Lawsuits Targeting Plastic Pollution Pile Up as Angry Citizens and States Seek Accountability
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June 5, 2024
The plastic pellets washing up on beaches and in marshes around Charleston, South Carolina, became very obvious about five years ago.
Called nurdles, these pebble-sized particles that are the raw material for many plastic products floated, too, in the aquamarine waters of the harbor, many carried at high tide to Sullivan’s Island, known for its white sand and million-dollar homes, where they caused alarm.
“We had been working to enact single-use plastic bans and then we started to see this nurdle problem,” recalled Andrew Wunderley, the executive director of Charleston Waterkeeper, part of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental organization. “Now we had industrial-like plastic pollution.”
So Charleston Waterkeeper joined with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit law firm, and the Charleston-based Coastal Conservation League, to identify what they believed to be the source of the nurdles and then to take that company, Frontier Logistics, L.P., to federal court, in March 2020. A year later, the environmental advocates and Frontier reached a settlement that included $1 million to improve water quality in the Charleston Harbor watershed.
From South Carolina to California, nearly 60 lawsuits have been filed since 2015, mostly by citizens or environmental groups, targeting the plastics industry. The litigation comes amid a rapidly expanding body of scientific knowledge detailing how burgeoning plastics production damages the planet and threatens public health.
Most recently, attorneys general in Connecticut, Minnesota and New York have raised the stakes with their own plastics lawsuits, bringing with them considerable legal firepower.
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