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Let’s go on a nurdle hunt

Until this morning I had no clue what a nurdle was, other than my new favourite word in the entire world.

Nurdles may sound fun, they may even look beautiful – tiny pellets of every colour of the rainbow, but they are actually a nightmare for our beaches and wildlife.

So, what exactly is a nurdle? They sound pretty harmless, right?

Nurdles are small plastic pellets that are used to make nearly all our plastic products. Spills and mishandling cause huge numbers of these nasty nurdles to end up accumulating in our oceans and washing up on our beaches each year.

You can look at larger plastic items and see how destructive they have the potential to be to our planet. A plastic bag could easily be confused for a jellyfish by a hungry, unsuspecting turtle, a plastic ring holding cans together could easily entangle a dolphin. But it can be harder to take these tiny pieces of plastic as the serious threat that they are.

Nurdles

Nurdles attract and concentrate background pollutants like DDT and PCBs (two really nasty chemicals) to highly toxic levels and like many other plastics are mistaken for prey by marine mammals and seabirds where they begin to work their way up the food chain. One of the worst things about plastic is that it never goes away, all it does is break down into smaller and smaller pieces.

When we first arrived at Crosby beach it looked relatively plastic-free, a few pieces of rubbish scattered here and there, but nothing shocking – sadly, I think we have all become a bit numb to the sight of plastic.

Once you got your eye in, you could see the beach was covered in nurdles. Every inch of beach was dotted with tiny plastic pellets along with larger plastic items as well. My stomach sank as the realisation of the magnitude of the issue came to light.

So, what can we do about the problem? Participating in nurdle hunts will never clear the beach completely but it can help show the extent of the problem to local businesses and contributes more detailed evidence of where they are coming from and how widespread the problem is. You can join Living Seas for a nurdle hunt event or go on your own, but please remember to share your findings with www.nurdlehunt.org.uk to have the biggest impact.

Being smarter about plastic will also help and it’s something we are all guilty of. Really all it takes are a few small (nurdle-sized) lifestyle changes. Buy a re-fillable water bottle, use your own takeaway cup and ditch the straws, there’s loads of simple ways you can help our planet. Head to the Living Seas website  to discover even more small ways you can make a huge difference and help save our seas.