At the end of July this year there was an environmentally disastrous spill of pre-production plastic pellets (nurdles) into the River Tyne in the northeast of England. In a post we highlighted the importance of putting in place long term monitoring, not only in the river but also much further afield.
Since then we were contacted by someone from Oracle Environmental Experts, one of the organisations leading the clean-up operation and we had a discussion about putting some long term monitoring in place. Unfortunately nothing came of that conversation. More recently we tried to contact the Newcastle University who, being regionally conveniently located, are undertaking research into the spill along the coastline. The are undertaking mapping, collecting images from the local community and investigating the incidence of ingestion by seabirds while also trying to identify the spread of nurdles in the northeast and further afield. It is good to report that the university has been given funding of over £80,000 by NERC to continue their research.
That said, we still believe there is a place for an increase in local community engagement in order to collect data along the coastline and provide long term monitoring at very little cost for much more than a year.
As a result we will be launching a campaign as part of our Big Microplastic Survey project specifically to target that region. We will be looking for volunteers, collecting samples which will be available for analysis and analysing the data over time with an aim to provide a report on the distribution and potential environmental impact using GIS mapping and other statistical analysis.
