EU takes aim at plastic pellets to prevent their nightmare cleanup | Hacker News Reader

EU takes aim at plastic pellets to prevent their nightmare cleanup

yahoo.com

106 pointsPaulHoule78 comments

I have spent a huge amount of time walking and hiking shore lines, and there is a huge problem with plastic in the ocean. The long term impacts to our food chain are going to be bad for us. Plastic is a cheat, and has no place in a sustainable economy or ecosystem, though as it has become embeded as the prime material in consumerism, effecting a switch to biologicaly benign alternatives is essentialy impossible and the catestrophic outcomes of a worldwide layer of plastic, are inevitable. The very hard part for people here to imagine is that it is China is the only one that can take complete controll and institute a switch to a bio inert alternative, the EU, will of course, build out another whole new regulatory beurocracy to puff and thump on cue.

> Anywhere between 52,140 tonnes and 184,290 tonnes of pellets entered the environment in the EU in 2019, according to the European Commission, which proposed the regulations.

> "This is equivalent to between 2,100 and 7,300 trucks full of pellets per year," the Commission said.

How? These are unbelievable numbers. Did 2,100 - 7,300 trucks flip over and dump their nurdles into the environment? Are there steady nurdle-leaks which cause a percentage of them to escape? What percentage of nurdles escape rather than getting melted and molded into plastic end products?

That could be one medium-size container ship

That does put it into perspective. At the same time, I don't think a medium-sized container ship of pellets is lost each year.

On the one hand, I'm happy that something is being done about this, because it's clearly a problem (completely basing this assumption on this one article).

But I'm very annoyed that this needs to be done in the first place. There's a lot of annoying regulation in place that shouldn't have to be there, but I feel like some profit-driven dicks will always find a way to mess things up for everyone

Environmental protection needs to be a default with criminal consequences for those that fail to take proper precautions to avoid disaster, beyond paying for the real and complete clean up costs. If this were the default we might finally be talking about the right way to deal with the cost of CO2 and methane released into the atmosphere and the true cost of doing so, which clean up of which is vastly higher than makes it economically viable.

The easy way is to create criminal laws for environmental damage for company leaders like we do for financial crimes.

Relevant recent incident:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/08/environmenta...

Obvs, uk gov does nothing

The previous Secretary for DEFRA (Steve Reed) saw passage of the Water (Special Measures) Act which allows the government to bring criminal charges against water company executives for persistent lawbreaking.

So to say, "uk gov does nothing" is simply not true. The Labour government has started doing things. However, it's starting from a place where the previous Conservative government functionally removed all legal requirements. In particular, Liz Truss in the same role issued instruction that water companies no longer need to monitor sewage outflows and can just self-report.

EDIT: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-special-mea...

'allows' being the operative term here which means that the statement you attempt to contradict has not been contradicted.

How many executives has the UK government sought to prosecute under this law?

> 'allows' being the operative term here which means that the statement you attempt to contradict has not been contradicted.

That's a totally absurd statement in response to "the current government put a new law on the books to give themselves the power to prosecute."

> How many executives has the UK government sought to prosecute under this law?

As stated in my original reply: it came into force in February 2025. It's currently November 2025. It takes time to commit "multiple" offences, particularly given they need to be investigated and convicted. And no, dumping sewage twice doesn't automatically count under any legal regime.

In addition, DEFRA identified that Ofwat (the water regulator) is not fit for purpose in July 2025 and set out a proposal to abolish and replace it.

So yes, it does contradict your statement because the government is literally acting. What would you propose happen instead? That the government hold show trials and just start locking up water company staff and execs?

The water companies are too busy lobbying for price rises/manufacturing consent in the media (of which these stories are a part of. The water companies will again claim they are a victim of low bills meaning they can't invest which is what causes these events...)

It's all so insidious

UK gov will permit bills to rise and nothing will fundamentally change when it comes to water in the UK except how much we pay

UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.

It's really quite sad. I just wish people would work together to compromise but it seems all over the world there's this intense tribal effect. I guess evolution is to blame, we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now and as individuals modern life is far too complicated to have enough attention span to worry about every little thing, especially when governments and corporations often purposefully make it very difficult.

