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Nurdle Patrol
In 2023, 221 shipping containers were lost at sea, out of a total of 250 million shipped. That's a loss rate of 0.000088%.

Plastic pellets are a visible pollutant on beaches. I have not seen any evidence that they're a particularly harmful pollutant. A single 20 tonne containerload of plastic pellets can leave a visible residue on hundreds or thousands of beaches, but the 15 tonnes of CO2 emitted by the average American every year is entirely invisible.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff6c5336c885a268148b...

They are particularly harmful because they end up in your food and cause damage to your organs.
A plastic pellet is typically 3-5mm in diameter. I think I'd notice that in my food. Even if I did enjoy swallowing fish guts whole, a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system.

Additives can leach out of plastics and enter the food chain, but pellets lost at sea are a completely insignificant factor because the total volume of waste produced by this route is so small. The majority of marine plastic is either post-consumer waste dumped in rivers in developing countries, or fishing gear that is lost at sea. If you're really worried about this, then you really need to take it up with the government of the Philippines and the global fishing industry.

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

>> a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system

Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral), these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose, lodging in your brain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

It's a pity the parent commenter led with that point. Their second point, that the overwhelming majority of ocean plastic pollution comes from those two sources, remains valid (albeit I'm not sure if it's actually true but it certainly seems feasible).
To their second point, blaming the Philippines for dumping our ‘recycling’ in the ocean is a little bit like blaming African countries for burning our e-waste. We can’t pretend you can generate pounds of single-use plastic waste per person and have the problem disappear when you put it in a blue bin. Recycling is a lie invented by the packaging industry, and the reality is that we export the problem in bulk to the developing world, who inconveniently happen to share a planet, physics, and economy with us. We’re the ones buying the plastic to begin with, and it’s only right it washes onshore back here so we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist when it hits the bin.
The Philippines accounts for 0.16% of the world's waste plastic imports. Switzerland imports 10x more plastic waste and the Netherlands imports 100x more. Your explanation is very wrong.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-impor...

  • fao_
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I don't see how that contradicts the above poster's point that if there wasn't demand there would be no supply, and then to deal with it we ship it back to said third world countries so it can be "somebody else's problem", essentially exporting our waste and the ensuing health issues to other countries.

e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-48444874

And to just back up one of their minor points — "Recycling is a lie invented by the packaging industry"

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

So do many other particles flying in the air and getting into water. Just imagine what that little dust from ground sand does ...
...and where they'll just do absolutely nothing.
"I think I'd notice that in my food"

That isn't how food processing works.

There are many steps of grinding, pulverizing, mixing, re-forming, de-forming, extruding, heating, cooling.

The 3mm plastic pellet becomes a thousand smaller bits.

Also, you'd be surprised how many bugs are in your creamed corn, and you don't notice those either.

Well, probably not the nurdles themselves unless they're scooped from the oceans and used as a food additive, but they'll break down into microplastics and enter the food chain that way. The damage of said microplastics is still being researched, at the moment (I believe) it's still fairly vague, not unlike asbestos or smoking. IIRC they have been found to mimic hormones though.
  • ptk
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What do you find vague about the studied effects of smoking or asbestos? Or did you mistype and mean “unlike” instead of “not unlike”?
I think they meant "not unlike" as - we didn't think asbestos was bad, then we thought it could be bad, then yes, after studies, this is really awful. Similarly, we might find that ingested plastics cause more damage than we realize now.
There was never any doubt about asbestos, we just didn't care.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Kershaw

Two things.

The first is that that is actually crazy late to me. Asbestos has been in use since antiquity. I am genuinely surprised that something so toxic wasn’t noticed earlier. Then again, in times where tuberculosis was common I suppose it wouldn’t have looked that odd.

The second is that you’re viewing it through a modern lens, where of course literally everyone should believe and know that it’s bad the very first time someone notices it. The reality is that it would be much more murky. I would not be at all surprised if microplastics are viewed the same way in 100 years; how could they not have immediately known it was bad? Because we need to quantify how bad, and we can’t just force feed it to people so we have to wait until we naturally get case studies.

We really don’t need to quantify that.

We knew smoking was bad, we knew plastics were bad, we knew PFAS was bad.

But it’s cheaper than the alternatives, so we pretend we need studies to show “how bad exactly”. We don’t. We really, really don’t.

There's a similar UK initiative which has spread to a number of other countries.

