When numerous small plastic pellets were spotted littering the beach at Charmouth in west Dorset, a diverse group of people, united by their love of this special place, began to delve in to the problem. After a tortuous investigation, two kinds of pellet were identified on the beach at Charmouth: nurdles, the pre-production raw material of the plastics industry, probably lost during maritime transport or from plastics factories, and biobeads, used by South West Water at a local sewage works and released in accidental spills. Lack of care underlies both these examples of pellet pollution and as a result, a formerly pristine environment now suffers from a plague of plastic pellets that is virtually irreversible.
My part in this story began on a hot July afternoon in 2017, when I stopped for refreshments in Charmouth village in west Dorset. Whilst there, I picked up a copy of the local Shoreline magazine and came across an article entitled ‘Nurdles’ by Eden Thomson, a volunteer at the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre by the beach. She described how small plastic pellets, about 5mm across, mainly turquoise blue but also some dark grey and light grey were appearing in large numbers on Charmouth beach near the mouth of the river Char. She thought they were nurdles, the pre-production raw material of the plastics industry, used to make all manner of plastic items we now take for granted. Nurdles are easily transported but also easily lost during the many stages of the plastics supply chain often ending up in the sea and on beaches.
Eden explained that these pellets are not only unsightly, but pose a danger to wildlife and children. Gulls and ducks may eat them mistaking them for food, blocking their digestive tract or giving them a false feeling of satiety leading to starvation. The pellets may absorb toxins from the sea or may be made from plastic containing toxins, rendering them a potential danger to wildlife and to children playing on beaches.
I was both fascinated and shocked. Charmouth is a place I know well, a place I have visited for more than thirty years for coastal walking and for seaside family holidays. The beach and cliffs have a raw natural beauty affording striking views along the Jurassic Coast and across Lyme Bay. How could an apparently pristine environment have been polluted by products of our own carelessness and consumption?
I didn’t have time to visit the beach that day as I was on my way home to south Devon, but I began to investigate. I read as much as I could about nurdles and began to look for them on local beaches where I found them easily. I came back to Charmouth on several occasions later that year, and in 2018, and went to the beach where the river Char reaches the sea forming a shallow lagoon popular with children, ducks and gulls. I found the small pellets Eden had described distributed among the woody debris and larger pieces of plastic that litter the sides of the lagoon and river mouth. There were some lentil-shaped pellets, translucent or green or yellow, also cylindrical grey or pale blue pellets. These were all nurdles presumably lost during maritime transport or from plastics factories.
I also found large numbers of the turquoise blue pellets she had described. These were cylindrical but quite different from the other pellets having fine ridges in a screw thread pattern. Another kind of pellet was also present. These were black and roughly cylindrical, but variable and often irregular in shape. Despite being of a similar size (around 5mm), these blue and black pellets did not look like true nurdles and I thought that most likely they were biobeads, plastic pellets used by water companies in sewage treatment. Eden Thomson also independently realised that many of the pellets (about two thirds) were biobeads.
Sewage works using biobeads were introduced in the 1990s because of their smaller footprint compared to conventional plants, their lower running costs and their ability to produce a clean effluent. Huge numbers (billions) of biobeads are contained in large tanks called reactors at these sewage plants. The ridges and irregularities on the pellets provide an increased surface area for bacteria to grow to aid digestion of sewage as it passes through the reactor.
Our pellet identification was greatly helped by an influential report compiled by the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition (CPPC) led by Claire Wallerstein. The CPPC had found large numbers of black plastic pellets along beaches in east Cornwall and after extensive investigation had shown that most likely these pellets were biobeads escaping from sewage works at Plympton run by South West Water, the local water company. The black pellets found at Charmouth held a striking resemblance to those found on Cornish beaches and I began to think that the biobeads found at Charmouth must be coming from one of the local sewage works where containment of biobeads was poor. The nearest sewage works that used biobeads was located at Uplyme, about two miles inland from Lyme Regis, and also run by South West Water. I formed the hypothesis that the Charmouth biobeads originated from the Uplyme works where, if containment of biobeads were poor, they would be deposited in the sea from the outfall pipe some distance off Lyme Regis, along with treated sewage effluent. Prevailing currents would drive them on to the beach at Charmouth.