"we never evolved to live in such large groups as we are now"

Then maybe this is the problem? And the solution to build smaller societies again where the individual can have meaningful impact and not give up from the start to even try to move the buerocratic leviathan even a little bit in the right direction?

Which does sound nice, but then runs into the problems of neighbors who don't follow those same rules and who decided to eat your lunch, either economically through unrestrained capitalism seeking infinite growth over sustainability, or militarily to feed their internal economic pyramid scheme, or maybe just because assholes run their country and believe they are better and more deserving and decided might makes right.

There are significant efficiency gains to be had with increasing organizational and operational sizes, the problem is many people assume those gains will benefit everyone, at least partially, rather than the more common reality of all that efficiency being redirected towards the personal gains of a few. And billions of dollars are spent year after year to convince the common people that they will get screwed more if they don't allow it to happen because all the efficiency gains, that they have never actually experienced, will disappear.

"eat your lunch .. or militarily"

Obviously all empires want to grow and devour the independent small states/societies and this is what happened and this is why only gigantic states(and those small ones siding with them) stand a chance today.

But a often tried out concept is that of federation. Meaning (semi) autonomous entieties get together for common benefits, like military defense and infrastructure. But of course also those have a tendency to turn into empires.

(The Delian League in ancient greece comes to mind, or well the russian federation today. )

But that does not mean it must be always like this. I believe there is a sweet spot that can be achieved and stays stable. But the current Zeitgeist seems to head in another direction.

The amount of damage done in the 15 years of successively worse leaders requires not only time to fix but also incredible political bravery.

That in the backdrop of a press who are actively working against the best interests of the country (they serve their often foreign billionaire owners).

I would give us a chance if we had an extremely charismatic and rational progressive in charge but we don't. Starmer is an admirable person but he doesn't have the charisma or the vision needed to get us out of this mess. Thirty years ago he would have been a "One Britain" Tory.

The UK progressives - the Lib Dems and the Greens - have absolutely no chance electorally and the media is pushing the far-right Russian-funded Reform Party as a "solution" and I'm worried that enough low-information voters will fall for it.

It seems to be that Greens _do_ actually provide bold and actionable way forward.

And since they recently overtook the blue Labour, it's actually possible to hope again.

But what needs to be fixed? Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:

- too many immigrants

- too many small boat arrivals

- the existence of billionaires

- too much tax

- too little tax

- UK membership in NATO

- UK being too weak in NATO

- too much smut online that kids can see

- too many attempts to control the web

Agreeing on which of those "need to be fixed" is the essence of politics. There are no universally accepted answers.

The current government, for all its failings, is focusing on fundamentals: get building again; repair public finances to then invest into infrastructure; repair international relationships. To that end, they are calling projects in right and left, pushing the planning bill through the parliament, rising taxes (which is utterly necessary!), reforming the NHS (online appointments are coming), talking to businesses, building nuclear power plants, striking deals with allies (Norway just ordered £10bn worth of frigates, AUKUS is steaming ahead), and forging new alliances (Japan has just deployed their air force to the UK, their first European deployment in 71 years).

This is the opposite of populism, in fact a lot of that is making them unpopular in the short term. Yet it's the first time in more than a decade when we have a government that does those things. We got populists out and let's-do-serious-work-on-fundamentals people in, and now people complain that they aren't populist enough.

> Here's a small list of things that different groups think need to be fixed:

Honestly I think all of them need to be fixed. You might think they are contradicting, but I think that is only a way to make people be angry at each other, and not starting to demand really fixing things.

Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.

They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.

It seems like it's a conservative fantasy that all public money is being wasted but until I see detailed information on where and why (Chesterton's fence style) it is being wasted, I can't take them seriously

It seems like people are vastly overestimating the amount of money being wasted. If it was that easy, it would have probably been done. In serious circles (outside overt MAGA propaganda ecosystem) I believe DOGE is considered quite a failure.

I'd be much more sympathetic to a tax system reform as it seems that in democracies, there is a vast amount of tax "gerrymandering" in order to favor your voter base... but of course no politician wants to remove that option

> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP

In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?

(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)

Useful factchecking of the "bed wetting boy racer" stories here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/24/motability-d...

