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Sri Lankan Navy soldiers work to remove debris — including tiny plastic pellets
called nurdles — blanketing the beach near Colombo, Sri Lanka, in May 2021,
after the Singapore-registered container ship MV X-Press Pearl caught fire and
sank near Colombo Harbor. Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images


THE MASSIVE, UNREGULATED SOURCE OF PLASTIC POLLUTION YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD
OF

“We’re making these nurdles and basically spilling oil, just in a different
form.”

By Neel Dhaneshaneel.dhanesha@vox.com May 6, 2022, 6:00am EDT


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THIS STORY IS PART OF A GROUP OF STORIES CALLED

Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us.





NEW ORLEANS — On an overcast day in April, on the edge of Chalmette Battlefield,
a few miles outside the city, Liz Marchio examined a pile of broken twigs and
tree branches on the bank of the Mississippi River. “Usually I try to look — oh,
there’s one,” said Marchio, a research associate for the Vertebrate Museum at
Southeastern Louisiana University. She bent down to pick up something with a
pinch of her thumb and forefinger and placed it in her palm for me to see.

The object in Marchio’s hand was small, round, and yellowish-white, about the
size of a lentil. It looked like an egg, as if a fish or salamander or tadpole
could come wriggling out of it. Marchio handed it to me and turned to flip over
a tree branch floating in the water, where dozens more lay waiting underneath.
She made a sound of disgust. We had come hunting, and we had quickly found our
quarry: nurdles.

A nurdle is a bead of pure plastic. It is the basic building block of almost all
plastic products, like some sort of synthetic ore; their creators call them
“pre-production plastic pellets” or “resins.” Every year, trillions of nurdles
are produced from natural gas or oil, shipped to factories around the world, and
then melted and poured into molds that churn out water bottles and sewage pipes
and steering wheels and the millions of other plastic products we use every day.
You are almost certainly reading this story on a device that is part nurdle.

That is the ideal journey for a nurdle, but not all of them make their way
safely to the end of a production line. As Marchio and I continued to make our
way upriver toward New Orleans’ French Quarter, she began collecting nurdles in
ziplock bags, marking in red Sharpie the date, location, number of beads
collected, and the time taken to collect them.

Nurdles mix easily with the debris floating in the Mississippi River. Neel
Dhanesha/Vox
Liz Marchio collects nurdles beside a levee in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward in
April. Neel Dhanesha/Vox

At one point, on the side of a levee outside the Lower Ninth Ward, she collected
113 nurdles in five minutes. This is not uncommon: An estimated 200,000 metric
tons of nurdles make their way into oceans annually. The beads are extremely
light, around 20 milligrams each. That means, under current conditions,
approximately 10 trillion nurdles are projected to infiltrate marine ecosystems
around the world each year.

Hundreds of fish species — including some eaten by humans — and at least 80
kinds of seabirds eat plastics. Researchers are concerned that animals that eat
nurdles risk blocking their digestive tracts and starving to death. Just as
concerning is what happens to the beads in the long term: Like most plastics,
they do not biodegrade, but they do deteriorate over time, forming the
second-largest source of ocean microplastics after tire dust. (A nurdle, being
less than 5 millimeters around, is a microplastic from the moment of its
creation, something also known as a primary microplastic.)

There’s much we still don’t know about how plastics can harm the bodies of
humans and animals alike, but recent research has shown that microplastics can
be found in the blood of as much as 80 percent of all adult humans, where they
can potentially harm our cells. We may not eat the plastic beads ourselves, but
nurdles seem to have a way of finding their way back to us.

In most of the United States, the federal and local government respond to nurdle
spills big and small in the same way: by doing practically nothing. Nurdles are
not classified as pollutants or hazardous materials, so the Coast Guard, which
usually handles cleanups of oil or other toxic substances that enter waterways,
bears no responsibility for them.

Likewise, most state governments have no rules in place around monitoring,
preventing, or cleaning up nurdle spills; a spill is often an occasion of great
confusion as local and state environmental agencies try to figure out who might
be responsible for managing it. In the eyes of the federal government and every
state except California, which began regulating marine plastics in 2007, nurdles
are essentially invisible. For all official purposes, a nurdle that has escaped
into the wild may as well have entered a black hole.

