This week while walking the beach, I focused my Beachcombing survey on a small but serious problem — nurdles.
These are tiny plastic pellets, about the size of a lentil, that serve as the raw material used to make nearly all plastic products. You might not notice them at first, but once you spot one, you start to see them everywhere.
Using the same 10-minute survey method we use with the Nurdle Patrol program, I found 135 nurdles in 10 minutes of looking along the beach on Mustang Island. That’s a lot for one short stretch of sand, but it’s nothing compared to what I recently found in Dallas on Mountain Creek Lake. There, I counted 13,000 nurdles in 10 minutes — the highest concentration I’ve ever recorded personally…