Nurdles: the microplastic “molecules” that are in everything, but you’ve probably never seen or heard of them before

Nurdles are tiny pellets of pre-production plastics, which are created from crude oil or recycled plastics and then shipped to factories around the world where they are melted and molded into the countless larger plastic items we use every day. Nurdles are one of the most widespread forms of microplastic pollution threatening our waterways today, with over 11 trillion or 250,000 tons of of them ending up in the oceans annually.

(It takes 600 nurdles to make a water bottle, so if it’s hard to picture nurdles, just picture 18.3 billion water bottles dumped into the ocean each year.)

Nurdles aren’t new; their production began in the 1940s, but the demand for them is higher than it’s ever been–and still growing. Over 385 million tons of nurdles are produced each year, (a whopping 16.9 quadrillion nurdles) and that number is expected to rise with the global demand for plastic goods.

When you consider how many nurdles have been produced since 1940, it becomes easier–in the saddest way possible–to understand how there are now more microplastics in the ocean than there are stars in our galaxy.

While plastics in the ocean are generally bad for marine life, nurdles are especially dangerous. Their approximate 3 mm size and round shape make them almost identical to fish eggs, so many marine animals mistake them for food. Since nurdles are indigestible, the animals feel full, stop eating, and eventually starve to death. Then those smaller animals are eaten by larger animals, and nurdles make their way into the food chain, eventually ending up on our plates and in our own bloodstreams.

The largest nurdle spill to date happened along Sri Lanka’s coastline in 2021. 1,850 tons–or about 70 billion nurdles–spilled from a burning barge near Sarakkuwa beach. It was the worst plastic pellet spill in the world (the next largest spill was 150 tons in 2012). 

Most nurdles don’t enter the water through such drastic means though. The majority of them are spilled in smaller numbers from single shipping containers traveling inland or from the industrial facilities where they are made or processed. Those smaller numbers of spilled nurdles make their way into drains and then ultimately into our oceans.

Despite the widespread pollution caused by nurdles, they are not currently classified as a hazardous material, which lowers industry’s responsibility when it comes to producing, processing, and shipping nurdles around the world.

I think part of the reason why they haven’t been regulated is because nurdles are almost invisible to most of us. Although they are used to make nearly all of our plastic products, most consumers never encounter nurdles directly and therefore have never heard of them.

Our ability to drive the demand of a highly-pollutant material without ever knowing about its existence speaks to our complete disconnect from the phases of the materials economy. In the developed world, we spend almost all of our time in the consumer phase. Although awareness of plastic pollution is growing, most of us don’t regularly consider the extraction, production, distribution, or disposal phases in the lifetime of the goods that we buy. For most us, the lives of our goods start and end within the timeframe we find them useful. And then, it’s out of sight–out of mind.

With nurdles, it’s not just our ignorance of the production phase that is so damaging. Many people also don’t realize the Superman/Clark Kent connection between plastics manufacturers and oil and gas companies.  

While some nurdles are created from recycled plastic, the majority of them are made of what’s called “virgin plastic.” The most common materials for those nurdle resins are polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and polyvinyl chloride. In other words, these nurdles are made from oil and natural gas.

So as all the major oil and gas companies come out with ad campaigns touting their goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it’s important to remember that those same companies are creating quadrillions of nurdles each year and spilling trillions of them into our oceans. As the demand for gasoline goes down, these companies will try to drive the demand for plastic up to maintain and grow their bottom lines.

In August 2020, about 743 million nurdles spilled in the Mississippi River at the Port of New Orleans during a high wind thunderstorm. These nurdles are still washing up on shores all along the Gulf Coast, and will continue to do so for decades. As the Corps makes our river deeper and our ships get bigger and nurdle production continues to grow, these spills will become more common. 

Until nurdles are regulated as a hazardous material and our demand for plastics go down, nurdles will continue to be mishandled by the companies who produce, process, and distribute them.

And until then, we’ll have to ask our cosmologists to help us calculate the effects of nurdle pollution in the plastic galaxy we’ve dumped in our oceans.