Toxic Plastic Bead Spill Spreading On England's South Coast; Southern Water Just Raised Its Avg. Rates 47% This Year

[hatrack]

The massive spill of plastic beads at Camber Sands is devastating for local people, wildlife and tourism and the beads are dispersing along the coast, residents heard at an emotional public meeting on Thursday. Millions of tiny, toxic plastic beads are thought to have escaped into the sea from Eastbourne sewage works in East Sussex about two weeks ago when a screen keeping them in broke. They began to wash up on Camber Sands beach last Thursday, with the situation worsening over the weekend.

Environment Agency sources suspect this is one of England’s worst plastic pollution events, with approximately 10 tonnes of beads spilled: the plastic pollution campaign group Strandliners has estimated it is probably about 650m beads. “This is catastrophic,” Sarah Broadbent, who chairs the 1066 Country tourist board, told the meeting attended by hundreds of local people, Southern Water representatives, and the area’s MP Helena Dollimore. “We really rely on tourists here, who come for the beach. We will be at the bottom of everybody’s holiday list now.”

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Anthony Skinner, who runs a kitesurfing company at Camber Sands, is one of the 175 people who have spent days on their hands and knees using sieves, tweezers and dustpans and brushes to try to clean the beach. He and other people turned up to the meeting to get some answers from the water company and the Environment Agency. “I was one of the first on the site,” said Skinner, “I’ve been raking the seaweed to expose the beads underneath. Our beauty spot has been tainted, it will change people’s perception of the coast. We were already dealing with sewage and runoff from the roads, now we have to cope with this pollution too.”

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Southern Water customers this year received the highest bill increase in the country, with rates rising by an average of 47%. This feels like a double injustice to those dealing with pollution from the company. John Penicud, the managing director of wastewater at Southern Water, told the meeting that the Eastbourne treatment site was old, “built in the year 2000” and that a screen on the tank holding tonnes of plastic beads, which are used to filter sewage water, had broken. He added that five other Southern Water treatment centres used these beads. He said the company was “really sorry” for the spill and committed to paying for the cleanup, but confirmed some of the money for this would come from customer bills. Penicud said it would be paid for with a “mixture of funds” – investment from shareholders and customer bills.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/14/plastic-beads-spreading-sussex-coast-catastrophic-spill-meeting-told-camber-sands

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. This associated link was really helpful in understanding the story.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/14/what-are-bio-beads-used-for-and-how-did-they-get-spilled-on-to-camber-sands-beach