This finding is also a reminder that the pellets visible on beaches are only one part of a much broader problem. Microplastic pollution remains one of science’s main uncertainties because of the limited information available on its distribution, behaviour and impact on marine ecosystems.
Morriña Festival
When a plastic pellet becomes data: how the Morriña Festival community expanded marine pollution monitoring
A music festival takes up a few days on the calendar. Some pellets keep turning up on beaches years later. That is the case of the Toconao spill, which since 2023 has left thousands of plastic granules scattered along the Galician coast. That time gap explains why Morriña Festival, the second ad hoc campaign collaboration between Universal Plastic and Bring The Noise, is a relevant case for understanding how marine pollution evolves.
Resurrection Fest proved that a community mobilised by music generates scientific evidence about plastic waste. Morriña Festival carries that learning over to microplastics and pellets, which rarely catch the eye, contain chemical additives, accumulate pollutants and end up in the stomachs of marine fauna. Tracking them depends on having the right digital solutions, able to recognise them and record where they appear.
Seven beaches, one protocol, a community trained to look
During the festival days in A Coruña, participants walked seven beaches applying a citizen science protocol through Universal Plastic’s technology app. The protocol works simply. Each finding, recorded through photographs, automatic geolocation and waste classification, turned an individual observation into a structured data point, ready to be added to a global base of shared knowledge.
The value of this model lies in widening the network of people able to identify pellets, recognise microplastics and keep documenting their presence beyond a single event.
Data that accumulates and gains meaning over time
A pellet found on a Galician beach in 2026 doesn’t say much on its own. It gains value when it is cross-referenced with other records. You can see where similar pellets appeared before, which areas concentrate the most findings, how waste is redistributed after a storm. Each individual observation works like a loose piece, and the value emerges when those pieces accumulate and allow a puzzle to be reconstructed.
This principle connects Morriña Festival with Resurrection Fest and with the rest of Universal Plastic’s campaigns. Marine plastic pollution is understood through datasets that are built up over time. The more people record findings, and this change is also driven by companies, the faster that series is completed and the more useful it becomes for guiding decisions on coastal management and ocean regeneration strategies.
A legacy that doesn't depend on the festival calendar
Accumulating records of plastic waste makes it possible to detect areas with higher concentrations, identify changes after weather events and follow how waste evolves over time. In addition, all this information is integrated into ONDAs, the marine plastic pollution data space that Universal Plastic develops and drives within the digitalisation programme of the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence and that is catalogued as a trusted data space at national level.
There, the observations of a music festival sit alongside researchers’ data and public administrations’, and contribute to a picture of the ocean that no single actor builds alone.
The good ONDA of a barely visible problem
Morriña Festival shows that an event can generate an impact that outlasts its own duration. It mobilises communities that choose to create good ONDA for a few days and helps build environmental knowledge that contributes to science and keeps growing with every new observation recorded.
Festivals end. Pellets and microplastics remain. As long as they keep appearing on Galician beaches, every record adds one more piece to a map that is still incomplete and that can only be completed beach by beach, observation by observation.
