THE VILLAGE
NEWS
28 OCTOBER 2020 YOUR FREE COPY #ALLOVEROVERBERG The next issue of The Village NEWS will be out on 4 November 2020.
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The Karoo Prinia, or Spotted Prinia (Prinia maculosa) is a small passerine bird and an endemic resident breeder in Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland. They will frequent fynbos and gardens where they are active gleaners of insects, from catepillars and beetles, to flies and grasshoppers. This youngster was spotted (and heard chirping) in Sandbaai. PHOTO: Taylum Meyer
Nurdles pollute our coastline Writer De Waal Steyn
weeks the nurdles had made their way down the country’s east coast.
C
onservation authorities have expressed their concern after large quantities of plastic pellets, known as nurdles, were found on beaches from Cape Infanta to Muizenberg over the past few weeks. In the Overstrand washed-up nurdles have been found on Castle beach in Pearly Beach, at Die Damme in Franskraal and the Silver Sands beach in Betty’s Bay. The public is urged to keep a lookout for these pellets and to assist with cleaning up our beaches by collecting and handing them in at designated spots to prevent them from ending up in our landfills. Nurdles were first spotted along our shoreline in December 2017 after two damaged containers fell off a cargo ship in the Durban harbour. Within
A nurdle is a tiny plastic bead, about 3 mm in diameter. This is the form in which virgin plastic leaves chemical factories. They are packaged in 25 kg bags and transported to other countries by the container load. There they go to plastic product factories, are melted down and injection-moulded into an endless variety of plastic products and packaging. “Because they resemble fish eggs and miniature jellyfish, any nurdles that end up in the ocean
are mistaken for food and happily ingested by sardines and other small fish, as well as turtle hatchlings and any animals PHOTO: that filter sea water to obtain Jax Bath, food – from tube worms to DICT whales. Ingesting plastic is disastrous, as many of the smaller animals cannot egest (poop out) the offensive plastic once it is in their gut. This makes them unable to take in real food and ends in a painful death by starvation,” says Xavier Zylstra, Deputy Head of the Environmental Education Centre of the Two Oceans Aquarium Education Foundation. He says when nurdles are viewed under a mi-
croscope they have a very rough surface. “This seems to attract toxins from the sea, making each nurdle a toxic mix of petrochemicals and other additives, along with the toxic coating absorbed from polluted sea water. Once this enters the gut of any animal the toxins are absorbed. The small amount absorbed from a few nurdles may not kill a small animal in the short term, but many of these small animals are eaten by larger ones and the toxins accumulate up the food chain to possibly kill or debilitate higher predators, like tuna, sharks, seals and dolphins – and make human consumers very ill.” The nurdles also affect shore birds that see them as food. Zylstra says it is doubtful whether the nurdles now washing up on our shores are part of the 2017 spill. It rather seems to be the result of a new spill, although it would be hard to trace from which specific vessel it came. Continues on P2
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