to clean it up, because without regulations to ensure that this kind of material is handled with care, we will have another (new spill) next month.” You might end up running to remove it.”
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Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. Associated Press writer Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed.