Thanks to information collected by citizen scientists, noting the more than 1 ,000 days of violations recorded by those volunteers.a U.S District Court judge approved a 50million environmental settlement from Formosa Plastics Corp. The settlement is in response to a lawsuit in which a judge ruled the company illegally dumped billions of plastic pellets and other pollutants into Lavaca Bay and other waterways. The settlement also requires Formosa to comply with "zero discharge," and must stop all discharge of plastics into natural waterways. How was this company caught illegally releasing nurdles into the env ironment? The Formosa Plastics plant decided to come clean and revealed aled its misdeeds Citizen scientists, regular people who help the em rch, worked to collect data environment through crowdsourced research C The government saw the problem and stepped in to fix it