Who Shows Up When Nobody Else Will?

Working in the refugee sector for the last few years, there are dark days when it feels like the world is a pretty grim place, with the relentless rise of anti-migrant sentiment. In one weekend alone, media coverage was dominated by men in black wearing balaclavas blocking the port at Dover shouting “stop the boats”, quickly followed by violence in Portsmouth after a group of people seeking asylum were rescued by the RNLI.

What you don't see in the headlines are the communities and organisations rallying quietly in the background, efficiently supporting people who have risked their lives to leave their homes and seek safety in the UK. It's a kind of quiet, stubborn decency that rarely makes the news

So this summer in the North East, when two ships collided in the River Tyne - clipping a 100ft gantry crane so badly it folded in on itself, and very nearly killing the crane operator, who survived with broken bones - a container of plastic nurdles ruptured. Around a billion of the tiny lentil-sized pellets fell into the water in a matter of seconds. The tide carried them out and soon they were washing up like plastic snow on our beaches. 

When the council and the Environment Agency told people not to touch the plastic pellets, I think we all assumed that meant they were about to take charge of the clean-up. But no. So hundreds of volunteers took to the beaches anyway. They rolled up their sleeves, grabbed sieves, buckets, dustpans and brushes, and started the clean-up themselves.

It wasn't just environmentalists. It was people from across the community, all mucking in together, because we all have something in common - we care about where we live, we’re proud of our beautiful beaches, and we care about the wildlife that inhabits the sea and shores.

Sally McGee, who runs Yonder surf school in Tynemouth mobilised her local network over WhatsApp. Soon volunteers were organising themselves beach by beach, up and down the coast - around 200 people turned out for one of the very first organised cleans in Whitley Bay alone.

The powers that be didn’t seem to have a plan, in fact most people seemed to be on annual leave, so any hope of the cavalry turning up behind us faded fast; so we cracked on. 

Amazing innovators, engineers and a team of seamstresses started developing their own methods for filtering nurdles out of sand and seaweed - hand-sewn mesh bags made by volunteer machinists working from their own homes. One local resident even built his own filtering machine out of buckets and a recirculating pump that separates seaweed, sand and nurdles. Community equipment hubs, known as NESTs, sprang up so anyone could grab kit before heading onto the beach. None of this was official. All of it worked.

But collecting nurdles by the bucketload was never going to be enough on its own, so the community started putting pressure on the people who could actually stop this at the source. An open letter to the Port of Tyne. Demands for a seat at the table in meetings with North Tyneside Council and the Local Resilience Forum. 

I brought my day-job charity communications skills into play with the newly formed Nurdle Volunteer Press Team alongside Leah Pattem - a journalist who grew up in Whitley Bay who happened to be home visiting family for a few weeks.

We put together press releases, prepared volunteers for media interviews, liaised with producers and reporters, securing widespread coverage both locally, regionally and nationally. More coverage meant more pressure on the authorities.

Volunteers with boats and the right training - from organisations who'd been ready to help from day one - were still kept off the river for weeks, even as nurdles sat trapped in the water right in front of them.

The pressure paid off when official workers started to appear alongside volunteers on the beaches. Briggs Marine were brought in, hiring agency staff to work alongside paid council workers on the sand. For a while, it felt like things were finally moving. 

Then just as quickly the operation started being scaled back - and still, no real communication from the authorities about what the plan actually was, or how many nurdles had even been recovered. Promises of a figure that never quite materialised. It's hard not to feel the anger creeping in here: the sense that business and political convenience will always be prioritised over the people, and the coastline, actually affected. It doesn't help that plastic pellets like these aren't even classified as hazardous cargo, unlike oil.

But the volunteers keep going. The nurdles have spread now, from Druridge Bay in Northumberland all the way down into Scarborough in Yorkshire – that’s around 60 miles of coastline. Millions are still trapped in the Tyne itself, washing up on the beaches of North and South Shields - sometimes alongside the sewage that gets released into the river after heavy rain. But there’s a hardcore of volunteers still turning up, tide after tide, picking up nurdles. It has put the authorities to shame. More than 6,000 hours, freely given, by ordinary people with nothing to gain except a cleaner coastline - and over half a tonne of pellets recovered by hand.

So what have I learned?

That there's a resilience and a strength in my local community. I'm surrounded by brilliant, capable people who can run rings around those in power - people who just get on with it, and who hold power accountable while they're doing it.

People will not just blindly be told what to do. Given the chance, they stand up. They challenge. They organise themselves better than anyone expected them to. They want to help.

And after years of hearing the loudest voices insist that communities are divided, that people don't care, that empathy is in short supply - I've spent the last few weeks watching a beach full of people with dustpans and brushes prove otherwise. 

It's the same thing I see in the refugee sector, week in, week out: when the systems that are supposed to respond fail to show up, it's ordinary people, not politicians, who quietly pick up the slack. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens every single time, whether the crisis is plastic pellets or people fleeing for their lives. It's maddening that it has to be this way - and it's also, genuinely, where I find my hope.

We show up for each other and will keep showing up for each other.

For an in-depth look at the volunteer response - including the science, the regulatory gaps, and the sheer scale of what's still out there - go and read my fellow volunteer Leah Pattem's piece. Leah is an investigative journalist and photographer who has documented this summer's community response in incredible detail.

madridnofrills.com/documenting-uk-plastic-pellet-spill

If you want to find out more about volunteering with the local nurdle clean-up groups please visit: https://nurdle-hub.vercel.app