Mermaids' tears

In the midst of a havoc-causing storm in KZN, two container ships collided in the Durban harbour mouth on 10 October 2017 .  At least one damaged container carrying small plastic pellets (nurdles) fell overboard and was allegedly left submerged in the harbour for almost 24 hours.  During the days following the incident, millions of nurdles washed out on Durban's beaches. Sea currents picked up the lightweight nurdles and carried them north as far as Richards Bay, and south as far as the Eastern Cape's coastline.

https://journeytotheplasticocean.files.
wordpress.com/2012/08/spw2kaitak.jpg

Conservation and environmental organisations are calling it “An ecological disaster and an environmental emergency” and have asked volunteers to help clean the beaches.  In the past few weeks, thousands of people ventured to the beaches armed with spades, buckets, nets and containers to begin the painstakingly slow process of ridding our beautiful coastline of nurdles.

Not long ago, most South Africans didn't even know of the existence of nurdles and the enormously dangerous impact they have on nature. We were part of that group not knowing... And when Dr Bob Sluka from the UK contacted us through A Rocha to help with nurdle research on the west coast of South Africa, we had to turn to Google to teach us what we needed to know!  Even with Google-assisted new knowledge, we were unsure if we would be able to recognize the nurdles on the sand of the western coast beaches, and more over, if we would be able to send accurate data concerning nurdles to our Christian eco-friends in the North...

Luckily for us, PlasticSA's John Kieser, a real miracle worker, managed to contact us and it was in his office in Maitland that we had our first real meeting with the "mermaids' tears”, another name for nurdles – small plastic pellets or pipes, all colours and sizes. To tell the truth, we were now even more confused. How on earth will we know which are real nurdles and which are just waste plastics shapen in time by water and sand?  John had an answer for this question too: practice makes perfect!  As we said our good byes, he had a smile on his face and a twinckle in his eye - he handed us a bucket full of plastic pieces. "Go search for your nurdles here. This rubbish was picked up at Yzerfontein."  It worked. We really are getting the hang of it, but we still need more exercise!

John, who has been busy with the cleanup of beaches for a long time now, was very enthusiastic to hear about our project.  A lot of research and work has been done on the Eastern S A Coastline. But on the sparsely populated West Coast, especially in the Northern Cape, data is non-existing. We will be doing groundbreaking work! And obviously this is very exciting to all of us in the Footsteps-team!

But what are nurdles? Where do they come from? And why is it such a problem?

A nurdle is a very small pellet of plastic which serves as raw material in the manufacture of plastic products. During the manufacturing, transport or use of nurdles they are often spilled accidentally into rivers and oceans or fall in drains where they are washed out to sea.  In Europe this is a major problem.  A search of 279 beaches around the UK has found that almost three-quarters (73%) of them were littered with tiny plastic nurdles.  Campaigners estimate that up to 53 billion of these tiny pellets escape into the UK`s environment each year and that 230 000 tonnes enter the ocean in Europe annually.  In 2012, 150 tonnes of nurdles leaked from shipping containers into the sea around Hong Kong and cost the company responsible $US 1,2 million (at that time) to clean it up.

https://www.goodthingsguy.com/environment/nurdles-sa-beaches/

Nurdles are harmful to animals which mistake them for food items.  Not only are they toxic, but they cannot be digested, causing digestive blockages, starvation and death.  In the raw stage (pre-moulded and packaged) new nurdles are not toxic to touch.  Once released into the marine environment they will, over time, attract and concentrate harmful substance and background pollutants like DDT and PCB`s to high toxic levels.  These substances come  from land-based pesticides, herbicides and other organic pollutants that end up in the ocean.  Nurdles never go away, but they break down into smaller and smaller particles that then gets eaten by even more animals and so suddenly are part of people`s food.  

Because nurdles attract toxic substances, they can give scientists a very clear idea of the type of toxins found in the oceans.  Therefore - since there is no data for the northern West Coast of S A - Jacobus, as part of the nurdle project, must search for and collect older nurdles, wrap them in foil to prevent contamination and send it to Dr Hideshige Takada (Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Fuchu, Tokyo) where it will be used in Dr Takada's Global Pollution research. http://www.pelletwatch.org/ 

The thing that makes the nurdle problem even more catastrophic, is the fact that nurdles are very, very lightweight and these “mermaids' tears” are carried by the winds and currents of the world, till they are spread around in each and every corner of our planet.  No wonder everybody is concerned. It makes the West Coast and in particular the part of the unpopulated Northern Cape the ideal testing ground. These nurdles would not be locally manufactured and thus will be a very accurate indicator of how far this cancer has spread already...

Find attached Dr Sluka's assignment for Jacobus, for those interested:

It is, of course, possible that there aren't any nurdles in that area. Negative data (not seeing any, while looking for them) would be important scientific information. It does matter where you look on the beach. They are almost exclusively found at the high tide strand line, so that line of algae and debris that accumulates at the high tide mark of the beach. So if you look elsewhere, you don't see any. 

The method is very simple.

1) locate the high tide mark and strand line and identify the location, date, and any other observations that might impact the state of the beach. For example, in some places they regularly clean the beaches, so that would impact how much you see. I doubt that will be the case where Jacobus will be walking! But if there was obviously a very large storm a few days previous, that would be good to note. The FIDRA site asks for "Where did you gather most nurdles? Was it a sandy, rocky or pebbly beach? What were the conditions like? Had there been very high tides, strong winds etc."

2) have a watch/phone to mark the time and start looking, going slowly along the strand line, picking up algae, etc and looking. Sometimes styrofoam balls look like nurdles, so if you squeeze them, you can easily tell if they are plastic or not.

3) search for a pre-determined time. I would suggest 15 minutes as it is long enough, but not too long that it gets dull.

4) Count the nurdles that you see. If it is possible, you can collect them and then take a picture at the end. That can be uploaded and then later we could do some basic looking at whether the type, colour, etc of nurdles changes through the walk. You don't need to keep the nurdles.

You can see the upload page where we will eventually upload and report the data here: https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/take-part/share-your-findings.html

Regards
Bob

https://www.fidra.org.uk/