Squatting in the strandline as a storm brewed on the horizon, I combed through the debris with tweezers. I spotted my first nurdle almost immediately. Covered in sand, the pale plastic pellet blended almost perfectly into the background. Next to me, a woman scraped the top layer of sand away and plopped it in a bucket of seawater. As she stirred, several nurdles drifted to the surface.

“It’s impossible to make a dent,” I thought. Despite removing more than 3,000 pieces of microplastic during our cleanup, thousands more winked at us from the sand as we left Camber Sands beach. These tiny pre-production plastic pellets, called nurdles, are littering UK beaches in such numbers that beach cleanups can’t keep up.

“I think removing all the nurdles would be an impossible task. They’re everywhere,” says Andy Dinsdale, the founder of the East Sussex-based environmental organisation Strandliners.

Nurdles are tiny plastic pellets – around the size of a lentil – made from fossil fuels, which are used to make plastic products. Huge containers of them are transported around the world by road, rail and ship before they are melted down and made into all the plastic items we use in our day-to-day lives.

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Christy Leavitt is the plastics campaign director at the conservation group Oceana. She agrees that removing all the plastic pellets from our oceans and coastlines is “simply not possible”. Studies have shown there are more than 170tn plastic particles floating in the world’s oceans.

So, why even bother with cleanups? For Dinsdale and his team, cleanups help to gather data, to illustrate how bad the nurdle problem really is. Evidence from cleanups has led to legislation such as the plastic bag tax and a ban on single-use items such as cotton buds.

Organising them without recording the data would mean “we’ll be doing that for the rest of our lives”, says Beverley Coombs, a Strandliners volunteer. “If you just pick, bag and bin, nobody knows what the rubbish is. How on earth can you stop it coming back?”

Nurdle spills can occur when cargo ships capsize or drop containers overboard to preserve life during stormy seas – something allowed by international maritime law. Once in the ocean, these pellets can kill marine life and have catastrophic effects on the environment.

Dani Whitlock, a project officer at the Scottish charity Fidra says nurdle pollution rates are increasing despite voluntary industry measures that attempt to prevent it. She attributes these pellet spills to mismanagement, poor handling and lack of accountability.

Since the beginning of last year, there have been four major reported pellet spills across the world – with millions washing up in France, India, Dubai and Spain. And Fidra’s annual Great Nurdle Hunt reports finding pellets in 93% of all its surveys. “These voluntary measures are not working,” says Whitlock.

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Leavitt says the problem needs to be dealt with at source, “and that’s at the production level”. About 15m tonnes of plastic waste is poured into our oceans each year. “That’s roughly equivalent to dumping two garbage trucks full of plastic into the ocean every minute,” she says. Once this plastic waste reaches the ocean, it is incredibly difficult to remove.

While many members of the public are doing their best to reduce their own plastic waste, governments and plastic-producing companies need to be the ones to solve nurdle pollution. Producing less plastic and regulating its discharge into waterways is much more effective than trying to clean up the mess after plastic pollution has already reached the ocean.

It’s “one of the most straightforward plastic problems we have because there is a solution”, says Whitlock. Better legislation, regulation and independent supply chain audits globally – including labelling nurdles as hazardous so they are treated with care during transport – could reduce pellet pollution by about 95%, she says.

Dinsdale doesn’t understand why plastic-producing companies aren’t interested in protecting their raw materials. “They’re losing money. It’s in their own interest not to lose it,” he says.

Whitlock agrees. “It’s just mind-boggling that we’re not working towards that solution together.”

In the meantime, Dinsdale and beachcombers like him aren’t planning on stopping their hunts. If their efforts only involved cleanups, it might be a different story: “That would be depressing because you would never end,” he says.

But gathering evidence on the state of nurdle pollution gives conservation organisations more power to lobby for change, Dinsdale says. “We might be small in the grand scheme of things but we’re helping in a proactive way rather than a reactive way.”

Officials in northern Spain have issued alerts after millions of tiny plastic pellets spilled by a cargo ship off Portugal last month washed up on beaches, raising fears of environmental damage and triggering a political row.

Spanish state prosecutors have also launched an investigation after receiving information suggesting the non-biodegradable pellets could be toxic.

The emergency began on 8 December after the Toconao, a Liberia-registered vessel chartered by the shipping firm Maersk, lost six containers while sailing about 50 miles (80km) off the coast of northern Portugal. One container held 1,000 25kg sacks of the tiny balls, which are used in the manufacture of plastic products.

In the weeks since the spill, millions of the pellets have washed up on beaches in north-west Spain, prompting a clean-up operation by regional workers and volunteers.

On Tuesday, the regional governments of Galicia and neighbouring Asturias issued level 2 alerts, which will allow more personnel and resources to be assigned to the task as well as logistical assistance from the Spanish government’s environment and transport ministries.

Alfonso Rueda, the regional president of Galicia, said there was still time to stop more pellets washing up on the shoreline. “There are hundreds of sacks right now that have not reached the coast,” he said on Tuesday. “The time to collect them, or at least to try, is now that they are at sea. It seems there will be currents these days that will make it a little easier.”

The regional government of Asturias said it has raised the alert level after detecting “a significant increase in the strip of coast affected and an increase in the number of spots identified”.

The incident has led to a political row between Galicia’s conservative regional government and the socialist-led central government. Rueda said the central government had known about the spillage for two weeks before it informed his administration on 4 January. The Galician government has also said it is satisfied that the pellets are not toxic.

Asked why he had waited so long to secure central government help by declaring the level 2 alert, Rueda said his team had found out about the situation only “a few days ago”, while the national government “has known the details for a month”.

Spain’s environment minister, Teresa Ribera, had previously said the government was ready to help as soon as its assistance was sought.

“The pellets have reached beaches in Asturias,” she said in a tweet on X on Monday. “I’ve called the regional president and told him – just as I told Alfonso Rueda yesterday – that the government is available to help. Our teams are ready to respond as soon as they’re called on.”

Voters in Galicia go to the polls next month in a regional election. As the political squabbling continued, ecological groups called for a quick and coordinated response, saying the situation was already reminiscent of the confused reaction to the disastrous Prestige oil spill in Galicia two decades ago.

In a joint letter, Friends of the Earth, Ecologists in Action, Greenpeace, SEO/Birdlife and the WWF said there could be “no repeat of the nightmare management of an environmental crisis”.

“Environmental organisations are monitoring the Galician regional government’s reaction to the spill with concern as it serves as a bitter reminder of the black tide of the Prestige in 2002 and 2003 and the lack of coordination with the central government,” the letter said.

“We ask that no partisan use is made of the catastrophe and that joint efforts are made to tackle the long-term impact of the spill, to determine responsibilities, and to reinforce the rules on the production, transport and use of plastics.”

The European Commission warned of the dangers posed by plastic pellets three months ago.

“Once in the environment, these small particles of plastics do not biodegrade and cannot be removed,” it said in October. “They accumulate in animals, including fish and shellfish, and are consequently also consumed by humans in food. They contribute to the pollution with microplastics, which have been found in marine, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems as well as in food and drinking water.”