The Great Nurdle Hunt is an initiative by environmental group, Strandliners. A Great Nurdle Hunt event is taking place in Camber on Saturday 21st September at 5pm.
Please register at
events@strandliners.org
What is a nurdle? Nurdles are tiny, lentil-sized plastic pellets made from fossil fuels, which are used to make plastic products. Huge containers of them are transported around the world by road, rail and ship before they are melted down and made into all the plastic items we use every day.
It is estimated that there are 170 trillion nurdles in the world’s oceans and millions of these tiny pre-production plastic pellets wash up on beaches every day. Nurdle spills can occur when cargo ships capsize or drop containers overboard to preserve life during stormy seas – something which is allowed by international maritime law. Once in the ocean, these pellets can kill marine life and have catastrophic effects on the environment.
The most recent nurdle hunt at Camber was back in January. One of the participants, Melissa Hobson, wrote in The Guardian newspaper, ‘Squatting in the strandline as a storm brewed on the horizon, I combed through the debris with tweezers. I spotted my first nurdle almost immediately. Covered in sand, the pale plastic pellet blended almost perfectly into the background. Next to me, a woman scraped the top layer of sand away and plopped it in a bucket of seawater. As she stirred, several nurdles drifted to the surface. “It’s impossible to make a dent,” I thought. Despite removing more than 3,000 pieces of microplastic during our cleanup, thousands more winked at us from the sand as we left Camber Sands beach.’
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/17/nurdle-collecting-plastic-pellets-beaches – accessed 25th August 2024]
Whilst environmental groups all agree that it would be impossible to collect all the nurdles in the world, the cleanups help to gather data, to illustrate how bad the nurdle problem really is. Evidence from cleanups has led to legislation such as the ban on single-use plastics. Governments and plastic-producing companies need to solve the nurdle problem with legislation which could include the production of less plastic and the regulation of plastic discharge into waterways. This would be more effective than trying to clear up the pollution once it has reached the seas. Gathering evidence on the state of nurdle pollution gives conservation organisations more power to lobby for change.
If you are interested in finding out more, please visit https://strandliners.org/.
Photos by Strandliners
