Nurdle Patrol poised to get a $1 million boost

Round, multicolored pellets, while barely larger than a lentil, are a massive contributor to plastic pollution. They can accumulate by the thousands and billions on beaches and in waterways, threatening wildlife.

That’s where the Nurdle Patrol comes in.

The citizen scientist initiative run out of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, a division of the University of Texas’ Marine Science Institute, seeks to spot and document what some call nurdles — small plastic pellets that are raw material for making plastic products.

Volunteers fan out on beaches and along waterways scooping up the nurdles and counting how many they collect over 10-minute periods.

“It’s much like a treasure hunt,” said Stennie Mead, a Galveston Bay resident and longtime Nurdle Patrol volunteer.

Pending a judge’s approval, Nurdle Patrol is poised to receive $1 million from Formosa Plastics, a plastics manufacturer based in Point Comfort on Lavaca Bay. The money, part of a $50 million settlement reached last month under the federal Clean Water Act, comes after a judge ruled the company illegally dumped billions of pellets and other pollutants into surrounding waterways for a decade.

The money for the Nurdle Patrol would be a big boost for a program that so far has relied mostly on volunteers and a single, $10,000 grant.

Nurdles are considered a type of microplastic, which are less than 5 millimeters long. Most other microplastics are pieces of deteriorated trash.

“They look like a tiny pebble,” Mead said. “They do not exhibit any of the traditional signs of pollution.”

It’s difficult to quantify the scale of the plastic pellet problem, largely because data tends to be hyperlocal and neither state nor federal laws regulate plastic pellets specifically. This makes enforcement difficult and large cleanups unprecedented.

“Both at the state level and the federal level, (regulatory agencies) are going to want to find out more information about where these pellets are coming from,” said Jace Tunnell, director of the Mission-Aransas reserve. “They can fingerprint oil spills and know where it came from. They need to be able to do the same thing with plastic from a regulatory standpoint.”

Nurdle Patrol, which started as a Facebook group for residents along the Gulf Coast, launched a website in September where anyone in the world can learn how to conduct a nurdle survey and report findings. After Tunnell vets the data for accuracy, it becomes viewable on an interactive map that uses different colored circles to illustrate the number of nurdles found.

Tunnell shares the data with Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on a monthly basis, and he hopes that by consistently flagging nurdle sightings, he and the volunteers can inspire stricter regulations.

“These things are small; they're lightweight; the wind can blow them around. But, you know, the product is so cheap,” Tunnell said. “It's cheaper to leave it on the ground than it is to pick it up. And if nobody's fighting them for it, then why would they pick it up?”

A TCEQ spokesman said the commission regulates discharges from sources within its jurisdiction, but does not collect data specifically on the plastic pellets, which escape from ships, manufacturing sites and train cars.

“The information (from Nurdle Patrol) is general in nature and does not identify sources of nurdle discharges and may not provide sufficient information to document a violation,” a TCEQ spokesman wrote via email. “TCEQ will investigate these environmental concerns when the information provided is sufficient to identify a source to assess compliance.”

The $1 million would be spent over the next five years, allowing the program to host the Texas Plastic Pollution Symposium, hire someone to run Nurdle Patrol full-time and train more citizen scientists.

“That’s sort of the beauty of this,” Tunnell said. People “basically have all the tools they need to be able to run their own citizen science project in their community.”