The Bay She Loves Is Choked with Microplastics. She’s Taking the Polluter to Court.

Before it all started, Diane Wilson didn’t think of herself as someone who starts a ruckus.

But Wilson, a retired shrimp captain living in a cabin in the Texas woods, reached her tipping point in 1989 when a local fisherman showed her a damning report. Her quiet, rural county by the San Antonio Bay had one of the highest amounts of toxic pollution in the country. The report linked the findings to the area’s high concentration of industrial chemical plants to the area’s high concentration of industrial chemical plants.

“I love the bay,” says Wilson. “I’m a real introvert. I love the silence. But that report made me act totally out of character. Our little bitty county of 19,000 people, making those headlines? So, I asked for a meeting with the city, and there was immediate backlash. Industry allies came to my work, asking if I was starting a vigilante group. It was a snowball rolling to hell.”

Wilson lives in the town of Seadrift, which sits squarely in petrochemical country. Texas has the highest concentration of chemical plants in the United States, mostly along its coast. Many of these facilities are plastic manufacturing plants that make nurdles, pea-sized microplastics that are the raw material for products like diapers, toys, food containers, and car parts. Chemical plants spill 1 billion pounds of these nurdles every year, polluting the communities they operate in and floating out into the ocean.

Diane Wilson surveys the land and water for areas where plastic pellets might be found in Seadrift, Texas. (Danielle Villasana for Earthjustice)

The report echoed what Wilson had been seeing at her fishmonger business, where fishermen offloaded and sorted their daily catch. Returning fishermen told her about catatonic fish rolling near the surface. Later, it became rolling alligators. Sorting through catches, Wilson found eyeless shrimp with black lungs and fish with grotesque deformities. One day, the shore was coated with dead dolphins.

These events galvanized Wilson. That one request for a city meeting turned into three decades of advocacy, during which she took on some of the biggest chemical polluters in the world. In 2019, she won a $50 million settlement against plastics giant Formosa, which was the largest ever award in a Clean Water Act citizen suit. Formosa agreed to zero discharges of nurdles from its facility and to remediate the waterways they’d polluted.

Now, Wilson is literally putting her body on the line. She is days into a hunger strike to protest a massive plastics facility owned by Dow and Union Carbide. After Wilson’s advocacy group served Dow with a notice of intent to sue over their nurdle spills, Dow turned around and applied for an unheard-of license to pollute from the state of Texas.

Wilson’s courageous act is amplifying the stakes: when chemical industries pollute, everyone’s health is at stake.

No facility should get a pass to poison a community’s water. That’s why Earthjustice is representing Wilson as she joins a Texas lawsuit to determine the fate of this facility’s permit request – which could have ripple effects across the chemical industry.

Dow’s Union Carbide Corporation Operations’ facilities and plants in Seadrift, Texas. (Danielle Villasana for Earthjustice)

The Problem with Plastics

Microplastics, as Wilson learned, create macro problems.

Microplastics have gained global attention for their seeming inescapability. Traces of them have been found in our food, our oceans, and our bodies – even in the placentas of unborn fetuses. Nurdles are the second largest source of microplastic. They enter our waterways when they spill out of waste discharged from factories, or the trucks and ships that transport them. From there, they can end up in the ocean, contaminating fish and seafood that people eat.

Nurdles pick up a host of toxic chemicals on their journey. Besides the ones they’re made of – like phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA) – nurdles absorb other toxic substances that contaminate waterways, like DDT.  As these chemicals build up through the food chain, they increase risks to human reproductive, digestive, and respiratory health and are linked to serious diseases like cancer. At the same time, nurdles choke ecosystems, harm fisheries, and derail livelihoods.

Nurdles resemble fish eggs and are mistaken for food by marine wildlife. A dead fish with plastic pellets in its mouth, washed ashore near the Wellawatte neighborhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka. (Saman Abesiriwardana / Pacific Press via Alamy)

The problem of microplastics is solvable. Federal and state laws limit how much waste companies like Dow can discharge into the environment. But companies repeatedly violate those rules, and governments often fail to enforce them. Many companies will continue to pollute at the risk of being subject to a fine, rather than proactively paying to install and maintain pollution controls. Or, companies will seek a permit to pollute above the legal limit – which is what Dow and Union Carbide are trying to do in Seadrift.

Nurdles as Far as the Eye Can See

This is the pattern that Wilson, and her group of water monitors, has documented at Seadrift’s biggest chemical facility.

Diane Wilson of San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper sifts through tiny plastic pellet waste from the Dow Seadrift Plastics plant on Jan. 18, 2026. (Danielle Villasana for Earthjustice)

Seadrift is the headquarters of Union Carbide, a chemical company that is infamous for triggering the deadliest chemical disaster in history in Bhopal, India, which killed over 3,000 people. Union Carbide was acquired by Dow Chemical in 2001, and the two companies co-operate the Seadrift facility with another chemical company called Braskem America, Inc.

For years, Wilson’s group, the San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper (SABEW), has documented pollution in the form of pellets, flakes, and foam in waterways surrounding the facility that connect to the San Antonio Bay. Waterkeepers travel by kayak and boat to collect samples – and the amount they collect is astonishing. One day in December 2025, Waterkeepers collected over 100 pounds of pellets from a single area near the facility.

“It’s millions of pellets,” says Wilson. “It’s grotesque. I would get in a kayak and track any place that looked like water was flowing out along the vegetation. I would sit there, and as far as the eye could see, there were pellets. I would dig, and you could not get to the end of it.”

The Seadrift facility’s serial discharge is a blatant violation of its permit, which states that “other than trace amounts,” no discharge of floating solids, like nurdles, is allowed. Yet the Waterkeeper’s survey data shows nurdles by the ton, choking the water and the marine life beneath it.

What Happens Next

Now, Earthjustice is helping Wilson’s waterkeeper group join a case against Dow. The state of Texas sued the company on February 13 for its habitual noncompliance with its state-issued water permit by discharging plastic pellets from the facility. Earthjustice is representing Waterkeeper as it intervenes in the state court suit, ensuring that their extensive evidence of nurdle pollution is lodged in the official record.

Going after giant chemical companies is not for the faint of heart. Over the last three decades, Wilson faced harassment, boat sabotage, and isolation from community members. The livelihoods of many Seadrift residents depend on local fish and shrimp harvests, but many have reported sharp declines in those harvests in recent years.

Despite the complicated economic context, Wilson never backed down – if anything, the intimidation has only strengthened her resolve to fight for the home she loves.

“I’ve been on the water my whole life,” Wilson reflects. “I believe the water is family. There is intelligence, a force or power that comes from the water. You do not give up family, and I’ve seen enough now to know: if we don’t fight, these companies will destroy it. I know it in my bones. They will kill it. So I feel like, as long as I do what I do, I’m keeping them from destroying that bay.”