CHICAGO — While looking closely at each seedling stem at the floating gardens of Chicago’s Wild Mile, Emily Kowalski found eight tiny plastic pellets hidden within the leaves and soil.
“Once you see them, you see them everywhere,” said Kowalski, the associate director of the nonprofit organization Environment Illinois, picking one up and placing it with the others.
Plastic pellets are tiny, white, round objects — about the size of a grain of rice — fabricated at plastic factories. They are the building blocks of plastics manufacturing, but if they make it into waterways, they pose a danger. Kowalski said the pellets can look like food to birds, turtles and fish, and that if they ingest too many of them, they can become ill, starve or be poisoned by the accumulation of toxins from the pellets.
As the hazards they pose become increasingly known, state legislators are seeking to give the Illinois EPA more leeway to attack the problem, which often is traced to spills from factories. Spills are not intentional. But given how light the pellets are, they can easily end up in the state’s waterways, blown by the wind or carried by stormwater.
House Bill 4418 grants the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency emergency rulemaking powers to create “stormwater pollution prevention plan” that specifically addresses plastic pellet spills. The bill directs the IEPA to, within one year of its passing, devise best practices for facilities that produce the pellets.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Joyce Mason, D-Gurnee, recently passed the House 69-33 and awaits action in the Senate.
Other bills address the issue
Some Democratic U.S. senators, including Dick Durbin, of Illinois, want to enact plastic pellet regulations nationwide. Last month, Durbin introduced the Plastic Pellets Free Water Act, which includes some of the same provisions found in its Illinois General Assembly counterpart.
According to an analysis of federal EPA data by Environment Illinois, at least seven facilities in Illinois produce plastic pellets — four of them near a river.
Kowalski said documenting the source of pellets found in the environment can be challenging since they can be carried long distances on a river or another waterway. There haven't been any recent spills connected with the facilities identified in her organization’s study.
The pellets are shipped from pre-production plastic manufacturers to production facilities, which use them as the input into their molds to make their products.
“It’s the first real plastic form from the oil that creates the plastic,” Kowalski said.
Donovan Griffith, executive vice president and chief security officer for the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, said the association had a neutral stance on House Bill 4418. Kayla Rivera, communications manager for Epsilyte, a manufacturer in Peru, said the requirements described in the bill are consistent with the practices they already follow.
The Epsilyte facility produces lightweight, expandable polystyrene spheres designed to insulate, absorb shock and be durable. The facility sits one street from the Illinois River, past the Starved Rock nature preserve. Rivera said Epsilyte actively works to minimize pellet loss and prevent spills into nearby waterways.
House Bill 4418 contains the same language as HB 3278, which passed the House 68-38 last spring but has yet to be taken up by the Senate this session.
Sen. Rachel Ventura, D-Joliet, a cosponsor of the bill, said the state urgently needs to address the central role industrial facilities play in creating water pollution.
“In the United States, up to 94% of tap water samples have tested positive for microplastics, which studies have shown have the potential to be passed up through the food chain,” Ventura said. “Urgent regulation is needed.”
House Republican leadership didn’t respond to requests for comment. But when HB 3278 passed the House last April, Republican floor leader Patrick Windhorst criticized the broad authority it gave to the IEPA.
“It seems like we’re just handing that off to the EPA to develop and implement the plan rather than us guiding the plan,” he said, according to transcripts.
Plastic pellet spill in Michigan
In February, Michigan authorities discovered several thousand pounds of pellets that had spilled from a semi-trailer into the Kalamazoo River a month before.
When Kowalski testified at a House hearing in favor of Mason’s bill, she said that while bigger spills, like the one in Michigan, get a lot of attention, she is concerned with the “routine” loss of plastic pellets into Illinois’ environment and river system.
“I think this really is a commonsense solution to an absurd problem,” Kowalski said. “The biggest hurdle for this effort is really just the lack of understanding. Most people haven’t seen a plastic pellet or heard of it.”
Environment Illinois is organizing its second annual international plastic pellet count day on May 2, designed to get people out into their communities to look for them. Kowalski said this is a way to both educate people about the issue and gather data about where the pellets are being found.
Even for Connor Nelson, a volunteer at the environmental nonprofit group Urban Rivers, identifying a plastic pellet is not easy.
After Kowalski removed the pellets on Wild Mile, Nelson took a quick look. He first thought they were styrofoam. But after Kowalski said that they actually were plastic pellets, he immediately realized how many he had seen in the area.
“The more you look, the more you see,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to, one-by-one, pick it up, without feeling somewhat defeated, because you’re not going to get all of that.”
Gabriel Castilho is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is a fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.