2024-01-09 18:30:46
Using colanders or sieves, volunteers have been trying for days to collect millions of plastic micro-balls that fell from a container ship in December, which are invading the beaches of northwest Spain and causing a storm. policy.
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These little white balls have been flooding onto the beaches of Galicia since the fall into the sea on December 8 of six containers that fell from a merchant ship flying the Liberian flag and sailing between Algeciras and Rotterdam.
According to the Danish shipping giant Maersk, which owned these containers, one of them contained bags filled with plastic granules intended in particular for the production of bottles.
In this region of Spain still traumatized by the oil spill caused in 2002 by the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige, hundreds of volunteers are working with sieves or strainers to rid the beaches of these millions of “pellets”.
“We collect the pellets with our own utensils,” explains Adriana Montoto, a 35-year-old pharmacist who regrets that it is “the NGOs who organize everything” and not the authorities.
A 26-year-old home helper who came to help on Noia beach, Sonia Iglesias Rey, for example, uses a bamboo basket because “the pellets float” in the water.
“Very difficult to recover”
These “citizen cleaning” actions are organized by organizations like Ecologists in Action. Accused of “inaction”, the regional authorities, with broad powers in Spain, announced on Monday the mobilization of 200 people to help clean up.
Cristobal López, spokesperson for the NGO, deplores that the State and the authorities have not provided “the means”. It would have been much simpler to “recover the whole bags from the water” just after the containers fell, he insists.
The size of “these small balls of 5 mm in diameter (…) makes them very difficult to recover once mixed with the sand”, indicated in a press release the NGO, which filed a complaint on Tuesday against the shipowner of the ship for “crimes against the environment”.
The Spanish public prosecutor’s office itself announced on Monday that it had taken up the matter and opened an investigation.
According to an estimate carried out for the European Commission in 2018, up to 167,000 tonnes of plastic micro-beads escape into nature in Europe each year.
These granules, sometimes called “mermaid tears”, had particularly flooded en masse about a year ago on the coasts of western France.
These pellets are often ingested by marine animals and can therefore end up in human food.
“Their shape and size attract many species of birds, fish and crustaceans who mistake them for fish eggs” and can die “once they have a stomach full of plastic,” explains Ecologists in Action .
The beaches of the municipalities of Vigo, Pontevedra, Muros, Noia and even Ferrol and La Coruña are the most affected, but microbeads have also been found in neighboring regions.
“We still do not know what the extent could be” of the damage, Minister of Ecological Transition Teresa Ribera commented on Tuesday on Cadena Ser radio.
Political turning point
This affair took a very political turn just over a month before regional elections in Galicia, stronghold of the leader of the right-wing opposition at the national level, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
The left-wing government has in fact accused the region, long led by Mr. Feijóo and still in the hands of his Popular Party, of having delayed too long in asking for state aid.
“Beach cleaning cannot be ensured solely by the tremendous commitment of volunteers and environmental organizations,” the Ministry of Ecological Transition told AFP on Tuesday.
The far-left Sumar party, a member of the government coalition of socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, went so far as to announce on Tuesday the filing of a complaint for “inaction” against this region which ended up announcing on Tuesday that it would raise the pollution alert level to 2, a necessary condition for central government to send aid.
“What is toxic” in this affair “is the political use” that the left makes of it, Mr. Feijóo retorted on Tuesday.
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