Cleaning Up: Nurdles on the North East Coast

A nurdle is plastic before it becomes anything we recognise. These tiny pellets are the raw material of bottles, packaging and countless other objects, intended to pass invisibly through industry before emerging in a finished form. Following a vessel collision in the River Tyne on 19 July, they escaped that process and entered the landscape itself. Carried by tide, wind and current, the pellets have washed ashore across the North East coastline, with particularly heavy deposits around North and South Shields.

Photographed by Hazel Plater in North Shields, this photo essay meets the clean-up at ground level. The scale of the spill is answered by rakes, brushes, sieves, bags, specialist equipment and repeated human labour. Something released in a single industrial incident must now be recovered piece by piece, from sand, stones and seaweed, while each new tide threatens to rearrange what remains.

This attention to the relationship between environment, industry and community is important to our history. In the early 1980s, Side commissioned Isabela Jedrzejczyk and John Davies to make For Druridge as proposals for a nuclear power station threatened Druridge Bay. Their photographs recorded the coast, farmland and character of a place whose future could be transformed by decisions made beyond it. Later in The Coal Coast, photographed between 1998 and 2002, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen examined a shoreline shaped by generations of coal mining. Mineral and chemical pollution had created an unexpectedly vivid landscape, but the beauty of the photographs never separates the coast from the industrial damage embedded within it.

Documentary work is often made before an event has settled into history, while its meaning and consequences are still being argued over. It does not only prove that something happened. It records how an event entered a place, what it demanded from the people responding, and what might otherwise disappear once attention moves elsewhere. Hazel Plater’s photographs hold this moment between spill and aftermath, when plastic made for another purpose became part of the North East coast, and the work of removing it had only just begun.