SAS vs. mermaid’s tears
A small victory in the battle against little plastic pellets on UK beaches.
For over a year now, Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) have been campaigning against the problem of mermaid's tears on our beaches. This has nothing to do with upsetting mythical creatures but instead refers to the millions of tiny plastic pellets littering our nation's beaches.
Dubbed ‘mermaid's tears' by campaigners, these are the raw material used in industry to manufacture many of the plastic items we use day to day. The problem begins when they escape from factories due to poor housekeeping practices and make their way down drains, later to be washed out to sea and ending up on our beaches.
Marine litter is a massive problem on beaches all over the world, and mermaid's tears are the second most common litter item found on UK beaches according to Marine Conservation Society's 2007 Beachwatch Data. Often less than 5mm in diameter, mermaid's tears are not as obvious as a discarded coke bottle. But these tiny bits of plastic can cause a whole lot of damage to the marine ecosystem. They don't biodegrade, and act as magnets for chemicals such as PCB's, a problem when fish mistake the pellets as food, which either kills the fish or causes dangerous chemicals to accumulate up the food chain.
The good news though is that last week saw SAS achieve a mini campaign victory. SAS persuaded Centico Europe Ltd, to adopt new measures that will help achieve zero pellet loss from factories in the South West of England. With the first factory signed up, SAS hope to pressurise the British Plastics Federation into tackling this problem nationwide.
SAS have also filmed a covert investigation exposing poor practice at plastic factories that leads to mermaid's tears entering the waste stream and the ocean.
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SAS vs. mermaid’s tears (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK License.
Comments (4)
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People should check out Garbage Island series on VBS TV http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id.....5308505. The amount of man made garbage in the ocean is shocking.