Next time you walk along one of the island’s beautiful beaches, take a closer look at the sand, rocks and pebbles in front of you. Are you sure all those small stones are really natural pebbles? What about those tiny pale white round ones. In fact, what you might be looking at are plastic human-made nurdles.
Described as “the worst toxic waste you’ve probably never heard of”, nurdles are tiny plastic pellets used to make virtually all plastic products. However, an estimated 445,970 tonnes of nurdles – that’s the equivalent of 29 billion plastic bottles – are lost in the plastics supply chain to the environment. They might be spilt from trucks on land or from ships at sea and, as a result, are increasingly appearing in rivers and beaches.
During its regular beach cleanups, the Isle of Wight’s own Planet Aware find them all the time. The southern coast beaches along Military Road such as Grange Chine and Compton Chine are particularly affected. However, unlike collecting and cleaning away the usual debris of plastic bottles and discarded fishing lines, nurdles are virtually impossible to clean up and they can’t be recycled. Instead, wildlife mistake nurdles for food and these toxic pellets enter the food chain.
Whilst Planet Aware can’t collect all the nurdles arriving on our beaches, it is part of the growing movement of organisations trying to raise awareness and stop this pollution at source. For example, Planet Aware runs regular ‘Nurdle Hunts’ to make the public aware of the problem. And earlier this year, the organization worked with Oracle Environmental Consultants to present the extent of nurdle pollution to local councillors and MP, representatives from Crown Estates, the National Trust and the Coast guard and maritime agency.
Nurdle surveys also form a key part of the group’s voluntary work. Founder Sarah Marshall explains how the surveys are done: “If the sand is dry, we use hand sieves or our trommel made locally by DMR engineering. If wet we pick by hand and have used dust pan and brushes when we find nurdles on hard wet sand. We time how long we look for, note the location, and how many people looked. Then we send the results to the environmental charity FIDRA who use the data to push for change both nationally and globally.”
If you’d like to make a difference to your local beaches, why not start by looking out for nurdles. There are instructions on how to go nurdling here and Planet Aware is creating drop off points at place such as Ryde library, the Wildheart sanctuary and Lesley’s Nutshell. And of course, you can join the volunteers of Planet Aware on its regular beach cleanups and nurdle hunts.
References and further reading:
Data used in this article comes from the Fidra website: https://www.fidra.org.uk/projects/nurdle/
This Guardian article outlines the global extent of the problem:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/29/nurdles-plastic-pellets-environmental-ocean-spills-toxic-waste-not-classified-hazardous#:~:text=An%20astounding%20230%2C000%20tonnes%20of%20nurdles%20end%20up%20in%20oceans%20every%20year.&text=Like%20crude%20oil%2C%20nurdles%20are,pollutants%20on%20to%20their%20surfaces.
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