I wanted to find out more about the biobeads, so I contacted South West Water asking to speak to someone involved in the technical side of sewage treatments and use of these pellets. I received only contradictory and confusing information, which was very frustrating. In the meantime, however, Joe Hackett of Transition Town Bridport had been organising a visit to the Uplyme sewage works to learn more about the sewage treatment process and the biobeads used. The visit to Uplyme took place in February 2019, and a large group of us including representatives of Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre, Litter Free Coast and Sea and other interested individuals were greeted by two employees of South West Water, Rhidian Howells and Stephanie Jones. They explained the sewage treatment process including the use of a reactor containing biobeads where sewage was digested by bacteria.
While we were on the site, we were surprised to find some of the ridged blue biobeads and many of the black biobeads scattered on the ground. These appeared to be identical to those seen on the beach at Charmouth. This immediately answered the question about the biobeads used at Uplyme, something South West Water had been unable or unwilling to tell me despite repeated requests. Howells confirmed that these were the pellets used at Uplyme, but emphasised that, as a result of the work of the CPPC in Cornwall, improved containment measures were being installed at all South West Water sewage works using biobeads – to prevent any further pellet loss, I presume. The simplest conclusion was that the Uplyme sewage works was the source of the biobeads seen on Charmouth beach.
Our work, linking biobead pollution on Charmouth beach to the Uplyme sewage works, featured in the Western Morning News in August 2019. South West Water were asked for a comment and denied that the Uplyme works was the source of the pellet pollution stating:
“We are confident that there has been no loss of biobeads from the site”.
They argued that because the biobeads were expensive and played an important role in sewage treatment, they would not be allowed to escape! If this were true, then why did we find ‘expensive’ biobeads littered about the Uplyme site on our visit?
At this point, irritated by the intransigence and prevarication of South West Water, I felt it was time for me to step back slightly and allow a local Charmouth group to pursue the issue. Ali Ferris, one of the wardens at the Heritage Coast Centre took this on and assembled a group of interested local people (the Ban the Beads Group) and early in 2020, they wrote to South West Water asking them to visit Charmouth to see the biobead problem for themselves. South West Water responded positively agreeing to a meeting but, unfortunately, this meeting was delayed by illness and then swept aside by the pandemic and the lockdowns.
No more scope for denial!
Perhaps the pandemic made people think afresh, made them re-evaluate their priorities, and in early 2022, a new local group was founded, the River Char Action Group (RCAG). Their aim was to make the river Char safe for wildlife, for swimming and for playing in by eliminating pollution of all kinds, including sewage and agricultural contamination, but also plastic pellet pollution. The RCAG were part of a group that made another visit to the Uplyme sewage works in August 2022 to learn about biobeads and sewage treatment. Dana Assinder, a member of the RCAG, told me that during their visit, the South West Water representative who showed them round explained how the company had started using new and larger black biobeads in their Uplyme works. He was reluctant at first to confirm the kinds of biobeads used there previously. The visitors, though, found black and blue biobeads, identical to those seen at Charmouth, littering a storage area and its immediate surroundings, just as previous visitors had. After this revelation, the South West Water representative acknowledged that these were the biobeads used until recently at the works. The company later confirmed that damage to a containment screen several years previously had allowed biobeads to spill into the sewage outfall pipe that discharges into the sea off Lyme Regis.
The findings from this visit confirmed our suspicions and made it difficult for South West Water to deny their responsibility for biobead pollution on Charmouth beach any longer. The RCAG wrote to the water company in October 2022, asking them firstly to clear their Uplyme site of spilled biobeads, which they carried out promptly. On the strength of the accumulated evidence, the group also asked South West Water to fund a clean-up of the microplastics (pellets and other pieces of plastic 5mm across or smaller) on Charmouth Beach. South West Water replied positively, welcoming the chance to be associated with a beach clean, and eventually agreed to finance the work. This was a generous gesture as the company were only partly responsible for the pellet pollution on the beach.
Beach cleans
The RCAG identified Nurdle, a pioneer, not-for-profit, West Country organisation, to clean the beach, concentrating on areas around the riverbanks. Nurdle, under their founder Joshua Beech, has unique experience in removing and sorting microplastics from the coastal environment. Josh and his team came to Charmouth for two five-day visits in late January and in mid-March 2024, to perform the deep cleans using the specialised equipment they have developed. During the first visit, Josh told me that this was one of the most difficult cleans they had done. Charmouth beach is stony, and parts are covered in woody debris, making cleaning more awkward. Also, the number of pellets was much greater than expected and many were trapped in a reedy area to a depth of up to 30cm making for slow work. They persevered and collected about 1.2 million pellets at the first clean, the majority being black biobeads.
