- Nurdles, the tiny plastic pellets used as feedstock for making plastic products, are becoming dangerous as they spill into land and waterways during transportation. Animals mistake nurdles for food, causing fatalities while putting plastic into the food chain.
- While India has been focusing heavily on ‘managing’ plastic waste, such as beach clean-up drives, and has also been working on a Marine Litter Policy since 2018, activists argue that plastic is not just a litter problem, as the government wants to project.
- Dealing with plastic pollution requires working on all three phases of the plastic lifecycle – upstream, where the production happens; midstream, where products are made from it; and downstream, where waste needs to be handled.
It was a Sunday in July last year, 2023, when a lifeguard in Mumbai noticed translucent tiny drops at the city’s Aksa beach. Unable to comprehend what they were, he called up the team at Coastal Conservation Foundation (CCF), a non-profit working on coastal and marine environments in Mumbai. “They looked like fish eggs. Crows were feeding on them. When our team went to check, they burnt it and realised it was plastic,” said Shaunak Modi, co-founder of CCF. Subsequently, bags full of these pellets, commonly called nurdles, were found at Juhu and Versova beaches in the city and at Palghar, a district north of Mumbai. This was the first reported incident of nurdle spill in India.
Nurdles are lentil-sized plastic pellets, a raw material for almost all plastic products. As plastic production increases worldwide, there have been many incidents of nurdles leaking from the supply chain into the environment from ships, trucks, trains and industrial sites during transportation. Because nurdles look like fish eggs, sea birds, fish and crustaceans end up feeding on them, leading to starvation and organ failure.
“It would have been a big issue in any other country, but nobody bothered to follow up here. The least the government should have done was inquire with the shipping company,” said Modi. Along with nurdles, sacks bearing the label of a South Korean company, Hanwha Total Energies Petrochemical, were also found on the Juhu and Palghar beaches. According to Fidra, a Scotland-based charity that conducts ‘nurdle hunts’ across the globe, South Korea is the world’s third largest exporter of plastics in primary form (base material used for plastic product manufacturing).
“I complained to the Disaster Management Cell of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, but their only response was that the beaches had been cleaned up. They did the routine beach cleaning, a part of their routine responsibilities. I am sure if we dig a foot of sand at Juhu beach today, we will still find nurdles there,” said Modi. A month later, in August 2023, Our Sea of East Asia Network (OSEAN), a South Korea-based network working to protect the marine environment, sent a letter about the spill in Mumbai, to Hanwha Total Energies Petrochemical but did not get a reply, informed Modi.
According to the Clean Seas Campaign, a global campaign by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), to raise awareness on marine litter and plastic pollution, there are 51 trillion microplastic particles in the world’s seas. India joined the Campaign in 2018, and since then, the National Centre for Coastal Research, Chennai (NCCR), under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, has coordinated many beach clean-ups to understand the kind and extent of marine litter on India’s coastline in a run-up to draft its Marine Litter Policy. NCCR has a programme to study the origin, pathway, degradation and environmental impacts of marine litter and microplastics along the Indian coast. “Public litter came up as the biggest source of beach litter in the coastal clean-ups we conducted. Of this, 19% were food wrappers, followed by plastic cups and bottles. On average, there is one tonne of plastic in every kilometre of the beach today,” said Pravakar Mishra, Scientist at NCCR.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, under a business-as-usual scenario and in the absence of necessary interventions, plastic waste entering aquatic ecosystems could nearly triple from 9-14 million tonnes per year in 2016 to a projected 23-37 million tonnes per year by 2040. By 2050, there may be more plastic than fish by weight in the world’s oceans, says a World Economic Forum study.
While there is significant focus on managing plastic waste, little attention is given to pollution emitting from the plastic production process (upstream of the life cycle) and products manufactured from it (midstream). “For decades, plastic pollution has been misunderstood to be a waste mismanagement issue. The petroleum and petrochemicals industry argues that it is not a part of this problem, and most of our national legislations have been taken in by this argument. Governments have mobilised funds to ‘manage plastic waste’ while production has kept on increasing exponentially. We have produced more plastics in the last ten years than in the last century!” says Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, Programme Manager at Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based non-profit.
“The Government’s response to the nurdle spill in Mumbai shows the country’s lax attitude. We can’t afford to wait for a bigger disaster to strike before a mechanism is put in place,” said Swathi Seshadri, Director-Research and Team lead (oil and gas) at the Centre for Financial Accountability.
Data dynamics
The production of primary plastics in India has gone up from 0.9 million tonnes per year in 1990 to 21 million tonnes in 2021, an increase of 23 times. “About 87% of this is for commodity plastics like packaging and household items,” said Singh from CSE. Around 99% of plastic is derived from chemicals that come from fossil fuels. In India, 67% of the petrochemical manufacturing capacity is utilised to manufacture polymers (plastics), informed Singh.
Private players own 73.75% of the petrochemical production capacity in India. “At 44.68%, Reliance India Ltd holds the biggest share here,” said Singh. India plans to position itself as a major exporter of basic petrochemicals, especially polymers, by increasing exports by over 100%. It looks like plastics is Plan B for the petroleum industry,” he said.
“The Indian petrochemical industry is expected to contribute almost 10% to the incremental growth in the global petrochemical demand in the coming years. About 80% of India’s petrochemicals capacity is integrated with petroleum refineries. This gives India an edge in terms of petrochemical feedstock certainty,” said Hardeep Singh Puri, Central Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas, in May 2023.
As many as 13,000 chemicals are used in plastic manufacturing to render properties like flame retardation, UV stablisers, colours, etc. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), 7,000 of these have been analysed for their hazardous properties, and 3200 have been found to be chemicals of potential concern. These include phthalates, Bisphenol A, biocides, and aromatic hydrocarbons.
