A Fantastic Plastic Fisheye View Nurdles are not a funny character from Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of OZ. But they are virtually invisible until you start looking for them and when they escape no one notices. Essentially they are semi-toxic pelletized plastic microspheres that are shipped around the world by the billions to be formed into all the workaday items that we can't do without.A transport container may contain a billion nurdles and so many are lost during transfer, usually done by a messy from of vacuum suction, that nurdles now compose 10% of the waste content on beaches worldwide. When you consider that 113 billion Kilos (250 billion lbs) are shipped worldwide that translates into a lot of nurdles. Most of which blend invisibly with grains of sand.
Virtually Invisible and They Get EverywhereHow much plastic is really out there? Well currently over 60 pounds of plastic is manufactured annually for every man, woman and child in the US. Out on the sea even far away from the shipping lanes, shoals of plastic bags and shampoo bottles drift by. In the Pacific there is a Plastic Sargasso Sea called the North Pacific gyre. It is now a swirling pool of plastic roughly the size of Africa and still growing. In this zone there are 6 kg's of plastic for each kilogram of naturally occuring organisms. They outweigh the zooplankton by 6-1. This is an example of one of the most rapid human induced ecological degradations on the planet, the result of only 50 odd years of plastics production. Back to nurdles, our microscopic plastic friends. While marine life can get caught up in plastic bags and empty bottles can make pristine beaches look like junkyards nurdles in their raw form are much more dangerous to the environment.
Graveyard of Plastic and DioxinsThe real danger with these pellets is the absorptive capability, they work like sponges to attract and capture PCB's and other dioxin like chemicals such as DDT and DDE and introduce them into the food chain. Mutagenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals are found on these polymer pellets at levels upto 1 million times that of seawater with the result that fish are changing sex and their reproductive systems are failing.They have a specific gravity similar to water. They rise and sink and saturate the top layers of the the oceans, the most active part of the oceans photocline. Even worse because they are transparent they can be mistaken as fix eggs or plankton, some of the basic food sources for many of the oceans creatures. Thus insuring their spread from the bottom to a higher concentration at the top of the food chain. At a size of 10 - 20 micrometers they are so small even micro-organisms can ingest them.
Mutated Bacteria on the LooseIt would have been hard to come up with a more perfect mutagenic trojan to oceanic life if it had been deliberately designed in a lab. All these things seem to have been known to people in the plastics industry for a very long time. In addition plastics can be recycled on a very extensive scale. The technology does exist, it is a complicated process but was last used extensively during during the '72 - '73 oil embargo, and with improved technology could be used on a larger, more cost effective scale. In the meantime we're still stuck with the nurdles, 100's of trillions of them, with many concentrating in one of the planet's oxygen bread-baskets, the central pacific. Short of engineering and extremophile type bacteria with a taste for dioxins and plastics there is probably no way to get rid of them in the foreseeable future.
Trojans in the OceanTime to figure out a way to deal with Nurdles before they contribute to a serious disruption of the ocean's food chain.