They Want To Make It Legal... To Pollute

A Small Tweak To A Wastewater Permit Could Have Disastrous Results For a Texas Community & Beyond

First, they pollute. For years. Decades, even.

Plastic pellets, powder, flakes, foam, pouring out of a 4,700-acre complex on the Texas Gulf Coast into the waterways that feed the San Antonio Bay.

Nurdles sound like something cute. But when these tiny plastic pellets wash up on the banks of the canal, they pile up in the sand right where kids swim.

Microplastics, like nurdles, do not dissolve or disappear with time. They linger downstream, impacting sealife, marine birds, and even potentially human health.

Every single day that production plants are running, the plastic goes in the water.

Then someone notices. Someone like Diane Wilson, a 78-year-old retired shrimper and Goldman Prize-winning activist, who spent a year boating up and down that canal, collecting bags and buckets full of evidence. She didn’t go to law school, didn’t work for a lobbying firm, didn’t have a corporate expense account. A woman who knew her water, knew her bay, and knew something was deeply wrong.

Then they get sued. And here’s where it gets wild.

When Dow Chemical found out that the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper was about to take them to court, and they saw the buckets of pellets and the 25-page legal notice, they didn’t clean it up. They didn’t apologize. They didn’t even pretend.

They filed a 320-page application to make it legal.

That’s right. Dow went to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and asked them to rewrite the rules.

The current wastewater permit says chemical plants can only discharge “trace amounts” of “floating solids.” Dow’s argument? That language is “vague.” That it has “the potential to be more stringent than necessary.” They want to discharge an unspecified amount of plastic into public waterways, and they want the state’s blessing to do it.

I’ve seen a lot in my years fighting for people whose water has been poisoned and whose complaints have been ignored. But the audacity of this move still stops me cold. You spend decades fouling a bay, and when you finally get caught, your solution is to change the definition of “caught.”

And the state? Well, the state stepped right in, but not in the way you’d hope.

Just 58 days after the Waterkeeper filed its notice of intent to sue, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office swooped in with its own lawsuit against Dow.

Sounds like justice, right?

Except under the Clean Water Act, once regulators file suit, citizens can’t. The state effectively used its own lawsuit as a lid, something to slam down on top of the Waterkeeper case and smother it.

Here’s the play: Sue the polluter, then negotiate a quiet settlement, all while keeping the environmentalists out of the courtroom.

Convenient.

Wilson called the state’s lawsuit “a sweetheart deal with industry.”

And let’s talk about who’s making the decisions here. Dow’s permit amendment will eventually go to a vote by three commissioners at the TCEQ, all appointed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Learn more here.

Dow contributed $20,000 to Abbott’s inaugural committees. Another $5,000 to his 2026 reelection campaign and $100,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee.
Source: The Texas Tribune

I’m not saying money buys outcomes. I’m saying it buys access. It buys a phone call that gets returned. It buys the kind of relationship where nobody’s in a hurry to say no.

Meanwhile, Diane Wilson and a bunch of volunteers are out on a boat.

The people who actually protect our water aren’t usually the ones with the permits and the lawyers and the campaign contributions. They’re the retired shrimpers. The volunteers collecting evidence in rubber boots. The citizen groups with nonprofit attorneys who outwork everyone in the room because they have no other choice.

Groups like Waterkeeper already proved this works. They sued Formosa Plastics in 2016, won a landmark settlement in 2019, and forced the company to pay more than $100 million into an environmental trust. Similar groups won settlements in South Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Every one of those victories started with ordinary people who refused to look away.

The science is catching up, too. We’re slowly beginning to understand how long plastics facilities have been pumping microplastics into our waterways, and how serious the damage is.

As one attorney put it, the governments are following in the wake of citizen activists on this issue. Think about that. The people who are supposed to protect us are being dragged forward by the people they’re supposed to protect.

Dow’s permit amendment is open for public comment right now. If it’s approved, it could set a precedent for plastics facilities across the state, and potentially beyond, to discharge whatever they want and call it permitted.

Legal experts say it would face serious challenges under the Clean Water Act’s anti-backsliding provisions. But challenges take time, and time is something the bay doesn’t have.

They’re counting on you not paying attention. They’re counting on the process being boring enough, technical enough, slow enough, that you tune out before the vote happens. They’re counting on Diane Wilson being alone out there on that canal.

Don’t let her be.

Texas is the nation’s largest chemical-producing state, with most industry located on the state’s Gulf Coast. About 46 petrochemical plants operate in the region—the largest concentration in the country—constituting 42 percent of the U.S. petrochemical capacity.

More than 400 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year by converting fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas into tiny plastic pellets called nurdles, which are used for manufacturing every kind of plastic from water bottles to car parts.

An estimated 230,000 tons of nurdles enter the world’s oceans annually due to spills and discharge from petrochemical facilities. By 2050, experts predict that there may be more plastic by weight than fish in the world’s oceans.

What To Do

If you live in Texas, you can help by requesting a public hearing on Dow’s permit. Please fill out the form at this link.

Tell the TCEQ what you think about legalizing plastic pollution.

Follow and support the work of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper for updates here. Show up for the people who’ve been showing up for all of us.

Because here’s the truth they never want you to know. You have more power than they want you to think. And every single time ordinary people have used it, things have changed.

The water is worth fighting for, as are the people who’ve been fighting for it alone for far too long.

Learn more about nurdles here:

Read more about this issue in The Texas Tribune.

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Have you heard of nurdles? Concerned about plastic pollution? Keep the conversation going in the comments below.