Nurdles, a primary microplastic
In May 2021, a fire occurred in MV X-Press Pearl, a container ship run by Singapore-based X-Press Feeders near Sri Lanka. Following the fire, the beaches of Sri Lanka were covered with nurdles and burnt plastic. With about 1,680 metric tonnes of pellets spilled in the Indian Ocean, the United Nations called this incident the “single largest plastic spill in history.” It killed dolphins, turtles, and fish, besides destroying livelihood from tourism and fishing in the island nation. “A significant amount of microplastics have been added to the environment under the influence of UV irradiation and abrasion against beach sand. Consequently, the ingestion of microplastics and heavy metals would be increased in a wide range of marine organisms and can be bio-accumulated in humans through seafood and salt,” said a December 2022 study about the Sri Lanka spill.
Being small and lightweight, nurdles float on water and are carried to far-off locations by ocean currents, drains, and rivers. They can escape into the environment through torn bags. “Nurdles are the second largest source of primary microplastic pollution (that has not become a microplastic by weathering) globally. Since starting the Global Nurdle Hunt, over 4.5 million tonnes of nurdles have flooded into the environment from the plastic supply chain, enough to cover an area the size of Bangkok,” says the ten years report of the Great Global Nurdle Hunt 2013-2023, a volunteer-led campaign run by Fidra to arrest nurdle pollution around the world. “There have been 16 documented large-scale shipping incidents causing nurdle spill and six major train derailments, but many more are unreported,” said the report.
Once in the environment, nurdles are difficult to clean up completely. They also attract other chemicals in the environment, such as toxic persistent organic pollutants (POPs), onto their surface. Biofilms of bacteria and microorganisms are also formed on their surface, which can harbour pathogens like E. coli.
Europe (37% of the primary plastic global market) and Asia-Pacific (34% of the global market) contribute maximum to the pellet loss in the seas. “There is clear evidence of plastic pellet pollution in regions of the world where there is also a high concentration of plastic manufacturers and converters,” says the report Mapping the global plastic pellet supply chain commissioned by Fidra. Given the predicted increase in the scale of the plastics industry, the risk of continued acute and chronic pellet loss is also expected to increase if no action is taken to improve the storage, handling, transport, and response to pellet spills, the report says further.
Civil society groups and governments are calling on the International Maritime Organisation, specialised agency of the United Nations responsible for regulating maritime transport, to prevent further pollution by classifying plastic pellets as marine pollutants at sea so that they can be labelled, stored, and transported more safely and any spill can be dealt with swiftly.
Petrochemicals and the coast
“Nurdles are a small but the latest cog in the wheel of the many problems our coasts face. All the beach clean-ups are a sham if pollution is not tackled at the source,” said Modi, pointing to an annual event where tar balls are washed ashore along the western coast of India. “This is a spill from a petroleum refinery. It happens every year, but there is no action,” he said.
“Most petrochemical industry is located near to the coast, making these areas vulnerable to pollution from oil and nurdle spills and coal emissions too,” said Seshadri. In December 2023, the floods in Chennai in Tamil Nadu caused an oil spill from the Chennai Petroleum Corporation Ltd. The oil entered the sea through Ennore Creek, a biodiversity hotspot. More than 60 hectares of the creek’s mangroves have been affected due to the oil spill.
“All these incidents prove India’s bad track record in managing accidents of this scale. The socio-economic and health costs of pollution caused by these companies on local communities are not even factored in. Fishers are having to go farther into the sea to catch fish. Sometimes, they even cross international boundaries unknowingly and end up in jail. At the same time, fishers have also reported that 40% of their catch now includes plastic,” said Seshadri. That points to a larger health crisis as well. “Fish is the only source of protein for most coastal communities, and they are losing out on it now. Artisanal fishers of Mumbai hardly get any catch now, thanks to the litter also,” said Modi.
According to Seshadri, polymer factories, plastic product manufacturing plants, and waste-to-energy facilities need to be held accountable under the polluter pays principle. “Not remediating these legacy impacts externalises and socialises the costs, and thus incentivises fossil fuel use,” she said.
The Global Plastics Treaty
“We are demanding that plastic production be reduced by at least 75% by 2040,” Satyarupa Shekhar, a public policy advocate, told Mongabay India. Her interests include urban governance, data justice, and plastic pollution.
However, the Indian government is not on board with this. In March 2022, the UNEP formed The Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) on Plastic Pollution with 193 member states. The INC’s mandate is to arrive at a legally binding instrument to end plastic pollution in all phases of its lifecycle. At the third meeting of INC held in November 2023 in Kenya, India disagreed with all the options presented to deal with primary plastic polymers. “It is important to note what is creating the problem is unmanaged and littered waste, which gets leaked into the environment and causes adverse impacts on human well-being and the environment. Also, we must deal with the plastic pollution due to legacy plastic waste differently, and it should not colour our understanding of sustainable consumption and production of plastics,” stated the Indian Government’s submission at INC-3. The INC-4 is due to be held in Canada at the end of April this year.
“But the challenge is that plastic pollutes at every stage. Be it nurdle or while it is in use. For instance, there is no filter in our washing machines for the thousands of microfibres released into the environment from synthetic clothes and the waste created after it is discarded. Saving oceans can’t be about using nets to catch plastic bags,” said Shekhar.
Banner image: Nurdles look like fish eggs. Sea birds, fish, and crustaceans end up feeding on them, leading to starvation and organ failure. Photo by Shaunak Modi/Coastal Conservation Foundation.