Ending the age of plastic
by Michael Lucy
They look quite natural in the sand. Lentil-sized white blobs, sometimes a little translucent, not quite perfectly round: they might be milky pebbles or moonlit grains of rice, and they blend in smoothly with the seaweed and shells left on the shore by the tide. It isn't hard to see why birds mistake them for fish eggs and gulp them down.
Nurdles, as they are disarmingly called, are pellets of plastic resin, the raw material shipped to manufacturers making plastic goods, and I am searching for them on a foggy midwinter morning at Shelly Beach in southeastern Australia, a seemingly pristine cove where endangered hooded plover nest among the rocks and waves roll in off water that stretches a clear 3,000 km to Antarctica.