Harmful nurdles on beaches need to be investigated

Nurdles are globally notorious for wreaking havoc in marine ecosystems. If these are present in Mumbai’s waters in larger quantities, they will be consumed by all manner of marine life. Over time, the pellets will weather away into smaller microplastic fragments and enter the food chain

Mumbai: An alarming ecological crisis is currently unfurling on Mumbai’s shores, which are already denuded by high levels of marine debris and pollution. On the morning of July 23, a lifeguard at Aksa Beach informed us at the Marine Life of Mumbai (MLOM) collective that something akin to small jellyfish had washed up along the high-tide line. He is part of our network of first responders who inform us of marine life strandings in Mumbai.

We put out an SOS online, and people began reporting these nurdles from Juhu and Versova beaches as well. (HT Photo)

Gaurav Patil, a marine biologist who works with the Coastal Conservation Foundation, visited Aksa Beach and found to his surprise that these were no marine organisms, but small pellets of plastic called ‘nurdles’. They are microplastics used in the industrial manufacturing of plastic products. A burn test to ascertain whether these were indeed plastics showed that when exposed to heat they simply melted and fused together, as plastics do.

We put out an SOS online, and people began reporting these nurdles from Juhu and Versova beaches as well. We have photographed crows and other birds consuming them at Aksa. On Wednesday, another lifeguard at Juhu found four huge bags of nurdles washed up at the high-tide line. Three of them -- containing several lakhs of these tiny pellets -- were split open, with their contents on the beach. The fourth sack was so heavy, we required a JCB to move it to a nearby police chowky.

In the many years I have spent documenting Mumbai’s intertidal regions, I have never come across these pollutants before. But any marine biologist will tell you how detrimental these can be. In May 2021, the cargo ship MV X Press Pearl had caught fire 10 miles off the Sri Lankan coast and released approximately 75 billion nurdles into the Indian Ocean. Entire beaches were covered in a thick white layer of pellets, followed by the deaths of fish, turtles, dolphins and all manner of marine life. The situation in Mumbai right now may not be as dire, but we cannot afford to ignore this. This is not the usual kind of pollution one encounters.

The lakhs of nurdles already emitted into the environment cannot all be retrieved, and the only way to salvage the situation now is to manually sieve them from the sand. One cannot use a bulldozer or other heavy machinery as they will compact the sand further and make them harder to extract. Responding to this situation effectively would also involve engaging experts from other countries, who have dealt with spillage of nurdles before.

Nurdles are globally notorious for wreaking havoc in marine ecosystems. If these are present in Mumbai’s waters in larger quantities, they will be consumed by all manner of marine life. Over time, the pellets will weather away into smaller microplastic fragments and enter the food chain. I would implore the BMC’s disaster management cell, with whom we have filed an official complaint, to investigate the origin of these pollutants. It has been four days since the first report from Aksa Beach, and this matter has not been received with the urgency it warrants.

The writer is the co-founder of Coastal Conservation Foundation, a marine conservation organisation, where he also manages the Marine Life of Mumbai and Coastal Cetaceans of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region projects