Aug. 2, 2020: the CMA CGM’s cargo ship Bianca was docked at the Port of New Orleans when a storm hit. Two poorly secured shipping containers containing nurdles — microplastic pellets that are melted down to form larger plastics — spilled into Durban Harbor.
French transportation company CMA CGM quickly drafted a team of lawyers to assist them in evading responsibility for the environmental disaster, refusing to disclose how many pellets had been lost in the spill in fear of admitting culpability.
In fact, the spill wasn’t even reported to the Coast Guard until New Orleans residents began to notice strange plastic particles washing up on the shoreline. Unfortunately for those concerned citizens, the Louisiana government chose not to launch an investigation into the incident.
Weeks were spent passing blame between different agencies until officials issued a recommendation to CMA CGM, asking it to clean up the mess. In that time, hundreds of millions of nurdles were lost to the Gulf of Mexico forever.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out, a simple “pretty please” isn’t enough to get a corporation to do the right thing against its own financial interests; at the advice of an unspecified insurance company, CMA CGM cleaned up only the Governor Nicholls Wharf, leaving miles of shorelines still coated with nurdles.
With the help of other scientists, LSU Coastal Environmental Science professor Dr. Mark Benfield began researching the spill and eventually estimated that around 743 million nurdles had fallen into the Gulf of Mexico that stormy night.
Local citizens rolled up their sleeves and spent hundreds of hours recovering nurdles from shorelines. Volunteers with Nurdle Patrol, a non-profit that aims to collect data about nurdle pollution, went to work to understand the scope of what had occurred. A petition for the EPA to help clean up the spill amassed tens of thousands of signatures.
While these efforts are incredibly inspiring, this burden should not have been placed on the citizenry alone. Volunteer groups are no replacement for the speedy and competent government response that should have occurred in the wake of such a disaster, and this failure to act will be felt deeply by our ecosystems.
As Dr. Benfield explains, organisms often mistake nurdles for food, which is problematic for several reasons. Though the nurdles themselves are non-toxic, as they spend time in the water, they soak up nearby toxins and pollutants. This means when an organism ingests one of these nurdles, it maybe getting exposed to a variety of harmful substances.
In addition, plastic consumption can cause organisms to feel mistakenly full, leading them to slowly starve over time. Microplastics can also clog their digestive tracts, which sometimes results in death.
We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the New Orleans nurdle spill, which is why it is necessary for us to understand why exactly this response went so horribly wrong.
First, plastic is — quite incorrectly — not classified as a hazardous material under the Clean Water Act (CWA), meaning the existing legislation does not spell out a proper framework to hold CMA CGM accountable.
The science has made the dangers of plastic pollution abundantly clear, however, and it is long past time to amend the CWA to represent the true danger plastic pollution poses to our aquatic ecosystems.
Despite this, the state and local governments could have taken other steps to hold CMA CGM responsible. One potential strategy could have been not allowing the company to dock in Louisiana until it either launched a thorough cleanup effort or supplied the financial support for others to do so.
In any case, members of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality should have launched a cleanup effort to recover as many nurdles as possible as soon as they were made aware of the issue.
Still, the New Orleans nurdle spill doesn’t have to be a story of corporate apathy, government negligence and environmental destruction. With the continued power of activists and volunteers, it can reflect our ability as citizens to fight corruption and enact change.
With one Formosa plastics plant in Baton Rouge and another potentially being built in St. James Parish so far, we must create strict guidelines to prevent corporations from polluting our local environments.
“We’ve discovered that there’s chronic pollution of nurdles along the Mississippi River, likely originating from all these plants,” Dr. Benfield said of his team’s findings. Formosa plastics is a “serial offender” of the CWA and contributes significantly to nurdle pollution in Louisiana.
Unfortunately, the failures of the LDEQ continue even now. In a December phone call, LDEQ Press Secretary Greg Langley stated that the department is monitoring neither the progress of the cleanup nor the environmental impacts of the spill, and he affirmed that the LDEQ had never mandated a cleanup by CMA CGM.
The Louisiana government allowed a foreign company to get away with dumping hundreds of millions of nurdles into the Gulf of Mexico. To this day, officials show no apparent interest in recognizing the impacts of this environmental disaster. Evidently, they’re content with allowing children, working people and other unpaid citizens to spend their spare time combing through the sand to collect the plastic debris.
It is shameful that the state government can find it within itself to give billions of dollars in tax breaks to the oil industry but cannot muster the resources to protect our fragile ecosystems from environmental disasters.
Claire Sullivan is an 18-year-old coastal environmental science freshman from Southbury, CT.