Plastic Forever: Nurdles

A word about terminology—microplastics and nurdles are distinct from one another although often grouped. Nurdles are pre-production plastic, meaning this is how the hydrocarbons (coal, oil, gas), come into our world having been fractured at high heat in towers. The vaporized "stuff" rains down in these little pellets, or are extruded and cut into beads. Microplastics are what is left when the plastic is worn away into slivers by friction or sunlight. Microplastics include the pernicious exfoliant bits called micro-beads in face scrubs and toothpaste. As if that weren't enough, microplastics include the lint from laundering synthetics, esp. fleece articles. Wiki will give you the low-down.

Nurdles are almost impossible to see until one learns what they are and how to differentiate them from a grain of sand or a fish egg. Once known, one sees numbers of them scattered across the sand. Nurdles are the raw plastic material that is shipped to manufacturers of bottles, car parts, toys, almost anything made of plastic. The real danger with nurdles is their absorptive capability. They are tiny magnets for metabolites, PCB's, breakdown products of DDT—DDE and other dioxin-like substances. They are poisonous little bombs loaded with tens of 1000's of times more poison than the ambient sea, and because they are translucent they are mistaken for fish eggs, they enter the food chain.

Along with the news about BPA and the chemicals leaching into our food from plastic we have learned that every human being on planet Earth has traces of plastic additives in their bloodstream. Our high resolution enlargements of nurdles make visible what we are feeding to ourselves and to our children.

Dr. Hideshige Takada at Tokyo University and his International Pellet Watch invites beach combers to send nurdles for chemical analysis. Here are charts showing what is in our nurdles from Kehoe Beach. Although DDT has been banned in the United States since 1972, it is still showing up in the nurdles we find.

We first became aware of nurdles in 2003 when a back injury put Richard on Injured Reserve, taking time off from the stoop labor motions of picking up plastic. Lying in the sand he squared off a 4x4 foot section and began sifting to find out what it would really take to really clean all the plastic from the beach. With close inspection many translucent balls, the size of a BB under 1/4”, were showing up. As he dug down and sifted through, BB sized pellets began to reveal themselves and after an hour of scrutinizing, he had an entire handful, but what were they? Then we both began finding them on the surface. What were these things? They were obviously plastic but there were so many dispersed in the damp sand. Later, a quick Internet search for “plastic pellets” turned up nurdles also known as Mermaid’s Tears—the pellets are pre-production plastic.

Our web search of the little things opened a new world of astonishing facts about human impact on the world. We sent our nurdles to Dr. Takada for anaylsis and were pleased to be listed as co-authors of his 2009 paper International Pellet Watch: Global monitoring of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in coastal waters. published in Marine Pollution Bulletin Volume 58, Issue 10.

Since our discovery of nurdles we've featured them in many of our exhibitions:

2008 Nurdles - The Mermaid’s Tears Bolinas Museum, Bolinas, CA

2009 Known Quantity The Bay Model, Sausalito, CA

Nurdles from Mnnemba Island

2012 Flows to Bay Museum of Monterey, Monterey, CA

2012 OUT TO SEA? PLASTIC GARBAGE PROJECT>>> TRAVELING EXHIBITION Organized by the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, Switzerland traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East until 2019.