EU takes aim at plastic pellets to prevent their nightmare cleanup

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/eu-takes-aim-plastic-pellets-030314496.html

by PaulHoule • 9 months ago

106 76 9 months ago

yahoo.com

Havoc• 9 months ago

Thought they’re talking about airsoft lol

HPsquared2• 9 months ago

Are those biodegradable?

ReptileMan• 9 months ago

Kinda. I think that modern airsoft balls degrade in a couple of years. Which shouldn't be an issue in a dedicated venue.

GOD_Over_Djinn• 9 months ago

They’re marketed that way, but there’s a giant asterisk. They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.

There is a new manufacturer called Terra that has apparently made “true” biodegradable Airsoft pellets

time4tea• 9 months ago

Relevant recent incident:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/08/environmenta...

Obvs, uk gov does nothing

gerdesj2• 9 months ago

"Dollimore, the Labour and Cooperative MP who joined the clean-up efforts,"

Sharlin2• 9 months ago

Well, I guess you could say that the government is doing something if a single member of parliament chooses to do some volunteer work on her free time.

hexbin010• 9 months ago

The water companies are too busy lobbying for price rises/manufacturing consent in the media (of which these stories are a part of. The water companies will again claim they are a victim of low bills meaning they can't invest which is what causes these events...)

It's all so insidious

UK gov will permit bills to rise and nothing will fundamentally change when it comes to water in the UK except how much we pay

HPsquared2• 9 months ago

From a wastewater treatment plant no less.

"This is the one thing we didn't want to happen"

fennecfoxy• 9 months ago

UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.

It's really quite sad. I just wish people would work together to compromise but it seems all over the world there's this intense tribal effect. I guess evolution is to blame, we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now and as individuals modern life is far too complicated to have enough attention span to worry about every little thing, especially when governments and corporations often purposefully make it very difficult.

symbogra• 9 months ago

The UK has a clear path to overcome the failure of democracy when people vote along purely tribal lines; the King should retake power and rule benevolently for the good of the UK.

lukan2• 9 months ago

"we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now"

Then maybe this is the problem? And the solution to build smaller societies again where the individual can have meaningful impact and not give up from the start to even try to move the buerocratic leviathan even a little bit in the right direction?

epolanski• 9 months ago

UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.

I really don't see any major western democracy being exempt from this.

Especially now that demographics have shifted and our populations get older it's hard to be elected unless you cater about what older folks care and don't care about. This makes long-term planning very difficult, as older folks couldn't care less with spend gargantuan money today so situation is improved decades from now.

dgroshev3• 9 months ago

But what needs to be fixed? Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:

- too many immigrants

- too many small boat arrivals

- the existence of billionaires

- too much tax

- too little tax

- UK membership in NATO

- UK being too weak in NATO

- too much smut online that kids can see

- too many attempts to control the web

Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.

The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).

This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.

radicalbyte• 9 months ago

The amount of damage done in the 15 years of successively worse leaders requires not only time to fix but also incredible political bravery.

That in the backdrop of a press who are actively working against the best interests of the country (they serve their often foreign billionaire owners).

I would give us a chance if we had an extremely charismatic and rational progressive in charge but we don't. Starmer is an admirable person but he doesn't have the charisma or the vision needed to get us out of this mess. Thirty years ago he would have been a "One Britain" Tory.

The UK progressives - the Lib Dems and the Greens - have absolutely no chance electorally and the media is pushing the far-right Russian-funded Reform Party as a "solution" and I'm worried that enough low-information voters will fall for it.

subscribed• 9 months ago

It seems to be that Greens _do_ actually provide bold and actionable way forward.

And since they recently overtook the blue Labour, it's actually possible to hope again.

scott_w2• 9 months ago

The previous Secretary for DEFRA (Steve Reed) saw passage of the Water (Special Measures) Act which allows the government to bring criminal charges against water company executives for persistent lawbreaking.

So to say, "uk gov does nothing" is simply not true. The Labour government has started doing things. However, it's starting from a place where the previous Conservative government functionally removed all legal requirements. In particular, Liz Truss in the same role issued instruction that water companies no longer need to monitor sewage outflows and can just self-report.

EDIT: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-special-mea...

callamdelaney• 9 months ago

'allows' being the operative term here which means that the statement you attempt to contradict has not been contradicted.

How many executives has the UK government sought to prosecute under this law?

georgefrowny2• 9 months ago

Drops the word "biobeads", refuses to elaborate on what that means. Such shit journalism.

They're small plastic beads uses to provide a large surface area for biological decomposition of waste in wastewater plants as water flows though big mesh tanks full of them. In doing so they become contaminated with various biological and chemical toxins.

SideburnsOfDoom• 9 months ago

I have heard of ponds being filtered that way using a basket of pebbles.

I suppose that there are some advantages of using plastic instead of rocks for this - for one thing it's lighter in bulk.

But well, here is the disadvantage. A spill of small rocks isn't usually an environmental issue.

amelius• 9 months ago

[flagged]

preisschild• 9 months ago

Yeah, reducing pollution is "extremist insanity" /s

fredrikholm• 9 months ago

Biobeads are not a natural phenomenon; they are produced for and used by water treatment plants and therefore it's the responsibility of their owners to ensure that they don't leak into the ocean where they don't belong.

