Mermaid Tears

The past few weeks have been spent settling back into “normal life,” and I have decided that I took for granted all of the time that we were able to spend in and around the ocean while we were traveling.  To help make sure that I don’t continue to take the ocean for granted,  I have been trying to spend as much time as I can in it while I am not assimilating back into work and responsibility.  This week’s ocean adventure took me, Sanja (our self-proclaimed fan club president) and our friend Leane, who is always up for anything ocean related to Makapu’u beach on the east side of Oahu.  We were hoping for some bodysurfing waves, and we got some…small and choppy, but waves nonetheless.

After about an hour, I returned to the beach to roll around in the sand for a bit while Sanja and Leane continued to entertain themselves in the lineup.  Sanja took over camera duty and the usual scenario resulted:  self-portraits by Sanja.  I actually think that she has outdone herself with this one.

After I was satisfied with my corndogging for the day, I took a walk down the beach which was COVERED in nurdles.  Nurdles, or mermaid tears, are perhaps the most annoying form of marine debris possible.  They are small, white spheres of pre-production plastic that end up as trash on the beach even before they have the chance to become proper plastic.

As I walked along, I thought about the first time I ever saw a nurdle.  I was probably about 12 or 13 and was searching for shells on Newport Beach in California with a friend of mine.  We kept coming across these small white spheres in amongst the sand and the shells.  We debated what they actually were and came up with small balls of surf wax that the surfers pick off of their boards and throw in the water.  To me, this is what they were until a few years ago when I really started to learn more about the marine debris problem.

So, for those of you who have no idea what a nurdle actually is (besides fun to say…), here are a few nurdle facts for you:

-Nurdles are very small pieces of plastic which are designed to be melted down and then molded or otherwise shaped to make plastic materials

-Small pellets represent the most economical way to ship this pre-production plastic to where it needs to go in order to become the plastic that we all use everyday

-Over 250 billion pounds of nurdles are shipped around the world to plastic processing factories every year

-Nurdles come in rail tank cars, and at 20-25,000 per pound, there are about a billion of them in each tanker

-The most common source for nurdles in the ocean is industrial spills from trucks and container ships; because nurdles are so small, they are hard to contain, and they slip away from containers and into waterways or into the ocean directly

-Nurdles now represent about 10% of the litter counted on beaches worldwide

In addition to nurdles, there are other kinds of “Mermaid Tears”:

-The other form of mermaid tear is a small piece of plastic similar in size to a nurdle, caused by the wearing down of finished plastic items

-Studies on the plastic debris in the ocean seem to suggest that mermaid tears only break down up to a certain point, and after that, they will float in the ocean for thousands or perhaps millions of years, potentially causing serious problems. As they get smaller and smaller, mermaid tears are harmful to more and more organisms in the sea

Mermaid tears are a problem for a number of reasons:

The first and most obvious is that they are ingested by marine animals, who cannot digest plastic. As a result, animals can sicken or die with large numbers of mermaid tears in their digestive tracts, and bigger organisms may then consume them when they eat the smaller organisms. As a result, plastic becomes widely distributed in the marine food chain.

Mermaid tears can also contain chemical pollutants. In addition to the chemicals naturally present in plastic, these small plastic pellets can also pick up other chemicals and contaminants, ranging from toxins to endocrine disruptors.