The Most Important Plastic Pollution You Never Heard Of: Nurdles

CALIFORNIA — Coastal communities in the Golden State are no strangers to plastic pollution with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reaching 1.6 million square kilometers. However, there's another dangerous form of plastic pollution that most haven't heard about even though it's everywhere in coastal California.

Tiny pre-production plastic pellets, colloquially termed Nurdles by a European scientist in the 1990s, pose a real threat to coastal ecosystems, according to University of Texas researcher Jace Tunnell. Nurdles are about the size of BB-gun pellets and are easily mistaken for fish eggs by other fish and birds who eat them and end up starving themselves by consuming large amounts of them. They are found on beaches up and down the California coast.

Every plastic object is made up of these nurdles. Companies melt the tiny pellets down and combine them to make anything from bowls to plastic furniture. According to Tunnell, many of these factories exist in Texas, but the process of transporting the nurdles makes it incredibly easy for them to drop into the ocean and spread throughout the world.

"It's a chronic, everyday problem, where when they're onloading or offloading these nurdles, or transporting the nurdles, and they're getting out onto the ground," Tunnell said. "They have to be offloaded to the rail car or the truck, and a little bit gets on the ground. So every time that happens, it rains and then it gets into the nearest creek, then into the river, the ocean and then washed back up on the beach."

Compared to other areas of the country, data on nurdles in California is sparse. Tunnell said this is likely due to fewer people searching for the plastic pellets in the state. According to Tunnell, individuals who take the time to collect nurdles and add their data to the nurdle patrol website make up the bulk of the current data.

What's worse, nurdles can soak up high concentrations of toxic substances from the environment, be that the ocean, a railroad or a creek, said Tunnell. When fish, birds or other animals eat the pellets, it can cause fertility issues as well as starvation in these animals.

It's unknown whether consuming animals that have eaten nurdles with toxic chemicals harms people, but Tunnell said researchers are growing fish and feeding them these plastic pellets to study whether the chemicals seep into their muscle tissue.

"That's where the human impact would be; is if we're eating the muscle tissue of say, like a fish or a bird, where it goes beyond the stomach lining into the muscle tissue," Tunnell said.

With the help of individuals and partners, there has been a total of 2,216,933 nurdles collected during 15,527 surveys as of February 2023, according to the nurdle patrol website. There are partners all over California, including the Surfrider Foundation, which has chapters in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Morro Bay National Estuary Program, and the Girl Scouts.

San Diego Girl Scout Madisyn Hamby has worked closely with Tunnell to develop her own patch to encourage other girl scouts to join the worldwide search for nurdles.

Hamby, a high school student, was doing research for her National Service Project when she found information about nurdles online. Since then, she has created the patch program, spoken at zoom conferences, and even taught classes about them at schools.

"A lot of people don't know about nurdles," Hamby said. "They were like, 'I had no idea these were on my beaches,' and then when I showed them how to start finding them, more girls were getting interested."

Hamby estimated she must have found close to 3,000 nurdles in the San Diego and Orange County areas.

Hamby went on to win a Silver Award for her Girl Scouts patch program and is currently working on her Gold Award. She went to Cape Town in South Africa in December 2022 to meet with more people who have found nurdles there.

"I think it's important for people to know about nurdles," Hamby said. "It's probably one of our biggest issues in our oceans because many animals will eat them thinking it's a tiny bug which causes them to die, or we consume that animal that ate the nurdles, which means we ingest these nurdles."

Recently, Tunnell and other researchers launched a Spanish version of the nurdle patrol website. Tunnell said that the more people from around the world that collect nurdles the better because it helps give insight into how widespread the issue is.

Anyone can collect nurdles and add them to the research on nurdlepatrol.org. To start, individuals can go to any beach and look along the waterline near the newest high tide line, and when they spot one, start a timer for 10 minutes.

In that 10 minutes people should record how many nurdles they collect and record the amount, the date and the location on the website. After the 10 minutes are up, don't throw the nurdles away because they may end up right back into the ocean. Tunnell said that people collect them in jars, make art with them or send them back to the researchers at the University of Texas.

Plastic production industries have started to be more careful about how they handle nurdles, Tunnell said, because they get fined $15,000 a day for dropping them, which has cost them millions of dollars to date.

"This is the type of plastic where the public doesn't have anything to do with it," Tunnell said. "In the big scheme of things, this is an industry problem that needs to be led by the industry to solve and it is 100 percent preventable."