Nurdles murder seabirds
Sally Campbell writes to correct the impression that plastics become nurdles when they break down. This term refers only to the industrial lentil sized pieces that are made into plastics for consumers. Plastics break down into microplastics when the degrade.
Nurdles are plastic pellets about the size of lentils. They are the basic component of nearly all our plastic products, and when plastics degrade at the end of their manufactured life, they go back to being nurdles. Vast numbers of them end up in the sea, where they can carry toxic pollutants. Sea birds, which reasonably assume that anything found in the ocean is edible, mistake them for fish eggs, which they resemble, and gobble them up. Nurdles accumulate in the crop until the bird starves to death.
Clearly, we need to reduce the amount of plastic that goes into the sea, but the opposite is happening. The number of plastic bags given out by supermarkets in the UK has risen for the fourth consecutive year to an annual consumption of 8.3 billion. A 5p charge is due to begin in Scotland this autumn, and Wales, which began charging last year, reports a 96% reduction in single use plastic bags. Our Arran Co-op offers an ever-renewable heavy-duty plastic carrier for a one-off charge of 10p, so it should not be difficult to stop using the thinner ones.
Ineos, the petrochemical giant based at Grangemouth on the Forth, is already a large nurdle producer, but it has just received financing to invest in Europe’s largest ethane storage tank, importing shale gas from the USA. Gas, like all petrochemicals, underlies the production of nearly all our plastic products. You can see the results on www.nurdlehunt.org.uk.
Just a year ago, Ewelina Agnieszka Zajac reported in her MSc Dissertation for the University of Glasgow that microplastics predominate the Firth of Clyde sediments. The highest abundance was observed in the vicinity of harbours and estuary mouths, and there was a massive accumulation of nurdles within the Inner Clyde estuary. A million seabirds are estimated to die each year from eating plastic (see: charles.clover@sunday-times.co.uk).
Near Plymouth Sound in Cornwall, volunteers clean the beach every month. Last month they carefully counted every piece of litter, and this was recorded on a film called The Big Pick . You can see it on YouTube. In just 6 minutes, it shows how they picked up 576,664 pieces of plastic from a section of beach about the size of a doubles tennis court. 401,230 of them were nurdles, but the film shows an astonishing haul of larger items, including shoes, shotgun cartridges, paintbrush handles and a toilet seat. There are also 4.8 million pieces of Lego drifting around in the sea, after 62 containers of Lego bits were lost overboard in a storm.
Human beings are the only creatures producing waste that nature cannot digest. Couldn’t Arran buck the trend and become a plastic-free island? Modbury in Devon and Overton in Hampshire have already done exactly that, and it shouldn’t be too difficult. Plastic wasn’t invented until just after WW2, and older people say they managed fine before that.
