$1 Million Nurdle Spill Settlement Shines Light on Plastic Pollution During Shipping

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You wonโ€™t find an ethane cracker or industrial plastics manufacturing equipment on tiny Sullivanโ€™s Island, South Carolina. The tiny 2.5 mile-long barrier island along the Atlantic coast near Charleston claimed a spot in history for its role in the Revolutionary War, though itโ€™s perhaps better known among vacationers and tourists in recent years for its sandy beachfronts and blue waters.

But, in July 2019, Charleston environmental lawyer Andrew Wunderley arrived on the beach after getting a tip from a dog walker whoโ€™d noticed something strange in the sands along Sullivanโ€™s Island. Wunderley arrived to discover an extraordinary number of tiny white bits, so dense and widespread on the beach and in the surf that he later compared them to sleet. The bits were newly manufactured pieces of plastic resin, known as nurdles, which pose hazards to wildlife and contaminate the environment as they breakdown intoย microplastics.

In early March, Wunderley, as the executive director of the Charleston Waterkeeper, and the Coastal Conservation League reached a $1 million settlement with the suspected source of the nurdles: not a plastics manufacturing site, but Frontier Logistics, a shipping facility in South Carolina where plastic nurdles arrive by rail from manufacturing plants along the Gulf Coast and are packaged forย export.

The legal settlement โ€” among the largest in U.S. history over plastic nurdle pollution โ€” shines a light on ways that a rising wave of plastics manufacturing in the U.S. has impacts far from where the plastic itself is made from oil andย gas.

In addition to the $1 million to fund water-quality improvements in the Charleston Harbor watershed, Frontier Logistics agreed to upgrade its facility to prevent nurdle spills from its warehouse site on a former U.S. Navy base. After the 2019 spill, Frontier also moved its facilities to a location somewhat further back from theย waterfront.

Frontier is not the only operator in the Charleston area that handles large quantities of nurdles, but it is the company whose operations were closest to the water. Surveys by the Charleston Waterkeeper reported the highest concentrations of nurdles closest to Frontierโ€™sย locations.

โ€œMore and more of these nurdle exporters want to set up shop on the coast, but industry growth cannot come at the expense of our waterways,โ€ said Laura Cantral, executive director of the Coastal Conservation League. โ€œWe hope the precautions being put in place at Frontier as a result of this lawsuit will serve as an example for the rest of theย industry.โ€

A Glut in the Gulf Drives Plasticย North

The March 2 legal settlement did not require Frontier to admit liability for the 2019 nurdle spill and the company continues to dispute thatย issue.

โ€œIt is our sincere hope and belief that the funds will be used for beneficial environmental projects in the greater Charleston Harbor,โ€ Frontier CEO George Cook told a local ABC News affiliate. โ€œWe also maintain that we were not at fault for the subject matter under this lawsuit, however, we felt the monies could be better spent off the court room floor and into the hands of local environmental folks, who would then use the proceeds to do some good things for the greater Charleston Harborย Community.โ€

Amid a massive buildup of plastic manufacturing in the U.S., Charleston port officials encouraged the development of the region as a plastic resin export hub, where nurdles manufactured along the Gulf Coast could be loaded onto ships and sentย abroad.

Plastic nurdle spills have also driven litigation along the Gulf Coast, including a $50 million settlement over nurdles spilling from a Formosa Plastics Corp. USA site in Point Comfort, Texas. A federal court ruling labeled the company a โ€œserial offenderโ€ of the Clean Water Act and Formosa agreed to a zero-discharge standard for its plant. Yet, local activists discovered evidence last year that the company continued to discharge nurdles into the regionโ€™sย waterways.

And despite the pandemic, which depressed demand for oil generally, plastics manufacturing has continued to accelerate in the United States. In January, 8.3 billion pounds of plastic resins flowed from U.S. manufacturing sites, an increase of 5.4 percent from January 2020, the American Chemistry Council said in a March 2 statement.

โ€œYou have this glut of plastic manufacturing in the Gulf area around Houston. If youโ€™re Chevron Phillips or Formosa or whoever, youโ€™re backed up trying to move your product at the Port of Houston,โ€ Wunderley told DeSmog. โ€œSo it makes sense for you to send them up here by train and have them packaged and sent out of ourย port.โ€

A Regulatory โ€œWildย Westโ€

It can be quite difficult to keep nurdles from spilling during transportation โ€” and thereโ€™s little state or federal regulation nationwide aimed at preventing spills. California adopted a state law in 2009, but an October investigative report by watchdog FairWarning found just 15 nurdle cases in the state, and could not identify a single Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) action outside of California.ย ย 

โ€œItโ€™s this new regulatory Wild West,โ€ Emily Cedzo, the land, water, and wildlife director of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, told Audubon Magazine inย July.