“Here in Louisiana, we’re making these nurdles and basically spilling oil, just
in a different form,” said Mark Benfield, an oceanographer at Louisiana State
University who studies microplastics, “And no one notices it, and no one seems
to do anything about it.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A nurdle often escapes from the plastic production process in mundane ways,
slipping into drains at factories or spilling out of cargo containers while
being transported by trains and ships. When nurdles are being loaded into
trains, for example, they are often blown into rail cars using large hoses. The
beads can leak around the edges of hoses at factories and out the sides of rail
cars as they travel to distribution centers; Benfield and Marchio have both
found nurdles lining the sides of tracks used by nurdle-carrying trains.

Sometimes, however, a large spill — often during transportation — will send
millions or even billions of nurdles out into the world all at once, coating
shorelines with deposits so thick they could be mistaken for banks of snow.

In May 2021, a container ship off the coast of Sri Lanka caught fire and sank,
releasing an estimated 1,680 metric tons of nurdles in an incident the United
Nations called “the single largest plastic spill on record.” About a year
earlier, in August 2020, a storm hit a ship docked at the port of New Orleans,
knocking a container filled with bags of nurdles into the Mississippi River.
Hundreds of millions of beads escaped from their bags, coating local beaches in
white plastic and floating down toward the Gulf of Mexico. They would remain
long after the spill; Marchio pointed to a small dimple on the side of the first
nurdle we found that identified it as a likely remnant of that spill.

“Big spills, like by ship containers and barge … that’s probably about once a
year,” said Jace Tunnell, director of the University of Texas’ Mission-Aransas
National Estuarine Research Reserve and founder of the Nurdle Patrol citizen
science project, which asks contributors to count nurdles on their local beaches
and uses the data to create a map of the pollution.

The map could easily be mistaken for a map of plastic production sites: The vast
majority of red and purple dots, which correspond to particularly high levels of
nurdles, appear in the petrochemical hubs of Texas and Louisiana. “What happens
every single day — it’s a chronic problem — is the loss of pellets during
on-loading and off-loading and during transportation,” Tunnell said.

Most plastic does not biodegrade, and a spilled nurdle does not simply
disappear. Many wash up on shorelines, like the ones Marchio and I saw, where
they easily blend in with the sand, shells, and assorted debris; if undisturbed,
they will likely remain there for hundreds if not thousands of years.

A nurdle in the wild is a sneaky thing. Even before it starts breaking down, it
is difficult to spot from afar, unlike the plastic bags or bottles we often
associate with plastic pollution. It does not give off a heat signature or emit
fumes, or create a sheen on the surface of water the way an oil spill might.
What it does do is attract toxic pollutants. A nurdle floating down, say, the
Mississippi River will absorb the pollutants riding alongside it while sloughing
off the water, Benfield told me. It also provides a convenient home for
phytoplankton, which will go on to attract zooplankton, which eat the
phytoplankton and emit dimethyl sulfide — better known as the smell of the sea.

For many marine animals, the smell of the sea is the smell of food. Seabirds
like albatrosses and petrels track dimethyl sulfide to locate patches of
plankton from afar, swooping down to pluck their plankton-eating prey out of the
water. A nurdle is the size and shape of a fish egg; its camouflage is nearly
perfect after some time in the water, looking and smelling like easy pickings to
fish, birds, turtles, and crustaceans alike.

Once eaten, nurdles can tangle a creature’s intestines or make it feel as if it
is full, said Benfield. A 1992 EPA report found that at least 80 species of
seabirds ate nurdles; Benfield said that number has since more than doubled.
Plastics provide no nutrients to animals, but an animal that fills up on the
beads will eat less food as a result, meaning it could starve to death without
even knowing it was starving — especially if its digestive tract is too small to
pass the nurdle. Photographs from the aftermath of the spill in Sri Lanka showed
fish filled with the pellets, white plastic lining their insides.

A dead fish with a mouth full of nurdles washed ashore on a beach near
Wellawatta in Colombo, Sri Lanka, after a container ship caught fire and sank
near the Colombo harbor in May 2021. Saman Abesiriwardana/Pacific
Press/Shutterstock
A crab makes its way across a Sri Lankan beach covered in nurdles days after the
container ship sank. There were 87 shipping containers of nurdles on board.
Eranga Jayawardena/AP

Plastics are endocrine disruptors, meaning they can stunt an animal’s
development, and researchers are studying whether toxic pollutants can pass from
a nurdle into an animal’s tissue and subsequently up the food chain. But
measuring the full impact is difficult, in part because it’s difficult to know
exactly what causes a marine animal to die in a world that is increasingly
hostile to marine animals.

