Nurdling Our Health Away

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Thursday, July 23, 2009

Elena Moroz: Known as mermaid’s tears by seafaring adventurers, nurdles are plastic pellets that are accumulating on our beaches and in the oceans at alarming rates, with troubling consequences. Nurdles are preproduction plastic pieces made by manufacturers to be molded and shaped into products. Although plastic is completely non-biodegradable, it does go through a process called photodegradation, where the sun's rays and other environmental factors break down the plastic into smaller and smaller pieces. These post production pieces find their way into the oceans and also contribute to the plastic soup of nurdles floating around.

Nurdles are bad news. Not only do post production bits that have been infused with harmful chemicals during production emit them into our water, but preproduction bits are also champions at soaking up harmful chemicals that are already present in the water such as DDT, PCB and DDE, acting as little chemical transporters. The small size of the pellets enables them to easily float on oceanic currents all over the world, dispersing toxins from one continent to the next. Accumulations of nurdles and other plastic waste has resulted in environmental catastrophes such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch- a plastic waste island as big as Texas that is floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The environmental repercussions impact all levels of ecosystems. Animals confuse them with fish eggs and plankton, consuming them and feeding their young with them, contaminating their bodies with toxic chemicals. Some animals overeat plastic and die from dehydration or blockage of the digestive tract. Others suffer the tragic fate of starvation, unable to get the nutrients they need from the plastic confetti that they mistake for food. The smaller the pieces, the easier they can get into the stomachs of even the smallest marine animals like krill, which are the base of the food chain. Since almost every animal in the ocean depends on krill by either eating them directly or eating other fish that live off of them, nurdles and the toxins that they carry infiltrate the entire marine ecosystem.

Nurdles are affecting our health as well. The most obvious way is by contaminating the fish that we eat at home. Phthalates and other hormone disrupting chemicals such as Bisphenol-A and nonylphenols that are found in the nurdles are linked to a multitude of health problems ranging from brain damage and cancer to infertility and heart disease. The different chemicals can also mix together, reacting and forming new toxins which could be even more harmful. We know very little about the consequences of opening this Pandora's Box. Scientists are just starting to study the effects of nurdles.

Some more statistics:

• One plastic soda bottle breaks down into enough nurdles to put a nurdle on every mile of beach in the world.
• 267 species around the world are affected, including 43% of all marine mammal species.
• Plastic outweighs plankton in the ocean six-to-one.

So is there a solution to the problem? The solution lies in prevention - consuming and producing fewer plastics, and polluting less. Cleaning the oceans of nurdles is unrealistic, seeing as it would most likely cause more damage to the marine life and it would be too costly. Charles Moore, the captain of the Algalita boat of the Marine research foundation, equates cleaning out nurdles from sand and water to attempting to pick out ozone-depleteing chemicals one-by-one from the atmosphere.

Healthy Child suggests consuming fewer plastic products and participating in beach clean-up days, or just polluting less yourself. Recycling and reusing helps, although only about 5% of plastics can be recycled, which is why reducing consumption is far more effective. You can learn a ton of ways for living life with less plastic at Fake Plastic Fish.