A 2020 investigation by Frontline and NPR found evidence that companies intentionally covered up the extent of their nurdle spills. โ€œThey want you to put down a certain numberโ€ on spill reports, a former Formosa supervisor told the news outlets. โ€œThey want you to keep it low, so you lie. That’s my job, that’s my bread and butter. I got a family. So I gotta do what theyย say.โ€

After a Chevron Phillips representative assured reporters that nurdle spills were โ€œnot a problem hereโ€ at the companyโ€™s new $6 billion site along the Texas coast โ€” which they claimed had, in Frontlineโ€™s words, โ€œsome of the most advanced pellet containment systems in the worldโ€ โ€” reporters discovered the plastic pellets themselves, causing the company to concede that a โ€œsmall amount of residual pelletsโ€ hadย escaped.

Nurdles are often shipped by rail in hopper cars that are loaded and unloaded via vacuum hoses and with pneumatic systems. And while shippers are extremely careful not to let, for example, a single white nurdle find its way into a carload of blue nurdles, where it could cause streaking and ruin tens of thousands of dollars worth of product, theyโ€™ve proved far less careful about allowing nurdles to escape into theย environment.

โ€œWhen they load them into the train cars, they spill, when they load them into the containers, they spill, they rattle out of the containers as the truckโ€™s taking them to the port,โ€ Wunderley said. โ€œYou can find these things all over: train tracks, bridge crossings over waterways, things like that. Itโ€™s almost impossible to do thisย cleanly.โ€

This August, several railroad companies signed onto Operation Clean Sweep, the plastic industryโ€™s voluntary effort to curb nurdle pollution. โ€œWhen it comes to controlling the releases of plastic resin pellets and powders during rail and truck transport, it comes down to basic housekeeping,โ€ Miriam Gordon, policy director for UPSTREAM Solutions told FreightWaves, a rail industry trade publication. โ€œThe best practice is to vacuum up the spilled pellets and powders. Itโ€™s not rocketย science.โ€

โ€œItโ€™s amazing how few facilities take these and other simple precautions to prevent feedstock materials from entering the environment,โ€ sheย added.

nurdles in the water and plant debris in South Carolina
Tiny white nurdles can be seen washed up among marine debris in this photo provided by Charleston Waterkeeper.

In addition to problems with that sort of routine handling, there have been major nurdle spills, like one on the Mississippi River this past August (documented by DeSmogโ€™s Julie Dermansky) and another in Durban, South Africa, that spewed 49 tons of pellets into the sea โ€” an estimated 2 billion pellets โ€” in what Sky News dubbed โ€œan ecologicalย nightmare.โ€

Small Pellets, Bigย Problems

Once you know to look for them, environmentalists say, itโ€™s shockingly common to find nurdles on beaches โ€” and not only inย Charleston.

โ€œItโ€™s a little like hunting for a sharkโ€™s tooth,โ€ Wunderley said, as he described how easy it is to find nurdles on beaches. โ€œYou know how if youโ€™re just walking along, you donโ€™t see them, but if you bend down or you sit down for a minute and look, you start seeing them. Itโ€™s a situation sort of likeย that.โ€

Itโ€™s not entirely clear where the nurdles discovered on Sullivanโ€™s Island were manufactured โ€” but at least some of the nurdles handled by Frontier were made by Chevron Phillips Chemical, press reports haveย indicated.

An October investigation by local press uncovered emails between local port officials and Frontier, including an offer from a port official to โ€œdo our best to keep CP Chemโ€™s name out of itโ€ sent to Frontierโ€™s CEO.

South Carolina regulators had also reported โ€œnumerous areas of concernโ€ after inspecting Frontierโ€™s Charleston operations, but declined to penalize the company, citing its efforts to prevent moreย spills.

A researcher from the University of Texas at Austinโ€™s Marine Science Institute found that Charlestonโ€™s beaches continued to show strikingly high concentrations of nurdles months after the spill in the summer of 2019. โ€œThe number of nurdles weโ€™re finding is disturbing,โ€ the researcher, Jace Tunnell, said in a December 2019 statement released by the Southern Environmental Lawย Center.

Thatโ€™s because nurdles can not only be devastating for wildlife โ€” often eaten by birds and fish that mistake the tiny pellets for fish eggs โ€” but, with a little time, they degrade into microplastics, tiny particles of plastics with potentially severe environmental and human healthย impacts.

โ€œRecent evidence indicates that humans constantly inhale and ingest microplastics,โ€ the journal Science reported in February, โ€œhowever, whether these contaminants pose a substantial risk to human health is far fromย understood.โ€

Researchers in Australia recently reported that, in part because microplastics have entered the food chain in significant quantities, most people now consume the equivalent of a credit card eachย week.

And that makes these tiny plastic bits into what could be one of the largest environmental issues of theย Anthropocene.

โ€œThe problem almost gets bigger,โ€ Wunderley noted, โ€œthe smaller theyย get.โ€

Main image: Nurdles collected in South Carolina. Credit: Charlestonย Waterkeeper
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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.

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