‘An oil spill in solid form’: Bio-bead disaster devastates beloved English coast

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1. Andy Dinsdale began walking the southern English coast in search of a “sea heart,” a tough Mahogany seed carried by ocean currents from Central and South American rainforests.

   In his quest to find one, he inadvertently became a plastic pollution expert.

   For the last 20 years, Dinsdale has witnessed the transformation of Camber Sands, a 2-mile stretch of golden sand and dunes, from one of Britain’s most cherished stretches of coast into a front line of an escalating environmental crisis.

   But he wasn’t prepared for what he saw in early November. As Dinsdale and citizen scientist group Strandliners scoured the beach for a pollution survey, they discovered something peculiar: An astonishing number of black plastic pellets were littering the sand.

   Millions of bio-beads — peppercorn-sized plastic pellets used in some wastewater plants to grow bacteria that help break down pollutants during the final step of the cleaning process — had washed into the English Channel after a mechanical failure days earlier at a water treatment plant more than 35 miles up the coast.

   An estimated 10 tons — or up to 650 million beads — had escaped into the sea, mingling into sand, slipping into creeks, and infiltrating the salt marshes of the adjacent Rye Harbour Nature Reserve, one of Britain’s most ecologically significant coastal wetlands. The spill represents one of the UK’s worst environmental disasters in years.

2. This should be an international incident which gets those responsible tarred, feathered, and jailed.

   So watch _absolutely nothing happen_ yet again.

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