Plastic pellet clean-up resumes on beach

Work to remove millions of plastic pellets from a beach following a leak at a wastewater plant has resumed following a break over the summer.

Millions of pellets, known as biobeads, entered the sea after a spill at a Southern Water treatment works in Eastbourne in October 2025, before washing up in Camber Sands and Rye Harbour Nature Reserve in East Sussex, and St Mary's Bay in Kent.

A clean-up operation had been in place since November, but was put on hold in Camber during the summer months due to the beach's popularity.

George Taylor, Southern Water's director of wastewater operations, said there was also a plan to continue work in Rye and for the clean-up to carry on through the winter.

Southern Water said the clean-ups - which do not yet have a timeframe - were being funded from company profits and would not negatively affect necessary investment or services.

Josh Beech, founder of Nurdle, which is clearing the pellets in Camber, said a biobead clean-up of this size had never been done before.

"We're really trying to set the benchmark here in terms of how to deal with this pollution," he told BBC Radio Sussex.

Beech said vacuum equipment was being used to remove the pellets, but they were "playing a little bit of a game of battleships" to find the buried biobeads.

He said the "groundbreaking" operation had been "immensely" successful so far.

Heavy metals, including lead, arsenic and cadmium were found on pellets which washed up in Camber, in tests by scientists at King's College London.

Linda Morrison, who is selling a holiday let in the area, said she thought the number of overnight visitors in Camber had dropped since the spill.

"It was all on the TV, it was in the newspapers, and there's only one thing in Camber, and that's the beach," she said.

"And if you haven't got the use of the beach for safety reasons, you don't want to bring children."

Although an investigation into the spill is ongoing, Southern Water said it was looking at additional containment and control of the beads at the Eastbourne site to prevent a similar incident happening again.

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