Have you ever heard of nurdles?  I know I hadn’t until about seven years ago when, quite by accident, I picked up a copy of a local magazine in a café in the West Dorset village of Charmouth.  The magazine contained an article by Eden Thomson, a volunteer at the local Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre describing how Charmouth beach was being polluted by  many small plastic pellets called nurdles.   (The picture at the head of this post shows Charmouth Beach)

I was both fascinated and shocked and began trying to understand what was happening.  Over the next seven or so years, with a break for the pandemic, a group of people, united by their love of Charmouth beach and the surrounding area, showed that the beach was being polluted by a mixture of pellets: nurdles, the preproduction material used in the plastics industry to make the many plastic items we use in everyday life, and biobeads, used in sewage purification by water companies.

We also showed that the two kinds of plastic pellet were being lost through unnecessarily careless handling, the nurdles during the many stages of the plastics supply chain, and the biobeads from the sewage works near Lyme Regis run by South West Water.  The result of this carelessness is that a previously pristine environment is irreversibly polluted by plastic pellets.

It has been a tortuous and sometims frustrating investigation and I wanted to record the efforts of the many people involved. I have, therefore, summarised the key milestones of our work in an article that was published recently in West Country Voices.

You can read the story here