Preventing nurdle spills, say Tunnell and Benfield, would involve a number of
deceptively simple changes. Companies can place containers in loading areas to
catch any nurdles that fall during their loading and unloading from rail cars,
install screens on storm drains to catch beads that wash away, or make the bags
they’re packed into before being shipped out of a sturdier material so they’re
less likely to split open. Workers can double-check valves on rail cars to make
sure they’re fully tightened and vacuum up nurdles that spill onto factory
floors.

Cleaning nurdles up after they’ve spread through an ecosystem is much harder,
and no one wants to be responsible for it. The most promising solutions so far
involve machines that are essentially vacuums with sieves that filter out sand
while sucking up the nurdles. But they have yet to be widely tested, let alone
adopted, and they’d be of little use cleaning up beads in the water.

Nurdles have a significant impact on the environment long before they are
formed, as well. The vast majority of the plastics plants in the United States
are located alongside communities of color, which are disproportionately
impacted by industrial pollution. Those plants emit a toxic mixture of
pollutants including ethylene oxide, styrene, and benzene; there are so many
petrochemical plants located between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that the area
has become known as “cancer alley.”

The tide may slowly be turning: Last year, residents of Louisiana’s
majority-Black St. James Parish managed to delay the construction of a massive
new plastics plant in their community, arguing that they’d suffer undue
environmental harm, but the plants that are already in the area will continue to
pump out both nurdles and the pollutants that come from making them.

As the world moves toward renewable energy and demand for fossil fuels is
expected to peak in the near future, the oil and gas industry is increasingly
shifting its business focus to plastic production. Plastic production is
expected to triple by 2050 thanks to a fracking boom in the United States that
makes natural gas extremely cheap to produce. That will lead to a rise in nurdle
production. The question on researchers’ minds is where these beads will end up.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mark Benfield scrunched up his face as he bent at the waist to examine the sand
below him, placing his hands on his knees for support and looking a bit like a
human-sized question mark. “This is hard on your back,” said Benfield. “A few
decades from now we’ll all have nurdle-related back issues. Nurdle-osis, like
scoliosis,” he joked.

We were standing on the beach at Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge, on the Gulf of
Mexico a couple of hours’ drive south of New Orleans. The beach was empty aside
from Benfield, myself, a couple of LSU students, and the occasional crab or
seagull. This was the place where, in 2021, Benfield had found hundreds of
nurdles nestled in the dunes, indicating a spill somewhere offshore. At first,
Benfield thought they may have been the remnants of the 2020 spill in New
Orleans. “But when we started to look at the shape and the weights, they were
different,” Benfield said, “so there was some big spill of nurdles that we
didn’t even know happened.”

Mark Benfield searches for nurdles at the Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge on the
Gulf Coast of Louisiana. “Your eyes start to get a search image for them after a
while,” Benfield said. Neel Dhanesha/Vox
Mark Benfield holds a nurdle he found. Nurdles are usually smaller than 5
millimeters around, making them primary microplastics. Neel Dhanesha/Vox

By the time Benfield and I went to Elmer’s Island, most of those nurdles had
disappeared. Storms had eaten away at the dunes, and the wind likely pushed the
beads inland to the marsh just north of where we were standing, where they would
quickly settle into the mud and become unrecoverable. Within a few minutes of
arriving, however, Benfield found one hidden amid a pile of sticks that had
washed up on the sand. “This must be pretty recent,” he said; it had probably
washed in with the tide a day or two ago, though there was no way to tell when
it had spilled or where it had come from. Benfield produced a ziplock from a
pocket of his cargo pants and dropped the nurdle inside.

The sound of shells crunching underneath our shoes accompanied us as we made our
way up the beach; occasionally, Benfield would drop to his hands and knees to
check whether he was looking at a nurdle or a shell. “I used to come to the
beach to look for shark teeth,” Benfield said. “Now I’m looking for nurdles.”

