By Phil Diehl / Del Mar Times / June 3, 2024
Nurdles are everywhere. Never heard of them? They are the raw form of plastic resin that’s melted and molded into everything from soda bottles to clothing fabrics, from food packaging to artificial Christmas trees.
However, two local environmental groups say a frightening amount of the pellets skip the useful product stage and are turning up on San Diego County beaches and in its lagoons, part of the rising tide of worldwide plastic pollution.
Nurdles are tiny, petroleum-based lumps about the size and shape of a lentil. Companies produce mass quantities of them and send them to manufacturers in trucks, shipping containers and railroad freight cars.
Volunteers have found “at least thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of the plastic particles alongside the tracks and in and around” North County lagoons and waterways, according to an official “notice of intent to sue” sent to the BNSF Railway Co. by the nonprofits San Diego Coastkeeper and the Coastal Environmental Rights Foundation.
BNSF freight trains carry nurdles in hopper cars on the coastal railroad between the Port of San Diego and Los Angeles or other destinations throughout the western United States. The tracks cross all the county’s coastal lagoons, from Del Mar to Camp Pendleton. The notice includes photographs of nurdles found in a drainage ditch along the tracks in Encinitas, just south of the Batiquitos Lagoon.
The lightweight nature of nurdles makes them easy to spill or leak, especially if a container is not tightly sealed, or when the material is loaded or unloaded, sometimes with a device that uses a hose like a leaf-blower. When set loose, the particles are easily spread by wind and water.
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There are tons of nurdles along the curbs on Santa Monica Ave, by the Hidden Spa and CVS. I have been using the Get It Done App for several months asking the City to do some street sweeping (especially before we had all the rain), but they just close my inquiries. I have swept most of them up but they keep getting dumped there. I wish the City would go back to its monthly street sweeping because this crap, and all the junk after the Farmers Market and the van dwellers on Santa Monica, is going straight into the ocean.