Spotlight on Nurdle

The British organization Nurdle have come up with three separate machines for collecting microplastics (and in particular nurdles) from beaches. According to their website, the Trommel is a hand-operated drum whose filter separates small plastic nurdles from the sand. By shovelling sand into the drum and slowly spinning it around, the sand falls through the holes leaving only the plastic. Nurdle vacuums are just that, hand-hand vacuum cleaners which can suck up larger plastic items from the beach, while the Nurdle Machine is the size of a sit-on lawn mower and sucks up litter like a big vacuum cleaner, filtering out the plastic from natural debris inside the machine and collecting the microplastics. Nurdle finance their cleanups by creating and selling products from the plastic they collect and are planning to create an open source guide so that anyone can build their Trommel. 

See the short film here for how it works in practice:

Spotlight on Hoola One

Hoola One Technologies Inc. is a Canadian startup, offering a solution to microplastic debris on beaches, and in particular nurdles, using the principle of buoyancy. Their website introduces their three units: the central unit Hoola One micro vacuums plastic, sand, wood and debris into a container full of water. The microplastics float but the sand sinks, allowing for the collection of plastic down to 0.05 mm and for the separated sand to be returned to the beach. Complementing the HO micro, the HO Wrack uses a single-module innovative sieving technology to collect plastics while the HO Backpack is a hand-held device with vacuum technology for beach surface cleaning, capable of collecting plastics up to about 15 cm in length. 

Spotlight on Project BB

Project BB’s BeachBot, designed by students from the TU Delft in The Netherlands, uses a sieve to separate litter from sand combined with AI to establish what kind of waste it is dealing with. The beach robot can detect, identify and clean up small litter items, mapping and collecting data while it works. The robot learns as it collects: the more it cleans, the more it recognises.

Spotlight on Waterhaul

Waterhaul was set up in Cornwall in the United Kingdom by two marine biologists as a reaction to the growing amounts of plastic fishing gear collecting on the beaches there. Waterhaul is a fisheries term for an empty catch but recuperating or 'catching' ghost nets from the Cornish beaches is far from this. Not only are they cleaning the beaches and protecting marine life, it has also helped them start a business. All of the properties which make lost fishing gear such a problem in the ocean - its abundance, its strength and its durability - make it an excellent resource as a material. Working with mechanical recycling facilities to process the different forms of end-of-life fishing gear, Waterhaul produced their first pair of sunglasses in 2018 and now convert the ghost gear into a range of products, including litter pickers.

Spotlight on Clean4Change

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste’s programme, Clean4Change, is helping the government of Sri Lanka to clean up the nurdles that covered the Sri Lankan coastline when the MV X-Press Pearl cargo ship caught fire in May 2021 and sank just off the coast of Colombo. Carrying a cargo of chemicals and nurdles, the marine environment was polluted with the chemicals and 700 km of shoreline were soon covered with an estimated 1,680 tonnes of lentil-sized pellets, many of which with high levels of toxicity after contact with chemicals or fire. The Marine Environmental Protection Authority (MEPA) in Sri Lanka called in the military to clean the beaches but urgently needed equipment to help the thousands of volunteers finish the beach cleanup. This is where the German company BeachTech stepped in with a donation of 8 BeachTech Sweepy Hydros specialised in nurdle collection, supporting the Clean4Change programme. Each unit was able to remove nurdles from 4,000 m² of beach per hour, collecting up to 250,000 nurdles a day.

Spotlight on MBRC the ocean

MBRC the Ocean is a non-profit organisation based in Germany working to make ocean plastic a thing of the past. Their work starts with the simple act of cleaning up the coastlines, beaches and ocean fronts so that wildlife, locals and tourists alike can enjoy them once again. With over a million euros already raised to fund cleanups, more than 1,300 people are currently working with MBRC Cleaning Hubs around the world from Iceland to Tanzania and the United States of America to Japan. 

MBRC is working with local communities in some of the most plastic-impacted regions of the world. MBRC hires staff on the ground and provides the tools to help clean up local beaches. By providing wages, education and on-the-ground support, it is working with local communities, volunteers and cleanup groups alike to rid the ocean of plastic both now and long into the future.