A NEW PLASTIC WAVE IS COMING TO OUR SHORES
ANDREW WUNDERLEY CROUCHES IN THE SAND TO PICK up a milky white sphere. He pinches the lentil-size orb between his thumb and forefinger. It nearly pops out of his grip. The little pellet is made of brand-new plastic and has all the wondrous qualities of the material—light, smooth, and virtually forever-lasting. Many more are scattered in the high-tide line of the wide, windswept beach, the pride of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, a barrier island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. He drops the pellet into a glass jar and picks up another, then another. Just offshore, container ships cut through the January fog on their way to Charleston’s industrial port.
Before plastic is formed into forks or garbage bags or iPhone cases, it is born into the world as these orbs. The plastics industry calls them pre-production pellets, or sometimes just resins. Everyone else—for reasons no one I asked seemed to know—calls them “nurdles.” Just a few months before we met on that January day, Wunderley had never heard of them. And then he received a fateful call.
Wunderley directs Charleston Waterkeeper, a group dedicated to protecting the region’s waterways. A dog walker rambling the beach contacted him after noticing a strange pearling in the sand—hundreds of white spheres pushing up with the surf. “It was almost like sleet,” Wunderley recalls.
Soon after, the state’s environmental agency and the South Carolina Ports Authority came to inspect. After they looked, they went straight to the warehouse of a shipping company called Frontier Logistics. They found pellets sprinkled on the floor, littering the truck loading zone, and pooled in crevices along the train rails. According to the state’s inspection report, these “appeared to resemble” the pellets on the beach. Frontier denied responsibility, but nonetheless paid a cleanup crew to pick up the Sullivan’s Island nurdles by hand.
For Wunderley, that was only the beginning of the story. Once he knew to look, the pellets were seemingly everywhere. His focus soon shifted from sampling for sewer contamination and patrolling creeks to shuffling in mud and sand on hand and knee in search of tiny debris, documenting what had rapidly become a serious problem.
EVERY TIME WUNDERLEY GOES BACK TO THIS BEACH, HIGH TIDES HAVE WASHED FRESH NURDLES ASHORE.
For the past few years Charleston has been transforming into a