Raising taxes is necessary because the previous governments have decimated the tax base. As of now, a median UK PAYE worker is paying about 13% on their income. A median German worker is paying about 30%.

This remarkable result was achieved by the backdoor: successive conservative governments obscured the stagnation by constantly increasing the personal allowance far in advance of the inflation. This bought them votes [1], but as a result we have a baroque tax system that tries to squeeze tax from less visible, often counter-productive places, and still doesn't collect nearly enough to cover necessary expenses. After a decade of cuts, every public service is cut to the bone, and there's no money to invest into hospitals, roads, or trains to increase the overall productivity.

PIP bullshit is a drop in the bucket compared to that.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HENRYUK/comments/1jsyzip/tax_rates_...

I mean arguably those are all distractions (except for the tax thing, indirectly); what really need to be fixed are the core, boring issues. The country, fundamentally, needs to keep the lights on; it needs to fix services which have been in decline for some time, it needs a credible route forward on pensions and other funding issues (but pensions are the scariest) and so forth.

A big part of the problem with the UK is exactly that; since 2015, the UK has been lurching from crisis to crisis, and more or less ignoring actually keeping the country running (keeping the country running is boring, Brexit is not boring, and so on).

I agree with you, but if you take an average person, chances are they will name one or the other as THE problem to be fixed.

The government is trying to focus on boring, annoying things and is getting rubbished for it. Doesn't bode well for other governments trying to do the same, does it

I agree with your assessment of the UK government, but I think you overstate the degree to which we are divided, aside from the hysterical rantings of the right wing press.

You are implying division among the public when in fact the division is sown by the billionaire/corporate media agendas, not real people:

- too many immigrants - too many small boat arrivals

All parties and a majority of the public agree on these points (polling shows). The details of how to tackle small boats and relative importance differ, but I don't think anyone wants to see large numbers of people crossing Europe.

- the existence of billionaires

Most of "the left" don't care about billionaires existing, they worry they exert an outside influence on our politics and skew market fairness. There's common ground with many on the populist right here. The only people who don't want us to think about these issues are corporate shills.

- too much tax - too little tax

This is a largely manufactured concern and reflects corporate interests or interests of the rich. The difference between Corbyn' 'wild' taxation plans and Johnson's was much smaller (as a portion of GDP) than that between the UK and France, German, any other northern euro country. Our debate around tax is hugely parochial, and concern largely used as a stick to beat the left with.

- UK membership in NATO - UK being too weak in NATO

I'm not sure how many people are worried about UK being in NATO. Would love to see polling data showing this as anything other than a very fringe concern. In fact Ukraine and Russian threat has made defence spending much _less_ controversial than since the cold war.

- too much smut online that kids can see - too many attempts to control the web

Polling shows the first is a majority concern, the latter not so much (this is a HN bubble). This is not a wedge issue.

The thing you missed is culture war bullshit (who is a 'real woman' etc)... but again, most people are either nonplussed or in the thrall of Russian chatbots and the MAGA trolls infecting uk online discourse. It's not something people really care about.

> UK government makes me sick, and what makes me even more sick is that no political party in the UK seems capable of fixing what needs to be fixed; they all focus on the particular populist opinions within their particular voter bases.

I really don't see any major western democracy being exempt from this.

Especially now that demographics have shifted and our populations get older it's hard to be elected unless you cater about what older folks care and don't care about. This makes long-term planning very difficult, as older folks couldn't care less with spend gargantuan money today so situation is improved decades from now.

The UK has a clear path to overcome the failure of democracy when people vote along purely tribal lines; the King should retake power and rule benevolently for the good of the UK.

Drops the word "biobeads", refuses to elaborate on what that means. Such shit journalism.

They're small plastic beads uses to provide a large surface area for biological decomposition of waste in wastewater plants as water flows though big mesh tanks full of them. In doing so they become contaminated with various biological and chemical toxins.

I have heard of ponds being filtered that way using a basket of pebbles.

I suppose that there are some advantages of using plastic instead of rocks for this - for one thing it's lighter in bulk.

But well, here is the disadvantage. A spill of small rocks isn't usually an environmental issue.

Apparently that they float is important to the process. I guess so they don't need to dig them out with an excavator or some mechanism and can just float them out to be changed.

