They are fighting against an almost invisible pollution in this region of Spain, still traumatised by the oil spill caused in 2002 by the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige. On the beaches of northwestern Spain, especially in Galicia, the mobilization has been organized as best it can in recent days to collect millions of plastic micro-beads. These tiny white marbles have been flooding the beaches since six containers fell into the sea on 8 December, falling from a Liberian-flagged merchant ship travelling between Algeciras and Rotterdam.
According to Danish shipping giant Maersk, which owns the containers, one of them contained bags filled with plastic pellets used in particular for the production of bottles.
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With simple kitchen strainers or brooms, dozens of volunteers and residents have been trying for days to pick up what they can. These "citizen clean-up" actions are organized by organizations such as Ecologists in Action. Cristobal López, spokesperson for the NGO, deplores the fact that the state and the authorities have not provided "the means". "It would have been much easier to retrieve the whole bags from the water just after the containers fell," he said. The size of "these small balls, 5 mm in diameter (...) makes them very difficult to recover once mixed with sand," the NGO said in a statement, which filed a complaint against the ship's owner on Tuesday for "crimes against the environment". The Spanish Public Prosecutor's Office itself has announced that it has taken up the case and opened an investigation.
The affair was coupled with a political controversy. With just over a month to go before regional elections in Galicia, the stronghold of the leader of the right-wing opposition at the national level, the left-wing government has accused the region of having taken too long to ask for state aid. Accused of "inaction", the regional authorities finally announced on Monday the mobilization of 200 people to help clean up.