A carpet of tens or hundreds of thousands of small white marbles, covering the sand, as far as the eye can see. For several weeks, a sad phenomenon has been affecting several beaches on the Atlantic coast in turn. After Finistère in December and the Vendee at the beginning of January, Loire-Atlantique is now the scene of this invasion. “The balls ended up mixing with the water and the sand, but at the end of last week, in Pornic, it was visually very impressive, indicates Jean-François Grandsart, head of the local branch of the Surfrider association, who issued the alert. This is pollution on an unprecedented scale in the department. »
Poetically called “mermaid’s tears”, these pellets also reported in recent days in Batz-sur-Mer or Bernerie-en-Retz are in fact plastic pellets, the raw material used for the manufacture of objects of all kinds. . Fallen into the ocean, they were surely brought back to the coast by the winds and currents. “It could very well be that one or more containers (…) have been lost in the North Atlantic and are dumping their cargo on the adjacent beaches, or even a release of a container already lost some time ago”, explains Cristina Barreau, in charge of the study of microplastics at Surfrider. “It could also be a poorly managed industrial accident that led to the dispersion of pellets in the environment. »
Too many and small to pick up
Hypotheses to explain a much more proven risk to the environment, while every year in Europe, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, 41,000 tonnes of industrial plastic granules (the equivalent of 11.5 billion plastic bottles) end up in the environment and in particular on our beaches, then at sea. will ingest some, and the rest will not disappear, laments Jean-François Grandsart. It will fragment into smaller and smaller particles and on land, they will then join the water tables. They are so small and numerous that anything we can do to pick them up will be ridiculous, even with a sieving machine. It’s too late, the damage is done…”
Last week, the mayor of Les Sables-d’Olonne Yannick Moreau announced that he had “filed a complaint against X” while asking the courts “to find and condemn the polluting ship whose cargo soils our beaches”. A similar approach undertaken in Pornic, indicates its mayor Jean-Michel Brard. On January 1, 2022, a decree was issued by the government to require GPI production, handling and transport sites to implement measures to prevent losses and discharges into the environment.