UT-Austin Team Helps Fight Global Plastics Pollution

AUSTIN, TX — A global citizen science initiative spearheaded by the University of Texas at Austin recently received $1 million as part of a $50 settlement against a company accused of plastic pollution, school officials said.

Petrochemical company Formosa Plastics agreed in October to pay $50 million in the largest-ever settlement of a lawsuit linked to the federal Clean Water Act, university officials reported. Among the terms of the settlement was a $1 million allotment for the Nurdle Patrol, a new worldwide citizen science initiative spearheaded by The University of Texas at Austin’s Marine Science Institute and its Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, officials said.

In a case brought by residents of nearby Port Lavaca and environmental groups, the company was found to have illegally polluted waterways with billions of nurdles, the base material from which most plastic items are manufactured.

The settlement came amid a backdrop of growing plastic pollution — a scourge that has contaminated every continent on Earth, killing wildlife from whales to sea turtles. Some of the smallest plastic particles, called nurdles, are particularly insidious.

“Plastics makers ship nurdles all over the world, where they are melted down and molded into everything from toys to packaging, and many have wound up in the ocean and on beaches,” Jace Tunnell, director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, said in a prepared statement.

Tunnell recently assembled a veritable army of more than a thousand citizen scientists dubbed the Nurdle Patrol that counts and tracks the plastic pellets on beaches along the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, university officials said. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt approved the settlement terms that dictated Formosa Plastics will provide $1 million to support the Nurdle Patrol.

“This is a tool to give regulatory agencies the information they need to do further investigations to see where nurdles are coming from,” Tunnell said.

The Nurdle Patrol has humble beginnings, starting as a Facebook group where Tunnell recruited residents along the Gulf Coast to do short beach surveys and report the number of nurdles they found. What started small with a handful of volunteers rapidly grew to thousands in a matter of months, school officials said.

And in September, the website NurdlePatrol.org launched. The upshot: Anyone anywhere in the world can learn how to do a nurdle survey and report findings. So far, reports have come from as far as Xcalak, Mexico, and Truro, Nova Scotia, UT-Austin officials reported.

The collected data is provided to state environmental agencies such as the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on a monthly basis, officials explained. With the influx of settlement funds spread out over five years, Tunnell hopes to train more citizen scientists, offer workshops and create Nurdle Patrol citizen scientists in areas that don’t have them, school officials added.

More than mere eyesores littering beaches, the microplastics called Nurdles less than 5 millimeters in size often are mistaken for food among sea turtles, fish and birds. What's worse, Nurdles are also known to absorb harmful chemicals such as DDT, an insecticide, that has been linked to problems in animals including humans, officials explained.

Zhanfei Liu, an associate professor at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, is a research partner to the Nurdle Patrol. He works to combat the microplastic scourge by examining how nurdles absorb chemicals such as PBCs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and PAHs (polyaromatic hydrocarbons), which can be harmful to people. Liu has detected both in nurdles.

“Plastic lasts a very long time in the environment,” Liu said. “Our preliminary data shows higher concentrations of PCBs and PAHs in nurdles. It’s concerning.”

Other University of Texas at Austin researchers are also working on strategies to fight microplastic pollution:

• Assistant professor of practice Moriah Sandy and her team of undergraduate researchers are hunting for bacteria and fungi that eat plastic and are working to understand the microbial chemistry behind plastic degradation.
• Researchers in the lab of Andy Ellington are working to understand and mutate enzymes that break down plastic and increase plastic degradation.