Millions Of Plastic Pellets Wash Up On Spanish Beaches

NOIA, Spain (AP) — Countless tiny plastic pellets are washing up on the shores of northern Spain and local authorities declared an environmental emergency on Tuesday after a shipping container fell off a transport vessel last month.

The regional governments of Galicia, which has borne the brunt of the pollution, and neighboring 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 Dec. 13 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 kilometers (50 miles) to the west of Viana do Castelo.

One of the six containers contained 1,000 sacks of pellets, with each sack holding 25 kilograms (55 pounds) 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