What’s a nurdle?

It’s not a cross between a Nerf and a turtle. Nor are we talking about a wave-shaped glob of toothpaste, in this case.

A nurdle is a pre-production industrial pellet that manufacturers use to produce everything from plastic bottles to keys on a computer keyboard. An estimated 250 billion pounds of nurdles are shipped around the globe annually.

The problem is that nurdles land in the ocean during transport to plastic manufacturing facilities in Asia or the U.S. continent. They are washing up along shorelines all around Hawaii, including most of Oahu’s popular Windward beaches, such as Waimanalo, Bellows and Kailua.

Nurdles have been found among the plastic debris on all of those beaches, according to Suzanne Frazer of Beach Environmental

Awareness Campaign Hawaii (BEACH), a nonprofit group that cleans the shorelines.

At first glance you might not even notice them because the tiny pellets blend in pretty well with the sand. What’s scary is that these nurdles act like sponges that readily absorb chemicals. Recent scientific studies have shown that nurdles can absorb pollutants like DDT and PCBs.

Even more alarming is that fish, birds and marine wildlife eat nurdles, which look like fish eggs. They typically eat the more colorful nurdles, leaving the transparent ones to wash up on shore.

That also means that whatever is in those nurdles is potentially in the food chain.

It’s alarming enough that the Environmental Protection Agency last month launched a first-in-the nation enforcement effort to eliminate nurdles in the waters of the Oyster Bay Regional Shoreline in San Leandro, Calif.

Nurdles make up a good part of plastic debris usually left behind during community-organized beach cleanups, which target larger litter items.

IF you’re not sure what plastic debris is, take a closer look at the high-tide line next time you go to a beach on the Windward side and you’ll see tiny, jagged pieces of plastic in blue, white, red and yellow.

When a larger item such as a plastic crate sits in the sun, it typically breaks down into pieces that become smaller with each tide. BEACH calls it “plastic sand.”

While plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, it doesn’t decompose. It sticks around for hundreds of years.

What you can do to help is reduce your use of plastics. When you see plastic litter on the beach, pick it up to keep it out of the ocean. That includes everything from plastic bottle caps to sand toys and forks — every little bit helps.

To read more about plastic marine debris, visit the Green Leaf blog at thegreenleaf.staradvertiserblogs.com.

Nina Wu writes about environmental issues. Reach her at 529-4892 or nwu@staradvertiser.com.