That changed for Benfield after the 2020 spill in New Orleans. While he had been
studying microplastics in the Gulf of Mexico since 2015 and found nurdles in the
Mississippi River during previous research trips, he’d only ever pulled a
handful out of the river at most; that August, they blanketed the banks.
Benfield recruited Marchio, who worked for the Jean Lafitte National Historic
Park at the time, to help document the spill, and together they spent days
traveling to points along the Mississippi River, laying down square frames and
counting tens of thousands of beads in the space of a single square foot.

As the local community learned about the spill through local news outlets and
word of mouth, concerned residents organized cleanup efforts. Word got out that
Benfield was interested in the nurdles, and people began sending him samples. At
one point, Marchio found an entire bag of nurdles, practically intact,
underneath a wharf in New Orleans. The name of the manufacturer, Dow Chemical,
was still clearly stamped on the bag, along with a warning: “DO NOT DUMP INTO
ANY SEWERS, ON THE GROUND, OR INTO ANY BODY OF WATER.”

Mark Benfield holds a nearly intact bag of nurdles recovered after a container
full of nurdles fell off a ship docked in New Orleans in 2020. Neel Dhanesha/Vox

While Benfield, Marchio, and the volunteers busied themselves with trying to
document and clean up the spill, state and federal agencies spent weeks trying
to decide who, if anyone, ought to be responsible for oversight of the spill and
any potential cleanup.

While the Coast Guard usually takes responsibility for cleanups of oil and toxic
substances that spill into waterways, it has no responsibility for nontoxic
spills. Because nurdles aren’t deemed hazardous to human health under federal or
Louisiana state law, a court had to decide which agency, if any, was responsible
for cleaning up the spill, said Gregory Langley, a spokesperson for the
Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). “The problem with court
action is it’s not instantaneous,” Langley said.

The Mississippi River, of course, was not beholden to the courts; while the
agencies waited and debated whose job it was to clean up the nurdles, the
current carried them downriver. “If you lose something in the river,” said
Langley, “it’s gone.”

About three weeks after the spill, the ship’s operator paid for a small crew of
men with booms, leaf blowers, and butterfly nets to clean up a small section of
the river. The voluntary cleanup, the DEQ reasoned, rendered waiting for the
court a moot point; no determination was made about which agency, if any, would
have been responsible for the spill.

That cleanup crew was mostly for show, Benfield told me, and most of the nurdles
had already disappeared, carried downriver by the current and blown away by the
wind. The DEQ still doesn’t know who would be responsible for cleaning up such a
spill in the future. “All of that is subject to court action,” Langley told me.
So the DEQ would still have to wait for a court decision in the event of a
future spill.

Benfield and Marchio have since become the de facto Louisiana outpost of a
countrywide effort to document, map, and, eventually (they hope) stop nurdle
spills. In the aftermath of the 2020 spill, Benfield turned his lab in LSU’s
Baton Rouge campus into a sort of evidence room. When I visited, jars of nurdles
lined the countertop by a sink; dozens more were packed into boxes, ready to be
shipped to Jace Tunnell in Texas so he could include them in teaching kits he
sends to schools around the country. The bag of nurdles Marchio found underneath
the wharf in New Orleans sat in one corner, next to a bucket filled with a
mixture of sand, twigs, and nurdles brought in by a well-meaning local who
helped with the cleanup in 2020.

When Benfield finds new nurdles, he analyzes them under a spectrometer to see
what they are made of; he hopes to eventually build a database of nurdles so
that they can be traced back to their origin. In an ideal world, he’d receive
samples of nurdles from plastics manufacturers that could make that sort of
tracing easier, but he doubts they would be open to the idea; there’s no
business case for accountability, he reasons.

Benfield analyzes a nurdle found at the Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge using a
spectrometer in his lab at Louisiana State University. He hopes to eventually
build a database of nurdles that can be used to trace them to their source. Neel
Dhanesha/Vox

“It’s ridiculous. If I went to the river and tossed in hundreds of plastic bags,
I’d be in trouble,” Benfield said. Under Louisiana law, he would likely be fined
somewhere between $500 and $1,000 for littering, at the least, and have to serve
a few hours in a litter abatement program. “But because (the nurdles) are so
small,” he continued, “the companies get away with it.”

