Reporting by Michael Hawthorne for Chicago Tribune:
Illinois is requiring polluters to begin reporting spills of industrial plastic pellets known as nurdles, a growing source of contamination in the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds.
Companies that manufacture, use or transport nurdles also must develop plans to limit them in storm runoff, making the state the first in either watershed to officially designate bits of wasted plastic as pollution.
The new law, signed late last week by Gov. JB Pritzker, comes as an ongoing Tribune series, “Great Waste in the Great Lakes,” delves into threats posed by nurdles and other man-made particles known collectively as microplastics.
Nurdles, synthesized by petrochemical plants as building blocks of new plastics, have been found in every Great Lake and in rivers throughout Illinois.
Light enough to travel long distances through the air, nurdles routinely spill from chemical plants that make them, trains and trucks that transport them and factories that turn them into consumer products, the Tribune has found.
Fish mistake them for food. Researchers around the world are studying whether human exposure to microplastics contributes to or causes cardiovascular ailments, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, impaired fertility, premature births, certain cancers and developmental problems in children.
“We find at least 50 or 60 nurdles a week in a plastic trash trap right downtown on the Chicago River,” said Tim Hoellein, a Loyola University biologist who studies the problem. “As far as I can tell there’s no manufacturing facility close by, and that water is largely coming from Lake Michigan.”
This summer Hoellein and a group of graduate students collected water samples from the Calumet, Des Plaines, Illinois and Rock rivers and the Mississippi between Dubuque, Iowa, and the Quad Cities. They found nurdles in all of them, he said.
Hoellein’s team also documented surges of nurdles last summer in a narrow branch of the Chicago River within the Middle Fork Savanna, a rare, fragile ecosystem managed by the Lake County Forest Preserves.
Others have detected microplastics embedded in the sand of Lake Michigan beaches. Some of the particles are formed as plastic waste breaks down in the environment; others are fibers from synthetic clothes that flush out of washing machines and pass through sewage treatment plants into lakes and rivers.
“There is no silver bullet solution to address this pervasive problem,” Environment Illinois, a nonprofit advocacy group, concluded in a report intended to build support for the new state law. “Multiple policy changes at the local, state and federal level are needed to combat this.”
Jen Walling, chief executive of the Illinois Environmental Council, said several lawmakers shared the Tribune series with her as she helped shepherd the new law through the General Assembly. Lawmakers approved the legislation on votes of 69-33 in the House and 44-13 in the Senate.