Tiny white plastic pellets are washing ashore in Spain’s northwestern coast by the millions, with hundreds of volunteers leading the clean up as authorities struggle to coordinate and companies decline any responsibility. 

A tanker ship lost six containers off the coast of Portugal on Dec. 8. One of them carried over 26 tons of PET pellets — tiny plastic balls measuring about 5 millimeters (about 0.2 inches) each used to manufacture plastic products. 

“On the open seas we are seeing the water covered in a white blanket,” said by phone Joám Evans, a spokesman with environmental non-profit Ecologistas en Acción taking part in the cleanup effort. “On the beaches volunteer citizens, fishermen, surfers and all sorts of associations are picking up pellets one by one — it’s a complicated and never-ending task.” 

The spill is relatively small by global standards, but it has become an example of how hard it is to deal with microplastic pollution. About 167,000 metric tons of plastic pellets enter the EU’s seas and land every year, according to non-profits partly funded by the European Commission. While the plastic itself might not be toxic, the tiny particles absorb harmful chemicals and easily make their way into the food chain, from fish to bottled water. 

The first sacks of pellets started to wash up on Galician beaches, on Spain’s northwest, on Dec. 13, according to reports by environmental organizations. Local councils, fishermen and volunteers rushed to pick them up. But over the following weeks, the sacks started to deteriorate or broke as they crashed against the rocky cliffs of the Galician coast, throwing millions of pellets into currents and beaches. 

Best practice recommendations by the International Maritime Organization recommend that shipping containers holding plastic pellets should be kept inside a vessel’s hull or, when that’s not possible, within a protected area on deck. The cause of the container loss is still being investigated, said a spokesperson with Maersk S/A, which own the containers that traveled on a chartered ship. The owners of the vessel, which carries the Liberian flag, have appointed cleanup specialists, including two contracted companies,  to support removing the pellets, the Maersk spokesperson said.

The sacks were labeled Bedeko Europe, a plastics producer headquartered in Poland. The company did not reply to calls and emails requesting comment. 

The Galician coast is no stranger to environmental disasters. In 2002, the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker released 77,000 tons of fuel, with black tides reaching as far as France’s western coast. That disaster galvanized Spain and European institutions, which improved protocols to deal with toxic spills and toughened shipping rules for oil tankers.  

“We have the right protocols to deal with this, but they’re not being implemented,” said Raúl García, a fisheries officer at WWF Spain. “The first you thing you need when such a disaster takes place is for someone to take the lead — right now I have no idea who is in charge.”

Upcoming regional elections in Galicia on Feb. 18 have politicized the response. The conservative regional government has blamed the central government, run by a coalition of the Socialist Party and far-left group Sumar, for not passing on relevant information about the contents of the spill until Jan. 3. Reports in local media suggest the regional government knew about the incident since at least Dec. 21, but didn’t activate cleaning protocols until January.

Earlier this week, the neighboring region of Asturias raised a marine pollution alert to unlock financial and logistical aid from the central government. Galicia and Cantabria, also on the northern coast, later followed suit. Basque Country, further east, is reporting sightings of pellets on its beaches, but has yet to raise any new alerts. 

“Teams from the General Directorate of Coasts are already working with technicians in the Asturias government to clean up the pellets,” Spain’s Minister for the Environmental Transition Teresa Ribera wrote on a Jan. 9 post on X, formerly Twitter. “Now we’ll start work in Galicia.”

Meanwhile, environmental organizations, local fishermen whose income depends on the fish and seafood breeding on the Galician coast and individual citizens have taken the matter into their own hands, building an online tool where pellets sightings can be reported, organizing shifts and distributing gloves, masks and goggles among cleaners. As the pellets spread, they pick them up on beaches one by one, using everything at hand, including brooms, small containers and even their own hands. 

“We can’t yet measure the impact of this spill, but the difficulty of cleaning it up shows the size of the problem at a global scale,” García said. “We’re losing containers full of pellets every hour, everywhere, and we know very little about how to deal with what happens next.”