Guest Column

The Life Cycle of a Nurdle

By Marjory Holder

I’ve been thinking a lot about plastic lately. No, this isn’t a bad re-make of The Graduate (as the well-dressed man leans over to whisper in the young man’s ear, “I have one word for you, son. Plastics!”), but all the rain we’ve had lately has kept me out of the garden and given me too much time to think about the planet we’re leaving our children and grandchildren.

It all starts with “nurdles.” A nurdle is a small pellet of plastic -- the basic form from which all plastic products are made. Most come from Texas and Louisiana, where we pump natural gas and petroleum from the earth, mix it with various chemicals that make it hard or sort, or colorful, or shatter-resistant, and form it into the pellets -- 50 million tons of which are shipped around the country every year.

They become hard hats and volley balls, the polystyrene in our tires, the polypropylene in our moisture-wicking winter long johns, polyurethane insulation around our refrigerators, and polyvinyl chloride siding on our houses. The wiring in our homes is sheathed in polyethylene, also from nurdles, as is the PET plastic in our grocery bags and trash bags. This is the stuff of modern life.

Most of it is never recycled. And a lot of it doesn’t even make its way to the dump.

All you have to do is take a lazy drive, or spin, or walk, or mule-train ride down any Watauga County road, and you’ll see the first leg of its journey to where it doesn’t belong. It’s plastic bottles and styrofoam cups along the roadsides, shopping bags caught up in trees, tires thrown into creeks. From there, it washes into tributaries, and on into rivers, all the way across the state, until it washes into the ocean.

At this point it’s no longer just ugly and local -- it’s dangerous and global.

Here’s what folks are finding around God’s earth ... a floating mass of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean that’s larger than the state of Texas ... seabirds that mistake floating trash for fish and starve with their stomachs full of cigarette lighters and plastic forks ... and with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile of ocean, foreign organisms are finding more and more little life rafts on which to float to our shores and crowd out native species -- native species that we eat and which our coastal folks have always depended on to make a living.

Then after a while, the plastic cups and lids and serving trays and fishing lines and whatnot start to get brittle and break up. But it never really goes away. It breaks into smaller and smaller pieces. And these pieces are eaten by the little organisms in the ocean that are eaten by the little fish that are eaten by the bigger fish and then the even bigger fish ... and ultimately eaten by us.

The problem is that these pieces are like little sponges, absorbing toxins that have also washed into the water. Scientists have analyzed these bits of plastic around the world and found them loaded with PCB’s and DDT -- both of which were banned everywhere more than 30 years ago because they are harmful to living creatures ... including us. Right now the research is just beginning to figure out just how much of a problem this all is in our food supply.

All of this is a little scary; and it would be incredibly depressing, except there are things we can all do about it.

The first is Recycle. I well remember a former County Commissioner who was in a meeting about the growing cost of disposing of trash in Watauga County and said he thought people should recycle more ... even though he had to admit HE didn’t recycle. (My 9-year-old was flabbergasted when he heard it. “Even I recycle,” he said, “and I’m only 9!”) It’s incredibly easy to recycle in Watauga County -- cardboard boxes, newspaper and office paper, magazines, bottles, cans, and #1 and #2 plastic (the number’s on the bottom) can all be recycled at the container site where we take our garbage. And we need to teach our kids never to throw trash out the car window.

The second is Re-use. Most of us were raised with that old rhyme from World War II:

My mom is still the queen of washing out and re-using plastic bags. Other people carry a water bottle they keep re-filling from the tap. A girl I know set up housekeeping, not with a fancy set of Tupperware for leftovers, but with plastic soup containers left over from Chinese take-out.

And the third is Reduce. That means we can just flat out use less plastic.

Up until the 1940s in this country, and the 1970s in Europe, folks used to carry string bags to the store. That’s an old-fashioned idea that’s come back around -- you can see folks bringing their own bags to the Farmers Market or the grocery every week. It’s an especially good idea in places that either charge 25 cents for every plastic bag you use or have banned them altogether.

We can refuse to buy stuff that’s over-packaged ... you know those little-bitty tubes of something that’s in a huge plastic shell. We can write manufacturers and complain about over-packaging ... or send a photo of the silliest ones to Consumer Reports to shame companies into using more sense and less plastic.

The point is if we all just stop and think about it, there are things that every family and every person in Watauga County can do to make the problem smaller. I’d like to put a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Just Say No to Nurdles.” But bumper stickers are vinyl ... and I bet that starts with a nurdle.