PLETTENBERG BAY NEWS - Rough sea and weather conditions over the past week have brought a returning thorn in the side for environmentalists - the dreaded nurdles, tiny plastic pellets that serve as raw material in the manufacturing of plastic products.
Keep Plett Clean campaign founder Alison Bryant said the plastic pebbles have been showing up on Plett's beaches over the past few days and she has therefore called on beachgoers to keep an eye out for them and assist in collecting and safely disposing of as many as possible.
Nurdles started washing out on South African beaches after a massive spill in the Durban Harbour in October 2017, when a shipping container was knocked overboard in a collision with another vessel during a storm and about 49 tons of the plastic pellets landed in the ocean.
The South African Maritime Safety Authority (Samsa) thereafter launched massive clean-up operations, but by March 2021 ceased operations after 38 metric tons of the 49 had been recovered.
The clean-up stretched over three years and covered about 290km of coastline. Monitoring of the coastline will continue until 2025 and in the event of a resurfacing of enough quantities of the plastic nurdles, another recovery operation will be instituted.
Scientists have expressed growing concern over these pellets as they not only concentrate and attract background pollutants, but also never break down completely.
Furthermore, marine animals mistake the toxic pellets for food, but as nurdles cannot be digested, they cause digestive blockages, starvation and death.
The South African Association for Marine Biological Research (SAAMBR) asks that beachgoers do their bit by heading to the beach with some shade cloth, a swimming pool net or a colander to sieve out the sand among the nurdles before placing them in a sealed bag.
They warned that nurdles should not end up on a landfill and very few recycling facilities are capable of processing the pellets. A list of drop-off points is therefore available on the SAAMBR website, www.seaworld.org.za.
‘We bring you the latest Garden Route, Hessequa, Karoo news’