From a wastewater treatment plant no less.

"This is the one thing we didn't want to happen"

"Dollimore, the Labour and Cooperative MP who joined the clean-up efforts,"

Well, I guess you could say that the government is doing something if a single member of parliament chooses to do some volunteer work on her free time.

You did ask

Lost fishing nets are estimated to be 500,000 to 1 000,000 tons per year. Lost Nurdles are estimated in the ballpark of ~160,000 tonnes.

I wonder how quickly they are broken down by UV, given their relatively large surface area.

Does loose LEGO have the same polluting effects? Does it even float?

It does float, though not necessarily at the top of the water column. It's also larger and thus a bit more difficult to get mixed into the sand. It is still a problem.

1997 Lego spill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Lego_spill

The Cornish beaches where Lego keeps washing up - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28367198

After 25 Years at Sea, Shipwrecked Lego Pieces Are Still Washing Ashore on Beaches in England - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whimsical-legos-ar...

Also known as “Mermaid’s tears” [0] (although this name can encompass other artificial things found in the ocean also).

0. https://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-mermaid-tears.htm

One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic. Then it will take over the world.

This is slowly happening for various types of plastic. We have discovered some PLA-eating bacteria in Asian forests (PLA is "biodegradable", but usually not meaningfully at room temperature), PET-eating bacteria in the ocean, and apparently some bacteria that can degrade polystyrene and polyethylene

But each of them only works in certain environments. Just like wood is very biodegradable, but if you keep it dry you can build wooden structures that last centuries

Keep it dry or keep it wet. It's the alternating condition that makes wood desintegrate because then bacteria have both food, themselves and water to work with.

The wooden posts under buildings in Amsterdam famously stood for centuries, until the water table was changed a few times in a row and then rot set in.

I am confused by your comment. Wood does not disintegrate in water if it stays out of contact with the air ?

Indeed, if it is just saturated in an oxygen poor environment it will last for a very long time. As soon as you expose it to air it starts to rot, and pretty quickly too. This effect is compounded by the mechanical effects of repeatedly shrinking due to drying out and then re-absorbing water again until the wood is saturated.

More than you probably ever wanted to know about this subject:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17480272.2025.2...

https://www.waternet.nl/en/our-water/groundwater/

Lots of houses and other historical buildings in Amsterdam are having their foundation supporting piles replaced. This is a very challenging operation and highly specialized gear has been built to do the job, and with a minimum of vibration to reduce the chance of damage to the structure. They're called 'schroefinjectiepalen' in dutch (too many letters for Scrabble).

The essential piece of kit is a tiny pile driver that gets lifted into the basement of a building and that then pushes hollow steel shells into the soil until resistance. Each shell is threaded, much like drilling rig piles from oil drilling, only much shorter, typically 1 to 2 meters in length. When the required resistance is met the shells are filled with grout, so you end up with an inside-out reinforced concrete post that once it has cured can be load bearing. There are also versions where the grout escapes the post and forms a shell around it and there are versions where there is more armoring inserted into the steel tube.

Edit: finally found a good English language article:

https://www.walinco.nl/g-grouts.htm

These little machines are quite the feat of engineering, some of them are so small they fit through a standard doorway.

https://www.schroefinjectiebv.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/...

Here is a picture of one under one of Amsterdam's theaters:

http://funderingstechniek.com/foto/carre3.jpg

> They're called 'schroefinjectiepalen' in dutch (too many letters for Scrabble).

I was about to comment that you could form it in multiple steps, but turns out, I forgot about the size limitation of the scrabble board/how many of each letter.

Either way, that's some neat tech. Specialized machines for such "obscure" usages are pretty interesting. Partially because you just never even think about those existing until you hear of em.

It's a very interesting subject. At first the judgement was 'it can't be done' and then some enterprising company came up with a very creative solution.

And for me, I hadn't even thought of that being a problem, or wood being used for foundations, or... and so on.

Just, so many chains of logic I probably will never even think about that lead to such neat tech which would be interesting to me. Makes one wonder what else there is.

> One day, some bacteria is going to figure out how to digest plastic.