Being the documenter of plastic pellets is thankless work. There’s little
funding for researching them, and Benfield, Marchio, and Tunnell often speak
with the air of people resigned to the seemingly quixotic quest of tilting at
nurdles. “Nurdles infiltrate your brain,” Marchio said to me once. “I have to
remember that my role is monitoring, not cleaning. If I try to clean, I’ll just
get frustrated.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what does doing something about nurdles look like?

The plastics industry’s stance on plastic pollution at large has long been that
recycling needs to be improved. More responsible consumer behavior and
waste-management practices, the industry line goes, will bring post-consumer
plastics back to manufacturers that can reuse them. But a nurdle almost never
reaches a consumer’s hands in its base form, and asking consumers to solve the
nurdle problem through recycling would be akin to asking drivers to clean up an
oil spill by conserving the fuel in their cars. Unlike a finished plastic
product, the solution to nurdle spills, like nurdles themselves, will have to be
found somewhere in the plastic production process.

For a brief moment a few years ago, it seemed as though the answer could come
from the courts. In 2019, a federal judge in Texas approved a $50 million
settlement in a case brought by Diane Wilson, a retired shrimper, which alleged
that a plant run by the Taiwanese plastics giant Formosa Plastics had violated
its permits by illegally discharging nurdles into the water in and around Lavaca
Bay, on the Gulf Coast in Calhoun County, Texas.

The settlement, which was the largest of its kind in American history to result
from a civil environmental lawsuit, included a consent decree that committed
Formosa to “zero discharge” standards. In other words, the company’s plant at
Lavaca Bay’s Point Comfort had to stop releasing pellets into the water or risk
fines of up to $10,000 for each violation in the first year, increasing annually
to a maximum of $54,000 per violation.

Formosa isn’t quite keeping its end of the bargain. Since it began operations in
June 2021, said Wilson, a wastewater monitoring facility set up to keep tabs on
Formosa’s pellet discharge has logged at least 239 violations, for fines
totaling $5.3 million and counting. “The implementing of this consent decree is
the hardest thing we have ever done,” said Wilson, who at 73 years old has been
an environmental activist for more than 30 years. “You’ve got to be on them all
the time. Most of my life is almost full-time Formosa.”

For Formosa, which is the sixth-largest chemical company in the world with sales
of $27.7 billion in 2020, a $5.3 million fine is “almost like the cost of doing
business,” Tunnell said. At least for now, it seems it’s cheaper to simply keep
racking up those small fines over time than to make any potential large
investments that would be needed to stop the nurdles from spilling in the first
place.

In the meantime, Wilson told me, fishers in Lavaca Bay continue to pull up fish
with nurdles in their guts; oyster fishers have found the beads nestled in their
catch like pearls. The area is home to a mercury superfund site — an EPA
designation for contaminated industrial areas that receive funding for cleanup
efforts — that was closed to fishing for decades due to the threat of mercury
poisoning. Mercury has already devastated local marine life; now, Wilson says
researchers and activists are concerned the nurdles may absorb the mercury and
become vectors that can carry the mercury beyond Lavaca Bay. “People just ignore
it,” Wilson said.

The Formosa Plastics plant in Point Comfort, Texas, south of Houston, in
November 2021. It set up shop here in 1983, near the waters where shrimpers used
to catch shrimp in abundance. Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
Former shrimper Diane Wilson outside the Formosa Plastics plant in Point
Comfort, Texas, in November 2021. Wilson has been documenting alleged pollution
by Formosa for years. Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images

While Wilson’s lawsuit was a remarkable victory, it was also an indicator of the
difficulty of addressing nurdle pollution piecemeal. Wilson and her
collaborators spent years collecting thousands of beads from around the area —
including one discharge site in the middle of the water, which Wilson had to
kayak out to — and it was only through amassing a mountain of evidence that she
was able to convince a judge that Formosa’s Point Comfort plant was responsible
for the beads that were washing up in the area. Attributing nurdles to a
particular source is difficult, and repeating the feat would require a similar
effort for every nurdle production plant in the country.

“I think the best place to start is to take a small step backward and recognize
we have laws on the books already that are meant to regulate pollution and
emissions from manufacturing and production facilities,” said Anja Brandon, US
plastics policy analyst at the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to
protect oceans and marine life. “Namely in this instance, the Clean Water Act,
kind of our bedrock environmental law.”

