This week, the Marine Conservation Society’s Great British Beach Clean has people out on beaches all over the UK, and so now feels like a good moment to share a major clean up story Action Asylum has been part of recently.

On 19 July, a vessel collided with a container ship berthed at the Port of Tyne, splitting open containers of nurdles. These are the tiny plastic pellets, each about the size of a lentil, that get melted down to make almost the plastic products we use. Around a billion of them went into the river, and over the following weeks they washed up on beaches from Northumberland down to the North Yorkshire coast.

Nurdles are easy to miss and slow to pick up. Seabirds, fish and other marine animals mistake them for food, and the pellets soak up other pollutants as they drift. They don’t dissolve or evaporate, and can stay in the environment for years. Northumberland Wildlife Trust has more on the spill and how to help.

A coastline full of volunteers

The response from local people has been huge. By late August, volunteers had logged more than 6,500 hours clearing pellets from the river and the beaches. Around 200 people turned out for a single clean at Whitley Bay. Volunteers have sewn more than 500 reusable mesh bags for collecting pellets, set up equipment hubs on the beaches, and turned kitchen sieves and garden tools into nurdle-catching kit. With the official clean-up scaled back from late August, that community effort has carried much of the load.

More than 25 Action Asylum volunteers, from our groups in Newcastle and Leeds, have been part of it.

Newcastle:

Our Newcastle group, delivered by Action Foundation, recently got going in July. Only a few weeks later, on a sunny day in August, eight of its volunteers headed to the Fish Quay in North Shields, close to where the Tyne meets the sea.

Equipped with dustpans, brushes and the all-important kitchen sieves, they spent the day carefully sweeping up hundreds of pellets and filtering them into the collection bins on the promenade. They weren’t the only ones. Other local people were out doing the same, along with a crew from North Tyneside Council.

For Zia, the pellets were nothing new. “I worked with nurdles in a factory making plastic pipes in my home country,” he said. “These are toxic to animals and it’s not good for them to be in the sea.”

Scarborough:

On 14 September, 16 volunteers from our Leeds group, delivered by Leeds RETAS, made the trip to Scarborough for a beach clean with Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. Between them they collected 9kg of waste, with nurdles a part of the haul. 

Jo Rawson, Wilder Communities Manager at Yorkshire Wildlife Trust said that “finding the nurdles was something many of the volunteers found really rewarding. Once they got their eyes trained on spotting them there was no stopping them! A number of volunteers told us afterwards that they found it interesting to learn about the impact of the nurdles, and they were very pleased to have been able to help make a difference by removing them from the beach at Scarborough”.

Nurdles will keep turning up on this coastline for a long time, and so will the people clearing them. Our volunteers in Newcastle and Leeds are proud to be among them, doing slow, careful work alongside their neighbours to look after the local environment.

Jonathan, one of the Newcastle volunteers, reflected on what the day meant to him:

“My participation in the effort symbolises me as a Newcastle resident, not necessarily an asylum seeker.”

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