Isle of Wight Pearl, in partnership with Planet Aware IOW, carried out a Nurdle Hunt along the beach at Chilton Chine last Saturday (16th June).
Nurdles are small pellets measuring about 2-5mm and are used by manufacturers to create new plastic products. Nurdles are easily mistaken for food and ingested by sea birds and animals before getting trapped in the stomach, which prevents the animals from eating real food.
Worryingly, a large amount of the toxic Nurdles are being found in sea birds, fish and other animals. The Great Nurdle Hunt helps monitor the spread of them within our oceans and monitor their affect.
23 people joined the beach cleaning efforts by collecting rubbish and helping to find Nurdles along the West Wight coast. The finds in the relatively ‘clean’ area of the beach and cliffs are said to have been astonishing with one of the most disturbing finds being 13 pieces of helium balloon debris.
With the plans for the upgrade of the Isle of Wight Pearl and Pearl Café over the next 18 months, a large part of the behind the scenes work has been to improve the environmental sustainability of the business.
Looking for help and advice on what the business could do to conscientiously become more sustainable within the local environment, Isle of Wight Pearl were lucky to come across the skills and expertise of Sarah and Anne of Planet Aware IOW. Sarah explained that a beach clean would be great but an additional thing to do would be to do a Nurdle Hunt.
Rossanne Burfoot from the Isle of Wight Pearl said:
“We knew that we’d like to do a beach clean of our beach at Chilton Chine and June the month of the Pearl seemed perfect.
Article continues below this advertisement “I for one was shocked at the number of bits of balloon we found. There is absolutely no reason for these to be laying around on our beach. Whether they are accidentally lost or if they are let go on a mass release. They end up in the sea and cause a huge danger.
“We found items like the foil balloons themselves, the stoppers which are used to blow them up to the ribbon tied on them. We as a business won’t use balloons and I for one won’t buy a helium balloon again”.
The Nurdle hunt was a success with 4 types of Nurdles found, all of which have been logged on the Great British Nurdle Hunt map to aid the research.
Rossanne added:
“Isle of Wight Pearl will continue to strive to work with our beautiful landscape to protect the environment. We are lucky to be part of such a wonderful and beautiful island and if we all can do our bit to help, we will succeed”.