This type of legislation is in the same line as the USA's Clean Water Act; don't shit where you eat/live.

andrepd• 9 months ago

Yep, and in the air too. I can't even burn leaded gasoline. When will the madness end?!

eric-burel3• 9 months ago

Weird comment. Anyway I am so proud to see so many French names in the article.

dang• 8 months ago

Please don't edit a comment, once it has replies, in such a way as to destroy context for the reader.

postepowanieadm• 9 months ago

It's about non-tax barriers on pellets import :)

looperhacks• 9 months ago

On the one hand, I'm happy that something is being done about this, because it's clearly a problem (completely basing this assumption on this one article).

But I'm very annoyed that this needs to be done in the first place. There's a lot of annoying regulation in place that shouldn't have to be there, but I feel like some profit-driven dicks will always find a way to mess things up for everyone

conception• 9 months ago

The easy way is to create criminal laws for environmental damage for company leaders like we do for financial crimes.

PaulKeeble• 9 months ago

Environmental protection needs to be a default with criminal consequences for those that fail to take proper precautions to avoid disaster, beyond paying for the real and complete clean up costs. If this were the default we might finally be talking about the right way to deal with the cost of CO2 and methane released into the atmosphere and the true cost of doing so, which clean up of which is vastly higher than makes it economically viable.

brador• 9 months ago

Does loose LEGO have the same polluting effects? Does it even float?

shagie• 9 months ago

It does float, though not necessarily at the top of the water column. It's also larger and thus a bit more difficult to get mixed into the sand. It is still a problem.

1997 Lego spill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Lego_spill

The Cornish beaches where Lego keeps washing up - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198

After 25 Years at Sea, Shipwrecked Lego Pieces Are Still Washing Ashore on Beaches in England - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whimsical-legos-ar...

eric-burel3• 9 months ago

The keywords seems to bring an anomalous amount of trolls in the comments. But maybe I am in the wrong, and there's a positive side into leaking plastic pellets in the ocean. Like turtles can now build their own platic industry and we'll make business with them soon or something.

saubeidl• 9 months ago

https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/european-security-...

Akronymus5• 9 months ago

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

lazide2• 9 months ago

Eh, frankly this is kind of ‘Reddit cares’ ing what I think was an insightful and amusing comment.

But I might be biased due to my extensive shares in Testudines Petroleum Inc.

eric-burel3• 8 months ago

Makes sense, sorry. Was still making a sarcastic point that it's objectively difficult to be strongly against regulating things with basically no upside, though I understand that you can be against regulations in general.

eirikbakke• 9 months ago

One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic. Then it will take over the world.

wongarsu• 9 months ago

This is slowly happening for various types of plastic. We have discovered some PLA-eating bacteria in Asian forests (PLA is "biodegradable", but usually not meaningfully at room temperature), PET-eating bacteria in the ocean, and apparently some bacteria that can degrade polystyrene and polyethylene

But each of them only works in certain environments. Just like wood is very biodegradable, but if you keep it dry you can build wooden structures that last centuries

jacquesm3• 9 months ago

Keep it dry or keep it wet. It's the alternating condition that makes wood desintegrate because then bacteria have both food, themselves and water to work with.

The wooden posts under buildings in Amsterdam famously stood for centuries, until the water table was changed a few times in a row and then rot set in.

thw_9a83c• 9 months ago

One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic.

The problem is that day may be millions of years away. It allegedly took nature several million years to evolve bacteria that can digest lignin and cellulose, allowing old fallen wood to decompose in the forest. Coal deposits are from an era when such bacteria were not present.

Even if we had such bacteria, they would only be able to digest plastic under certain conditions. Overall, plastic pollution is here to stay for a very long time.

Ferret7446• 8 months ago

Humans have indirectly accelerated the rate of evolution (or natural selection if you will), so I doubt it'd take millions of years. Entire ecosystems have changed more in the millennium of modern human activity than many millions of years before that. What makes evolution slow isn't so much evolution itself but the pressures of the environment; drastic, sudden environmental changes spur rapid evolution.

metalman• 9 months ago

I have spent a huge amount of time walking and hiking shore lines, and there is a huge problem with plastic in the ocean. The long term impacts to our food chain are going to be bad for us. Plastic is a cheat, and has no place in a sustainable economy or ecosystem, though as it has become embeded as the prime material in consumerism, effecting a switch to biologicaly benign alternatives is essentialy impossible and the catestrophic outcomes of a worldwide layer of plastic, are inevitable. The very hard part for people here to imagine is that it is China is the only one that can take complete controll and institute a switch to a bio inert alternative, the EU, will of course, build out another whole new regulatory beurocracy to puff and thump on cue.

MrBuddyCasino• 9 months ago

Lost fishing nets are estimated to be 500,000 to 1 000,000 tons per year. Lost Nurdles are estimated in the ballpark of ~160,000 tonnes.

I wonder how quickly they are broken down by UV, given their relatively large surface area.

koliber2• 9 months ago

Anywhere between 52,140 tonnes and 184,290 tonnes of pellets entered the environment in the EU in 2019, according to the European Commission, which proposed the regulations.
"This is equivalent to between 2,100 and 7,300 trucks full of pellets per year," the Commission said.

How? These are unbelievable numbers. Did 2,100 - 7,300 trucks flip over and dump their nurdles into the environment? Are there steady nurdle-leaks which cause a percentage of them to escape? What percentage of nurdles escape rather than getting melted and molded into plastic end products?

antonkochubey• 8 months ago

That could be one medium-size container ship

koliber2• 8 months ago

That does put it into perspective. At the same time, I don't think a medium-sized container ship of pellets is lost each year.

PlunderBunny• 8 months ago

Also known as “Mermaid’s tears” [0] (although this name can encompass other artificial things found in the ocean also).

0. https://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-mermaid-tears.htm

EU takes aim at plastic pellets to prevent their nightmare cleanup

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