‘We feel like we’re fighting a losing battle’: the race to remove millions of plastic beads from Camber Sands | Coastlines
J.right in front of a scrum of dog walkers, around forty people urgently search the sand on all fours. Their task is to try to extract millions of black plastic biobeads the size of a peppercorn from where they have settled in the sand. Beyond them, a seal carcass grins menacingly, teeth protruding from its rotting skull.
Last week, an environmental disaster occurred on Camber Sands beach, on a scale that could prove unprecedented. The Eastbourne sewage treatment plant, owned by Southern Water, suffered a mechanical breakdown and released millions of biobeads onto the Sussex coast. Southern Water has since taken responsibility for the spill. Ironically, biobeads are used to clean wastewater: bacteria attach to their rough, wrinkled surface and clean the water of contaminants.
Since then, volunteers have flocked to the beach. On a cool November morning, under a blue sky, they carefully select the tiny pearls by hand. It’s incredibly tedious work.
Others – much to the envy of manual pickers – are equipped with sieves. A volunteer made a sieve from a mesh onion bag found nearby.
“We collect the sand, then pour it over a bucket into a sieve, then pour the water over it, so you only get the pearls,” says Hastings resident Roisin O’Gorman.
Andy Dinsdale, founder of Strandliners, an environmental organization which organizes beach clean-ups, says: “They have to get down on all fours, almost to the shore. [the line of seaweed and other debris that lines the high water mark on beaches]to look for very small black pellets of 5 mm. We can only do our best.
He is visibly exhausted from his days-long effort to coordinate the cleanup. He missed his son’s birthday celebrations, he said, to be here.
Despite their valiant efforts, many volunteers feel helpless. Walking pushes the plastic further into the sand and overfilled trash bags can break, sending workers back to square one. “Kneeling on the sand, on your knees, picking them off one by one is pointless,” says frustrated Tunbridge Wells volunteer Nick.
To make an even bigger dent, experts introduced a special machine. “Do you remember the Teletubbies?” Dinsdale said. He points, about a kilometer and a half from the beach, to what looks like a giant vacuum cleaner – remarkably reminiscent of the character Noo-Noo from the children’s TV series – sucking up a carpet of black beads.
This microplastic removal machine is the invention of Joshua Beech, environmental scientist and founder of the cleanup organization Nurdle. “It works by vacuuming the material, separating it by density, then sifting it and separating it at the back. [of the machine] it therefore comes out in the form of almost pure plastic in the collection bins,” he says.
Beech and his colleague Roy Beal spent five grueling days vacuuming the beach from sunrise to sunset. Beech hoists the heavy nozzle onto his shoulders while Beal holds it under his arm. “He has the shoulders of a rugby player,” says Beal. “I have the shoulders of a kayaker.”
They hope that removing as many biobeads as possible can prevent further damage.
Tamara Galloway, professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Exeter, says microplastics “overlap with the prey sizes of many marine organisms and can enter the food web, with the potential to transfer contaminants into cells and tissues.”
They can also break down and leach harmful compounds that affect animal hormones and cause reproductive problems. Local people are already concerned about an unusual number of stranded animals – three seals and a porpoise – which recently washed up on the beach. At this stage, the UK’s Cetacean Stranding Investigation Program (CSIP), which investigates strandings, does not believe these deaths are linked to the oil spill.
Rye Harbor Nature Reserve, adjacent to Camber Sands, is the Sussex Wildlife Trust’s largest reserve. This special area is “a matrix of wetland habitats”, influenced and linked to the sea, explains site manager Paul Tinsley-Marshall. “Vegetated shingle is a globally threatened habitat. » It is home to more than 4,355 species, including the common tern, rock tern, little tern, oystercatcher, plover and avocet. Biobead pollution has now been confirmed at Rye Harbour, and the reserve team is currently assessing the damage and carefully planning the clean-up of this sensitive habitat.
According to Strandliners, two large-scale biobead incidents have already been reported to the Environment Agency, in 2010 and 2017.
“This is the worst microplastic spill we’ve seen this year,” Beech says. Even worse than the spill of nurdles (pre-production plastic pellets) in March, when two ships collided in the North Sea. The plastic balls have washed up on Norfolk beaches and surrounding coastlines.
The damage caused by Camber biobeads may depend on their composition. Beads like these were once recycled from potentially toxic electronic waste until regulatory legislation in 2006. No one knows when these beads were made, Dinsdale says.
With the sun expected to set at 4:20 p.m., time spent on the beach is limited. “We’re struggling with the sunlight,” says volunteer Cate Lamb, who came from London with her partner, Khalid Flynn, and eight-year-old Maya Flynn. “It feels a bit like we’re fighting a losing battle because of the scale of the challenge.”
At that moment, his bucket split.
Rother District Council says attempts to remove all the pellets have “proved impossible” and they “expect further significant quantities to be deposited in the coming weeks and months”.
Beech and the Nurdle team hope to return after the next spring tide, but that depends on whether they can cover the costs of a second cleanup.
The money they make selling recycled tarps made from beach plastics to fund future cleanups is not enough. “We can’t afford to come back,” Beech says. “But the environment needs us back.”
Southern Water has apologized for the spill, but Helena Dollimore, MP for Hastings and Rye, wants it to go further by funding the clean-up and any future nature restoration. She also calls for an independent investigation. “Southern Water cannot be trusted to grade its own homework,” she said.
