Billions of tiny plastic beads, known as nurdles, have been washing up on beaches in the north of Spain and along France’s Atlantic coast. This is the result of industrial pollution on a massive scale. To understand how this form of pollution has gone undetected for so long, the Down to Earth team traveled to Tarragona, Spain, where massive nurdle spills have been reported.
Surfing in a 'plastic soup'
Located an hour's drive from Barcelona, Playa de la Pineda is a well-known surfing spot for Tarragona locals. Over the years, it’s also become known for being one of the hotspots of nurdle pollution in Europe.
For Jordi Oliva, surfing in these waters leaves him with a bitter aftertaste.
"You realise you've been swimming in all this pollution," he says, emerging from the water, surfboard in hand. "It's like plastic soup."
While they can't be easily spotted at first, once you lay eyes on them, you can't unsee them. Nurdles are everywhere, scattered on the beach.
Jordi co-founded a non-profit called Good Karma Projects to put the spotlight on this lesser-known form of pollution. He designed a simple set of sieves and a machine the non-profit uses to collect the white pellets.
"Every year in October, a nurdle hunt is held simultaneously around the world. On this beach, we broke the record, collecting 1,800,000 nurdles in under an hour and a half," he recalls.
The point is not to clean the beach, he adds, but to make this pollution even more visible.
"When we began spreading the word about this problem, people told us that when they were kids they collected them. They don't realise it’s plastic."
The basic ingredient for all plastic products
The life of most of our everyday products began with nurdles. It takes roughly 50 million individual nurdles to make 1 tonne of plastic. These pellets are melted and moulded to form plastic objects.
They're the size of lentils, measuring not more than 5mm, making them extremely volatile. That's how they end up dispersed in the environment.
Spills can happen under two different scenarios. First, there's everyday pollution, with nurdles leaking out from factories, when they're being transported in trucks or stored away in large warehouses.
They can also enter waterways following major accidents, like in the spring of 2021, when a cargo ship caught fire off the coast of Sri Lanka, spilling billions of nurdles into the ocean. Authorities are looking at the same scenario in France, after pellets began appearing all along the country's Atlantic coast.
Every year, an astounding 230,000 tonnes of these pellets end up in our oceans, spreading so quickly they've since been found on almost every continent.
Tiny pollution bombs
Joaquim Rovira is a biochemist at Rovira I Virgil University (URV) in Tarragona. He studies microplastics and their impact on human health. Precisely, the white pellets collected on the beach by Jordi and his team are the biggest microplastics within their category.
The threat posed by this type of plastic debris has been widely documented. Living organisms like shellfish and fish absorb and assimilate microplastics, eventually entering the food chain.
But plastic pellets are one of a kind, explains Joaquim.
"They’re tiny pollution bombs," he says. "And contain many additives, ranging from pigments to flame retardants. Some have even been labeled endocrine disruptors and identified as carcinogenic."
Following the nurdle trail
Marta Sugrañes is an ocean scientist who works in collaboration with the University of Barcelona and Good Karma Projects, as their scientific coordinator.
"We are trying to figure out where these plastic nurdles come from," says Marta. "The idea is to follow their trail, conducting an investigation like a detective."
She makes regular trips to two different beaches in Tarragona to collect samples from the wave run-up limit, the highest point reached by the waves on the beach on a given day. That's where the most recent nurdles wash up.
The samples are then taken to Barcelona, where they're sorted out and undergo a series of tests.
"We have evidence to prove that these pellets come from streams near the industrial complex here in Tarragona," she concludes. “We can establish a link between rainfall and the streams that carry these pellets down onto the beach."
The evidence collected by Good Karma Projects only comes to confirm what the NGO had been suspecting all along: the pellets begin their journey on land, more specifically in the factories where these nurdles are manufactured, before entering the waterways and ending up on the beach.
The industry strikes back
"We are aware of nurdles getting lost," responds Maria Mas, the Director of Tarragona’s Chemical Business Association. "We have been working tirelessly for quite some time to prevent pellet losses from our factories."
At the international level, the industry has put in place a programme dating back to 1990. Operation Clean Sweep (OCS) is a voluntary programme meant to help companies improve their practices in a bid to limit pellet loss.
But without independent audits and not enough transparency to verify that companies keep their promises, the programme has come under fire from many NGOs.
But Maria snaps back: "Facilities have been revamped, we've installed collection trays. Instead of blowing devices, we are opting for vacuuming processes in places where there can be leaks. That's where we have focused our efforts."
She claims the problem has been contained to a certain extent and that pellet losses are not as common as they used to be.
"Of course, if we want to bring it down to zero leaks, the entire supply chain will need to join this programme and commit to it," she retorts. "Not only join, but fully commit. That is the key."
Classifying nurdles as hazardous
What if, just like petrol, plastic nurdles were to be classified as hazardous at the international level? That's what non-profits like Brussels-based Seas at Risk are advocating for, for pellets to fall within a specific category of dangerous merchandise regulated by strict rules.
Frédérique Mongodin, Senior Marine Litter Policy Officer at Seas at Risk, is very sceptical of any promises made by the industry.
"We've been hearing of industry initiatives to prevent nurdle spills for the last 30 years," she says. "They should have fixed this problem a long time ago."
But shouldn't the industry care about losing raw material with value? It all boils down to the price of plastic, Mongodin explains. Pellets are pretty much worthless, costing less than €1 per kilo.
The next step should be legislating at the European level, she adds, forcing the industry to use packaging that is robust and airtight, while also imposing a ban on containers being placed on deck.
All these measures are already in place for other dangerous goods.
"We have reached a point where we need to legislate at the European level and fast," she concludes. "It's become urgent to hold the industry accountable for the pollution they have created."
