#nurdles

Plastic nurdles have been found in 84% of important nature sites surveyed in the UK. Nurdles are tiny pellets that the plastics industry uses to make larger products. They were found in 168 of 195 sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), so named because of the rare wildlife they harbour. They are given extra protections in an effort to protect them from pollution. The environmental charity Fidra, however, has been running nurdle hunts at SSSIs across the UK since 2013, and found pellets in 84% of them. It also found nurdles in six national parks: Loch Lomond & the Trossachs, North York Moors, New Forest, Pembrokeshire Coast, Eryri (Snowdonia), and South Downs. They are produced at sites around the UK, including Grangemouth in Scotland, and transported by land and sea to be melted down to make almost all of our plastic products. They are lost into the environment by mismanagement in the supply chain – namely, by being accidentally spilled. It is estimated that as many as 53bn nurdles could be lost into the environment in the UK each year.

L’Union européenne vote une réglementation inédite pour limiter la pollution par les nurdles, ces microplastiques omniprésents. Objectif : réduire de 54 à 74 % leurs rejets dans la nature d’ici 2030, une avancée saluée par les écologistes. 

Plastic can end up in the environment by many channels. Improper waste management can cause single-use plastics like bottles and grocery bags to end up in our oceans. But there’s also a smaller, sneakier source of plastic that also pollutes the land and sea. Called “nurdles,” tens of millions of these tiny pellets have found their way into the ocean after ship spills. On Thursday, the European Commission will vote on a measure to curb the pellets’ impacts by forcing companies to implement new measures to prevent and mitigate pollution. What are nurdles? The term may sound cutesy, but these balls are anything but. The lentil-sized plastic pellets are “the building blocks” of the plastic industry. They are melted down to make things like water bottles, grocery bags, and other food wrappers. However, many end up elsewhere. The Commission estimates that in the EU in 2019, between 52,140 tonnes and 184, 290 tonnes of pellets were lost to the environment. As a comparison, that’s between 2100 and 7300 truckloads of pellets annually. After tyre dust, nurdles are the second largest source of microplastics in the ocean, often coming from ship spills. The X-Press pearl shipwreck spilled 1,680 tonnes of nurdles into the ocean and onto the shores of Sri Lanka in 2021 in the worst of such spills. They have also occurred in Europe sending these tiny plastic pellets into the North Sea and waters off the coast of Spain, and France.

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So this hopeful finding from three years ago

And this from 2 years ago

…as plastic treaty talks continue in Geneva When a Liberian-flagged container ship, the MSC Elsa 3, capsized and sank 13 miles off the coast of Kerala, in India, on 25 May, a state-wide disaster was quickly declared. A long oil slick from the 184-metre vessel, which was carrying hazardous cargo, was partially tackled by aircraft-borne dispersants, while a salvage operation sealed tanks to prevent leaks. But almost three months later, a more insidious and persistent environmental catastrophe is continuing along the ecologically fragile coast of the Arabian Sea. Among the 643 containers onboard were 71,500 sacks of tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles. By July, only 7,920 were reportedly recovered. Millions of these plastic balls have continued to wash ashore with the fierce monsoon storm surges that demolished a stretch of palm-fringed beach in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital, in June. They lie scattered by the sea-facing Catholic church at Vettukadu and in tide lines on the beach, where giant jute bags of them, gathered by volunteers, await collection. Lightweight, buoyant and almost impossible to recover, they will circulate in moving sand and ocean currents for years, experts say. “The nurdles haven’t just polluted the sea – they’ve disrupted our entire way of life,” says Ajith Shanghumukham, a fish worker in the town. A fishing ban, imposed after the spill by local authorities in four Kerala districts, has since been lifted but fears over contamination have hit fishing communities already struggling with declining fish populations and the changing climate’s intensifying storms.

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Once a month for nearly two years, Evan Clark, the Waterkeeper at Three Rivers Waterkeeper, a water quality advocacy organization based in Pittsburgh, has traveled by boat along the Ohio River to Shell’s enormous new plastics plant in Beaver County. 

This facility is a cracker plant, using ethane from fracked gas to make ethylene and ultimately to manufacture up to 1.6 million tons of plastic per year. In his boat, Clark looks for tiny plastic pellets called nurdles and monitors the plant’s outfalls, the places where its wastewater is discharged into the river. 

Since the plant became operational in the fall of 2022, Clark has noticed strong chemical odors at the outfalls—potentially a sign of contaminants like volatile organic compounds, or VOCs—and found many, many nurdles, a feedstock used to make everything from soda bottles to car parts. 

This winter, Clark and the team he works with at the Mountain Watershed Association collected samples from 11 square feet of soil from the Ohio’s shorelines both upstream and downstream of the plant. Three Rivers Waterkeeper works to protect the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers, while the Mountain Watershed Association focuses on protecting the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela. 

They found more than 700 nurdles, of all different colors, shapes and sizes. “They start to get kind of a white chalky appearance after they’ve been in the water for a long time,” he said, and nurdles also appear different depending on where they were made.

It was an alarming discovery that has implications beyond Shell, Clark said, although recently the team has been seeing more fresh, similar-looking nurdles that seem to have been in the water for a shorter period of time and could be linked to the Beaver County plant. They haven’t yet been able to procure a sample from Shell to match the nurdles definitively. 

“That is a tiny area, smaller than half a sheet of plywood, and our preliminary analysis of what we’re looking at there didn’t point directly to a problem at Shell,” he said. “But it pointed to a plastics problem that we have throughout the whole region.”