The Government of Galicia has finally relented and raised the alert for marine pollution to level 2 following the presence of plastic pellets (balls) on the beaches, like the governments of Asturias and Cantabria, which they have seen as pellets have also arrived on its shores. With this decision the Xunta will be able to ask the State for help to combat this environmental crisis. It was announced yesterday by the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda: “If it is the requirement that they are asking us for the central government to collaborate in cleaning up plastic waste, we have no problem with it”.
Alfonso Rueda closed the political tug-of-war between the central and regional administrations regarding who and how should act to deal with the plastic pollution episode. Despite the fact that the pellets were detected on the coast in mid-December, the Galician Government has transferred the responsibility of cleaning the beaches affected by the spill to the municipalities. The royal decree of 2012 regarding the response to marine pollution establishes that, when alert level 2 is decreed, the operations are led by the regional governments, although the State forces are made available to the regional governments. In this phase, the autonomous community requests help, the cleaning operations are designed, the needs of each area are assessed and its own funds and those of the State are allocated to one place or another.
To provide this collaboration, the Ministry for the Ecological Transition has five logistics bases (Pontevedra, Tarragona, Jerez de la Frontera, Mallorca and Tenerife), equipped with equipment and specialized equipment to fight pollution. The procedure is very regulated, but spokespersons or representatives of the central and regional administrations have had a hard fight before putting the protocol into action.
The Galician president, who visited O Espiñeirido beach, in Porto do Son (A Coruña), one of the first beaches where these plastics arrived, demanded that the central government combat this pollution in the sea, “which is where this task must be done”. At the same time, he insisted on removing iron from the massive arrival of pellets, which has spread to the beaches of Asturias and Cantabria. In fact, the first report commissioned by the Xunta to determine the possible toxicity of the pellets concludes that they are non-dangerous elements and that, due to their composition, they are even suitable “for food use”. The document is signed by Santiago García Pardo, PhD in Polymer Science and Technology. However, it is a first emergency analysis, in which the expert has not analyzed the pellets as such, but has been made “based on the technical and safety data sheets that have been ease”.
The Environmental Prosecutor’s Office opened proceedings to investigate the spill. In the decree, the prosecutor confirms that these materials “show signs of toxicity”, since they “are not biodegradable”, “cannot be eliminated” and “contribute” to microplastic pollution, which the European Union “aims to eliminate -the bear”.
The Minister of the Sea, Alfonso Villares, acknowledged yesterday that the Xunta found out about the appearance of the plastic pellets in Ribeira on December 13, five days after the Toconao ship, with the flag of Liberia, lost part of the cargo off the coast of Portugal, but then “it was not known where they came from”. This information, he said, “had the Government of Spain”. Specifically, the Tocomao lost 26 tons of pellets (1,500 bags). These are not infrequent accidents. Between 2008 and 2022, an average of 1,566 containers per year were lost in the oceans, according to the World Maritime Transport Council.