After collecting so many pellets at their first visit, the expectation was that fewer would be collected at the second. That expectation proved to be wrong as more pellets were collected at the second clean than the first, probably because there had been a recent series of high tides and because Josh and his colleagues uncovered a new area on the west bank of the Char where both biobeads and nurdles were embedded in packed sand. Then in early April, storms drove large amounts of woody and plastic debris on to the beach, undoing much of the work that Nurdle had done. Volunteers quickly cleared the major waste from the beach, but also found more plastic pellets despite the recent cleans.
The Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre had been carrying out beach cleans for many years, organised most recently by Ali Ferris and supported by teams of volunteers. These beach cleans aimed to remove the remains of any man-made items of mainly plastic waste that landed on the beach. At each clean, however, they also found several thousand plastic pellets, a mixture of biobeads and nurdles. It seemed that, despite collecting pellets at each regular clean, more would appear in time for the next. The most likely explanation for this paradox is that there is a large reservoir of pellets (biobeads and nurdles) trapped in packed sand around the river mouth and elsewhere along the foreshore and at each tide some of these are washed up on to the beach. The two intensive cleans, carried out by Nurdle, identified and removed some of these trapped pellets, but there must be many more still there.
These reservoirs of pellets arise through historical spills of nurdles from shipping and plastics factories and one or more spills of biobeads from the Uplyme sewage works run by South West Water. In both cases, lack of care in pellet handling is the root cause of the problem. The number of trapped pellets appears to be so large that they represent almost permanent pollution. A similar situation seems to obtain on East Cornwall beaches as reported by the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Can we predict how this pellet pollution on Charmouth beach will change in the future?
Concerning biobeads, South West Water state on their web site that extra containment measures have been installed at all their biobead-dependent sewage works to prevent further unnecessary release of these pellets. This would include Uplyme so we must assume that no additional biobeads can reach Charmouth beach from this site. This, of course, does not affect the biobeads already trapped at Charmouth following historical spills at Uplyme; these will continue to appear on the beach.
Nurdles, however, continue to be spilled from container ships and from plastics factories and some will end up on Charmouth beach, adding to existing pollution. An extreme example occurred in April 2023, when the beach was inundated with fresh looking nurdles (predominately semi translucent white and cylindrical and new to Charmouth), most likely from a new maritime spill. It is impossible to know exactly where these came from and although many can be retrieved, it is inevitable that some will be trapped in the packed sand around the river mouth and probably also in sand nearby.
Nurdles predominate
Moreover, since April 2023, the profile of the pellets recovered during beach cleans has changed. Whereas when we began to examine pellets at Charmouth in 2017, biobeads were the principal pellet type, now nurdles can predominate. Biobeads are still recovered, sometimes in large numbers, but they are often outnumbered by nurdles, especially semi translucent white ones, similar to those that first appeared on the beach in April 2023. For example, Eden Thomson found that nurdles comprised 75 per cent of approximately 8000 pellets collected in October 2024. Nurdles have now become as much of a pellet pollution problem at Charmouth as biobeads.
Pollution of the marine environment by nurdles affects beaches in many parts of the world and is a global scandal. The plastics industry needs to take responsibility for this continuing problem, ensuring security of nurdles at all stages of the plastics supply chain by introducing a mandatory code for nurdle husbandry. Currently there is a voluntary code but this seems to be ignored regularly and efforts to agree global solutions to monitor and curb plastic use have so far failed.
What can we do about the nurdle problem?
We can campaign to get the pellets recognised as biohazardous pollutants and we can campaign to get the plastics industry to regulate itself better. More straightforwardly, though, whenever we go to the beach, we can look for nurdles, and also biobeads, and document the pellet pollution problem to provide more evidence of careless behaviour by manufacturers and users. Findings can then be reported on the web site of the Great Nurdle Hunt to keep up the pressure for better regulation.
Acknowledgements I should like to thank Dana Assinder, Andrew Carey, Ali Ferris and Eden Thomson for sharing information freely with me, for their helpful comments on this article and for their hard work in unravelling the plastic pellet problem, also Claire Wallerstein for her help throughout in supporting our investigations.