The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio,
caught fire in 1969, drawing national attention to the country’s polluted
waterways. Today, the act regulates the discharge of various pollutants into
waters around the country; it’s a major reason why many of the nation’s rivers
are cleaner now than they were 50 years ago.

“These laws haven’t been updated to meet the needs of the moment,” said Brandon.
In most of the country, she explained, “plastic nurdles have essentially gotten
off scot free because they have yet to be classified or specifically labeled as
a pollutant.” The rare exception is California, which in 2007 became the first
and so far only state to pass a law classifying nurdles as pollutants to be
regulated under the Clean Water Act, citing their contribution to litter on
beaches and the possibility that they could be mistaken for food by marine
animals.

Lawmakers in Texas and South Carolina have introduced similar legislation,
though both bills seem stuck. The Texas bill, introduced in the House by
representative Todd Hunter last year, never moved forward, while the South
Carolina bill passed the state senate in 2021 but was recently shelved in the
House.

Closing the nurdle loophole, says Brandon, would require classifying nurdles as
a pollutant under the Clean Water Act at the federal level. Lawmakers have shown
some support for this approach: In 2020, then-Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced
the Break Free From Plastics Pollution Act, which would have put in place
wide-ranging regulations on plastics and recycling.

Identical bills were reintroduced in the House by Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) and in
the Senate by Jeff Merkley (D-OR) in March 2021, but neither bill has moved
beyond committee. In April 2021, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced the much
shorter and more tightly focused Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, which would
give the EPA regulatory control over nurdles through the Clean Water Act; that
bill has also been stalled.

The plastics industry is opposed to both bills. “We do not think that plastics
belong in the environment. They belong in the economy,” said Joshua Baca, vice
president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, a major
plastics industry trade group. That said, he continued, “The Break Free From
Plastics Pollution Act is really a bad piece of legislation. It has a very nice
title. But it can be very misleading to the average person.”

Legislation like the Break Free From Plastics Pollution Act or the Plastic
Pellet Free Waters Act, Baca argued, are disguised attempts to simply shut down
plastic manufacturing in the US more broadly. “We generally think that the best
approach here is to think about this holistically in a way that looks at loss
across the entire value chain and puts in place best practices to avoid the loss
within the environment,” he continued.

Baca pointed to Operation Clean Sweep, or OCS, a voluntary program run by the
American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Industry Association that’s meant to
curb nurdle leaks and spills but maintains no oversight mechanism and imposes no
penalty for failure to comply.

“Many of our companies are inserting state-of-the-art technology within their
facilities ... to ensure that they limit the loss of pellets going on,” Baca
said. When I asked Baca for more information, he demurred, citing the possible
use of proprietary technology.

Formosa Plastics, the subject of Diane Wilson’s lawsuit, is not only a
participant in Operation Clean Sweep but also a member of OCS blue, a
“data-driven VIP member offering” of Operation Clean Sweep that “enhances the
commitment to management, measurement, and reporting of unrecovered plastic
releases into the environment from resin handling facilities.” Members receive
plaques commemorating their enrollment.

Nurdles seen under a microscope. The nurdle in the middle has begun degrading
through exposure to the elements; the white ones nearby are from recent spills
and haven’t been in the environment long enough to start degrading. It is
estimated nurdles can stay in the environment for hundreds or even thousands of
years. Neel Dhanesha/Vox

“I think they have a lot of good practices that ought to be mandatory, but
they’re voluntary,” said Tunnell. “That obviously does not work. There needs to
be accountability.” One way to create that accountability, Tunnell told me,
would be to classify plastic pellets as hazardous substances outright, which
would not only bring much tighter scrutiny to the production process but also
give the Coast Guard the authority to coordinate and perform cleanups whenever a
spill occurs. This is something like the nuclear option for nurdles, and would
no doubt be the subject of stiff opposition from the plastics industry if it
ever becomes a matter of debate.

For Tunnell, the stakes are existential. A failure to stop nurdles from spilling
would be like giving up on the future of our world. “At the end of the day, it
comes down to the next generation,” Tunnell said. “These plastic pellets will be
around for hundreds of years. It’s not like they dissolve. They’re just
accumulating and accumulating, and even if you’re in high school right now, your
great-grandkids will see the same pellets on the beach. So I think we owe it to
my great-grandkids and their great-grandkids to do something about this now.”





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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