By Julie Grant, Allegheny Front
Three Rivers Waterkeeper and PennEnvironment, along with the DEP, announced a settlement Thursday with Houston-based polystyrene maker Styropek and its facility, BVPV Styrenics LLC, in Beaver County.
In 2022 and 2023, the Waterkeeper group monitored the Ohio River near the newly built Shell cracker plant in Monaca, looking for nurdles, which are tiny plastic pellets. And they found a lot of them.
“Not only would you find it in the water, you’d find it on the banks as well,” said David Mazur, executive director of PennEnvironment. “So, the vegetation on the stream banks would be coated with tiny pieces of plastic, these pellets.”
But the nurdles weren’t coming from the Shell plant. Instead, they were traced to the Styropek plant’s wastewater pipe at Raccoon Creek, near the confluence with the Ohio River.
“You could literally sit there in a boat and look down, and it almost looks like a fountain, like there’s that pressure and it’s pushing these little beads of plastic to the surface,” Mazur said.
Pa DEP, environmental groups, reach $2.6M settlement with plastic maker Styropek (Post-Gazette)
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