A federal judge ruled last Thursday that Formosa Plastics, a petrochemical company outside Port Lavaca, can be held liable for violating state and federal water pollution laws. According to a lawsuit filed in 2017, the company violated its environmental permits for years, dumping millions of tiny plastic pellets — known as nurdles — into Lavaca Bay. Formosa denied any illegal dumping, arguing that it didn’t emit more than the undefined “trace amounts” allowed by its permit.
Since the company never filed any record of pollution with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), much of the record-keeping and data collection was conducted by resident volunteers who patrolled Cox Creek by kayak, collecting samples of water contaminated with nurdles. The oddly named plastic balls are a raw material used for manufacturing plastics, and they can poison fish and other wildlife that ingest them. Armed with the volunteers’ data, the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, an environmental nonprofit, brought a lawsuit against the company two years ago.
In his decision, Judge Kenneth Hoyt called the company’s violations “enormous,” referring to Formosa as a “serial offender” with more than 1,000 days of violations recorded.