The problem is that day may be millions of years away. It allegedly took nature several million years to evolve bacteria that can digest lignin and cellulose, allowing old fallen wood to decompose in the forest. Coal deposits are from an era when such bacteria were not present.

Even if we had such bacteria, they would only be able to digest plastic under certain conditions. Overall, plastic pollution is here to stay for a very long time.

Humans have indirectly accelerated the rate of evolution (or natural selection if you will), so I doubt it'd take millions of years. Entire ecosystems have changed more in the millennium of modern human activity than many millions of years before that. What makes evolution slow isn't so much evolution itself but the pressures of the environment; drastic, sudden environmental changes spur rapid evolution.

It's about non-tax barriers on pellets import :)

The keywords seems to bring an anomalous amount of trolls in the comments. But maybe I am in the wrong, and there's a positive side into leaking plastic pellets in the ocean. Like turtles can now build their own platic industry and we'll make business with them soon or something.

https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/european-security-...

From the HN guidelines:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Makes sense, sorry. Was still making a sarcastic point that it's objectively difficult to be strongly against regulating things with basically no upside, though I understand that you can be against regulations in general.

I didnt take issue with your point itself, but rather with how you seemingly implied there to be people whole break HN guidelines, where it explicitly says in the guidelines to contact the mod team for such cases.

I guess the sarcasm just flew over my head there. Thanks for the civility though.

Eh, frankly this is kind of ‘Reddit cares’ ing what I think was an insightful and amusing comment.

But I might be biased due to my extensive shares in Testudines Petroleum Inc.

Guess we have different definitions of what is appropriate. I might very well be the one in the wrong.

Eh, or we found the magic confluence called ‘engagement’.

Thought they’re talking about airsoft lol

Are those biodegradable?

They’re marketed that way, but there’s a giant asterisk. They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.

There is a new manufacturer called Terra that has apparently made “true” biodegradable Airsoft pellets

> They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature.

Thinking of PLA, for me at least, it's fine if it takes years instead of weeks, as long as it's fundamentally vulnerable to common bio-chemical attack and the monomers aren't toxic. That's not the stuff that's causing issues, I think.

I would accept "Can be depolymerized, and absorbed by the biosphere or water table or bonded to alkaline rock, when suspended in normal soil in a temperate climate in less than 100 years" as a victory here.

Lactic acid is in milk/yogurt/etc.

> They’re biodegradable in an industrial composter, and similar conditions are incredibly unlikely in nature. So they are, effectively, not biodegradable.

Just like every plastic marketed as biodegradable. I feel like most of the "biodegradable"/"eco-friendly" products rushed to the markets in the wake of stricter regulations are worse for the environment since they either require significantly more resources (especially water) to produce, extremely complicated special setups to dispose of, or even both.

Kinda. I think that modern airsoft balls degrade in a couple of years. Which shouldn't be an issue in a dedicated venue.

Would think it's trivial to make those from cellulose or something, but I guess it's always about money. Most "biodegradable" plastics are just turned into smaller pieces of plastic by UV.

The ISO 14855-1 standard for biodegradability:

https://www.iso.org/standard/57902.html

"Bio" BBs are made out of PLA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polylactic_acid

And typically made out of corn or manioc starch, or even cane sugar.

Precise weight is controlled via barium sulfate.

There's a small coating of varnish to make it smooth as well as a bit more resistant to external conditions, otherwise they would degrade too quickly.

In the case of BBs they need to withstand a fair bit of force, so I don't think it's about money. The biodegradable ones (PLA) on the market I've tried perform less well than their non-biodegradable alternatives and can shatter on impact, cause jams, etc.

I doubt you could make a hard enough cellulose pellet, maybe it's possible but costly, idk.

[flagged]

Please don't edit a comment, once it has replies, in such a way as to destroy context for the reader.

Biobeads are not a natural phenomenon; they are produced for and used by water treatment plants and therefore it's the responsibility of their owners to ensure that they don't leak into the ocean where they don't belong.

This type of legislation is in the same line as the USA's Clean Water Act; don't shit where you eat/live.

Weird comment. Anyway I am so proud to see so many French names in the article.

Yep, and in the air too. I can't even burn leaded gasoline. When will the madness end?!

Yeah, reducing pollution is "extremist insanity" /s

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