The inside story of the eco disaster you've never heard of
telegraph.co.uklentil-sized plastic pellets known as nurdles in the UK, and of all the places currently mapped is one of the most heavily polluted by them in the world.As I trudge along the rocky shore with Heather McFarlane, project manager at the environmental charity Fidra, which maps nurdle pollution, she tells me that 600,000 pellets were retrieved by volunteers on this small beach alone in 2018.But even that stark figure is a gross understatement of the problem.
Digging down into the seaweed, which is strewn with plastic bottles, chunks of polystyrene and all manner of man-made jetsam, the clear, yellow and blue pellets are so densely intermingled that they appear to have formed their own geological stratum. ‘There is nowhere you can stand where there isn’t a nurdle,’ McFarlane says.Nurdles have existed since plastic was first mass-produced: the pellets form the basis for almost every plastic product on earth.
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