Small plastic ‘nurdles’ are killing the environment.
Photo Credit: gentlemanrook via Wikimedia Commons
TINY, often colourful, with a cute name: “Nurdles.” These are the tiny pellets dotting the coastlines and drifting in our oceans, but they are anything but harmless. These pieces, also known as “Mermaid’s Tears,” are actually small bits of raw industrial plastic, and are the second-largest source of microplastic pollution worldwide … and they have experts very, very concerned.
The “Mermaid’s Tears” are the raw materials used to make plastic products, from bottles to car bumpers to television sets. They range from about two to five millimetres in size and have the potential to cause irreversible damage to ecosystems, especially, in this case, the ocean’s wildlife. It’s estimated that 445,970 tonnes of these pellets end up leaked into the environment each year.
In January of 2023 in northwestern France, hundreds of thousands of these nurdles began washing up on the shores of Brittany and in the Loire region. At the time, experts postulated that the pellets had spilled from a shipping container, which was lost in the Atlantic Ocean, but no ship reported an incident in the area.
Now, France is still feeling the effects of what was dubbed a nightmare by French officials. Despite volunteers working tirelessly to clean the shoreline, even more were found earlier this year, more than two years since the original incident.
Microplastics, a massive problem
These pellets, though tiny, are part of a much bigger problem: microplastic contamination. This type of contamination poses a serious threat to human health, as they do not biodegrade and instead often get broken down into tinier and tinier pieces, and are ingested by animals like fish and shellfish, which humans consume. Nurdles can absorb toxic products and bacteria found in their surroundings. They can also carry bacteria, including the very harmful E. coli.
Microplastics, once they are inside our bodies, can cause a wide variety of health problems including cardiovascular disease. They have now even been found in breast milk, brains, semen, and even in our bone marrow.
Nurdles also cannot be cleaned on a wide scale. They often require handheld tools such as vacuums, screens, or shovels, in a slow-moving process. They can also float, and so can travel far across the oceans and spread quickly into nature. They have been found in rivers, lakes, farther inland, and even in soils.
Sri Lanka’s catastrophic nurdle spill
The worst of these nurdle spills happened a mere four years ago in 2021, when a large cargo ship off the coast of Sri Lanka caught fire and, consequently, the billions of plastic nurdles it carried caught flame. Piles of plastic nurdles metres deep washed up on the coastline, as well as dead fish and turtles with pellets stuck in their mouths and gills. Reportedly, there was so much plastic that onlookers could no longer see the sand. This is the largest plastic spill ever recorded, and even now, volunteers on the island are still finding countless pieces of plastic among the bits of sand.
While the Sri Lanka disaster was an accident, nurdles are also not well-handled in facilities where they are transported, prepared, or processed. They are often stored in bags that could easily rip and send them flying with the wind, and are often moved around using forklifts, which often tear the containers and leak more of them into the environment. The loss of nurdles happens at every stage of the process. Between 300 and 400 million tonnes of nurdles are produced each year on a global scale.
Plastic waste increasing at an alarming rate
The amount of plastic waste has doubled between the year 2000 and 2019, and is poised to triple by the year 2060. The EU is determined to pass legislation that tackles this widespread and terrifying problem, but merely putting more stringent regulations on the reporting of spills and cleanup is not enough, according to environmental experts; it is argued that the regulations must be most harsh on the production facet, starting with changing the containers these nurdles are stored in. However, the process of changing the legislation is slow-going.
