Plastic Nurdles Are a Major Killer of Ocean Life

by Sea Stachura

Nurdles are not friends of the kids' character Barney, or a sister product of Floam, but they are equally synthetic. Nurdles are the tiny plastic pieces that are used in molds to create everything from plastic packaging to doll's heads.

So small are these oblong bits of plastic that they often fall through the cracks and out the doors of the trucks and factories that use them.

They end up in the ocean. Shrimp, turtles, lobsters, fish and birds have all ingested these little plastic pieces thinking they were food. But plastic is indigestible, so smaller creatures like shrimp and bass die from constipation and starvation. if they are consumed by larger sea creatures before their own deaths those animals eventually develops blockages in their own digestive system.

Sewer systems and waste water treatment facilities do not have a means of catching nurdles before they get to water. Green Peace has found massive amounts of nurdles in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, the Red Sea and off the coast of the Philippines. Even teh Atlantic is developing a bad case of the nurdle.

In 2007 California signed into law a bill that forces manufacturers to mind their nurdles. But nurdles remain a huge problem around the world. For every square mile of ocean about 13,000 bits of plastic are floating around according to the United Nations.

Tags: marine life, MarineLife, nurdles, ocean life, OceanLife, sea turtles, SeaTurtles