Nurdles are everywhere... https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/nurdle-finds.html

Oh thanks! I was looking for something similar when I posted.
Wow, Texas seems to be one of the worst offenders here. How do you collect close to 1000 nurdles in 10 minutes? Do people wade through them on the beach?
  • api
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That doesn’t necessarily mean they are all coming from Texas though does it? It could mean ocean currents are carrying them there. I think the idea here is we have maps of ocean currents and can trace them to their likely source.
That’s a good point. Texas beaches are the cul-de-sac of the Gulf Coast. Makes sense that trash would collect there.
In sprite of all the Trumps and Putins and Netanyahu's out there. This project is just that reminder : There really are good humans in the world.
Much nicer to run into a Nurdle patrol than a Nurgle patrol (I know this is not the kind of comment HN is for, but I couldn't help it).
  • flir
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The nurdles mostly come from the manufacture of Nurgles.
What's worse, a patrol of Nurgles or a patrol of Nargles?
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Here are the real nurds
Imagine a beach completely consisting of nurdles. Imagine an ecosystem of bacteria, microorganisms, fish and other seafood creatures adapted to living on it. I feel like as humanity we could totally reach a point where evolution to that kind of ecosystem becomes the only choice. Same for our immune, digestive and lymph system. We could end up at a point where most of life NEEDS microplastic to survive! Then we can finally stop caring about micro plastics and start loving them instead.

I for one love nurdles!

  • dTal
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"Evolve" here is a neat word for "countless trillions of creatures die preventable deaths or otherwise fail to reproduce over geological time". If your terminal goal is to "finally stop caring about micro plastics" rather than "protect Earth's existing ecosystem", why wait? Just nuke the planet to glass. Microplastic worry over.

(A similarly nihilist viewpoint comes from the people who pontificate that "the planet will be fine, it's humans who will suffer". Sure, if by "the planet" you mean "a lump of mass orbiting the sun". Low bar for your ethical framework.)

  • flir
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> Low bar for your ethical framework

Or highest. Puts overall species diversity ahead of the future of a single species (us).

  • dTal
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That would be a defensible (if unpopular) position - see VHEMT - but usually the people saying this are arguing against the ethical consequentiality of anthropogenic ecosystem damage ("the planet will be fine") which is very harmful to biodiversity. Nobody's really offered a sane ethical framework in which it's a good thing for humans to wreck the planet, killing themselves and most everything else in the process.
There's a broad read on the definition of "social Darwinism" I like to remember.

Natural selection is a scientific concept and process. When people hijack these concepts for social or political aims, it's no longer scientific, and it's something else entirely.

This is such a strange spot for a glass half full take lol. "At least it's warm in hell!"
I think the good news is that we can adapt to enjoy how warm it is in hell. So it’s bad news that we’re going to hell, good news is that we’ll eventually like it.
The trouble with that notion is this: imagining that a plastic-based ecosystem arises (horrifying thought!) it means that there are life-forms capable of deriving energy from plastics, breaking them down. That makes plastics useless to us humans, because any time we try to use plastics for all the things we currently do with them, those life-forms are going to come along and attack, break down the stuff we deem "useful plastics"; the critters will make no distinction between nurdles lost on the beach and the plastics holding your car/house/clothes/aeroplane together. i.e. It's Game Over for plastics use.
That's not necessarily true. There is an ecosystem for breaking down wood, and my house is framed in wood.
Termites are a good example.

They are a natural way to break down wood. And they can eat your house. Thus we have come up with ways to mitigate them. Now there is an entire industry around preventing termites, fixing termite damage, etc..

So, the problem is, we find some microbe that eats plastics. Boom, now we have a new problem, we need an entire industry to prevent them from eating the plastics we don't want them to eat. Think of traveling with your laptop, 'oops, got a little bit of plastic eating microbe, guess i'm buying a new laptop'

Well wood also doesn't rot away within a day. You have to unmaintain it for years, or spray termites over it, if you want it gone fast. So that is nice, if you have that flexibiliy. Once a plastic part is thrown away it will be processed at the composting company.
I mean sure, with issues like plastics, global warming, ozone layer hole, melted polar caps, extreme weather events, bug collapse, etc etc etc, life will find a way. It's not a "final" extinction event per se, nor one as catastrophic as the meteor strike from back when.

But we are living in a mass extinction event. Billions of crabs died. Bug population has collapsed. Biodiversity has nosedived.

Humanity hasn't suffered yet in terms of total population, but that's because we're able to adapt our environment accordingly. That said, we will see famines and scarcities in our lifetime. Hell, we already do, but it mainly presents itself in day to day life (in "the west") as some products going out of shelves (the UK having supply problems due to brexit / long border queues) or prices spiking (e.g. produce from Ukraine). But worldwide we will see more of that.

As for (micro)plastics, IIRC we've yet to determine the full impact. But we know these nurdles break down into microplastics over time due to UV exposure and the like, but they don't disappear completely and find their way into everything. We'll only know the full impact looking back in a few hundred years.

Harvest in England the second worst on record because of wet weather https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/10/harvest-...
Fast forward to that future, someone says: imagine a world where we don't have to live in our own waste ... how much more efficient would our biology be?