The Royal Dutch Shell Company plans to begin production at the Beaver County Ethane Cracker Plant this summer.The factory will take natural gas and break it down, or crack it, to make the building blocks of plastic.We wanted to find out what the impact of the plant, a decade in the making, will be.Watch the report from Beaver County in the video player above.Anna Emler, born and bred in Monaca, and her partner, Derrick Reynolds, got some help opening R&A Catering from the paychecks Reynolds got building the cracker plant. "We offer one meal a day and it's always a home-cooked meal, something we would cook at home and eat," Elmer said. "So you're going to get big portions, you're going to get great food, and that's what we like.""I think it's a special place for me, because it brought a lot of work to people here that didn't really have jobs or didn't have good paying jobs. With that, it helped build up the industry around here and it brought a lot of work to a lot of businesses around," Reynolds said.Now the plant provides customers."As you can see, they're here right now, eating here, and we've had a few jobs with them as well," Reynolds said. "We catered four, I think, for them already on site."Skip Homan, chair of the Beaver County Partnership for Community and Economic Growth, says snapping together the puzzle pieces of better public education and more amenities will lead to change."It's going to take building trust and some successes to convince people that that can change here," Homan said.He says large industrial businesses, like the glass plant in Monaca, have expanded. Small "mom and pop" stores pop up on the regular.Local citizen scientists work to make sure the environmental puzzle piece isn't lost forever. They do that by hunting nurdles."Nurdles are small plastic pellets that are used as the feedstock for any kind of plastic commodity that you can imagine, from Ziploc bags to any kind of packaging that you might buy in a store, so they're the basic building blocks of everything that's built," said James Cato from the Mountain Watershed Association.Cato says the cracker plant is one of the largest nurdle producers in North America.During Beaver County Riverfest, they found dozens of nurdles. They'll record them and use the data as a baseline to compare the number of nurdles along the Ohio River after production at the plant begins.Members of the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community say they fear heart, lung, and other health problems from current and future pollution."If they smell something, if they hear something, if it's light pollution, noise pollution, air pollution, water pollution, we have all the numbers of the Pennsylvania DEP and the proper authorities to call," said Bob Schmetzer with the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community.Shell senior vice president Hilary Mercer, who oversees the cracker plant, tells Pittsburgh's Action News 4 that her company which makes the building blocks of virgin plastic understands that the world's plastic problem is another puzzle piece in Beaver County's future that Shell has a responsibility to find."Because plastic waste is an issue, and we need to get into a circular economy where we use the plastics for the good things that it's there for, that actually we recycle that plastic back so we have a completely circular economy, and Shell is investing heavily in that, in terms of both mechanical recycling but also chemical recycling," Mercer said.Cato says the railroad cars that derailed on the guys run last month in Harmar were carrying nurdles and some of those may have traveled up the Allegheny River to the Ohio.If you want to go on a nurdle patrol and keep tabs on the environment, click here.Shell tells me the 600 permanent jobs at the cracker plant are mostly filled. If you want to see what jobs are open and apply, click here.