The Tarragona Public Prosecutor’s Office has archived the investigation opened last January into the dumping of plastic granules that contaminated the coast of Tarragona, due to the inability to trace the industry from which they came.
As already happened with the investigations opened in 2019 and 2021, the investigation by the Tarragona Environmental Prosecutor’s Office into the spills of last January ended in a file due to not having found enough data on the origin and time when the contamination of the area occurred. allows a company to be prosecuted.
The appearance in the sand of several beaches in Tarragona of tens of thousands of pellets, a material used for the manufacture of plastics, led to the opening of a criminal investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and, in turn, to the Generalitat to open an administrative file. which affected a dozen chemical companies in the region. Around the same time, Galicia was also contaminated by pellets after several containers from the cargo ship Toconao carrying these particles fell into the sea. The Prosecutor’s Office has also opened investigations in this community.
In the case of Tarragona, the investigations commissioned by the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Civil Guard and the Rural Agents have not allowed to obtain “much information” on the origin of the pellets or the time when they were dumped, reports the Agència Catalana de Notícies (ACN). The archiving decree of the prosecutor specifies that it has not been possible to attribute the dumpings to “specific episodes” nor to detect a dumping of “sufficient magnitude” to imply “criminal behavior”.
Since 2018, the presence of these small plastic balls has been documented on the beaches of Tarragona. And since then, environmental entities such as Good Karma or the Surf Rider Foundation have been monitoring their presence. According to their calculations, more than 700,000 of these microplastics would have been collected in 2021 and more than two million in 2022. The latest oil spills this year have even reached the coasts of Menorca.
