Nurdle pollution turns Spanish beach into 'plastic soup'

Located an hour's drive from Barcelona, Playa de la Pineda is a well-known surfing spot for Tarragona locals. Over the years, it’s also become known for being one of the hotspots of nurdle pollution in Europe. 

For Jordi Oliva, surfing in these waters leaves him with a bitter aftertaste. 

"You realise you've been swimming in all this pollution," he says, emerging from the water, surfboard in hand. "It's like plastic soup."

While they can't be easily spotted at first, once you lay eyes on them, you can't unsee them. Nurdles are everywhere, scattered on the beach. 

Jordi co-founded a non-profit called Good Karma Projects to put the spotlight on this lesser-known form of pollution. He designed a simple set of sieves and a machine the non-profit uses to collect the white pellets. 

"Every year in October, a nurdle hunt is held simultaneously around the world. On this beach, we broke the record, collecting 1,800,000 nurdles in under an hour and a half," he recalls.

The point is not to clean the beach, he adds, but to make this pollution even more visible. 

"When we began spreading the word about this problem, people told us that when they were kids they collected them. They don't realise it’s plastic."

The life of most of our everyday products began with nurdles. It takes roughly 50 million individual nurdles to make 1 tonne of plastic. These pellets are melted and moulded to form plastic objects.  

They're the size of lentils, measuring not more than 5mm, making them extremely volatile. That's how they end up dispersed in the environment. 

Spills can happen under two different scenarios. First, there's everyday pollution, with nurdles leaking out from factories, when they're being transported in trucks or