What are plastic pellets and what are their dangers to the environment?

Galician beaches continue to accumulate thousands of plastic pellets from one of the six containers that the ship Toconao lost on December 8 about eighty kilometers west of Viana do Castelo, in Portuguese waters. In total, 26,250 kilos of this potentially toxic material fell into the sea, according to scientists and environmental organizations.

Pellets, also called “pellet”, are the raw material with which plastic products are manufactured. They are polymers that can be melted and given the desired shape to manufacture the desired product, according to data from the National Association of Plastics Industries (ANAIP).

The most common way of manufacturing and distributing this raw material is in the form of pellets, also called “pellet”, according to this organization, which has recalled that there are different types of plastics, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE) or polypropylene ( PP), among others.

These balls are characterized by their size, only a few millimeters in diameter, which makes them difficult to locate and collect from the Galician coasts, although the spill also extends to other communities such as Asturias and it is not ruled out that it reaches the Basque Country.

Plastic pellets are a risk to the environment. From Greenpeace, they fear that these plastics end up integrated into the food chains of different animals and assure that it is easy for birds and fish to ingest them by confusing them with food, since they look like “small eggs.”

Its ingestion can cause gastric problems and even death in these animals, as well as ending up integrated into the food chain.

Furthermore, it is most likely that this material will gradually decompose into microplastics, thus affecting filter-feeding organisms, according to the environmental organization. It is also not ruled out that they end up absorbing other marine pollutants, becoming more dangerous over time.

The Prosecutor’s Office points in that same direction, warning in a decree issued this Monday that plastic pellets show “indications of toxicity,” “they are not biodegradable” and “they cannot be eliminated.”