What’s a nurdle? You're soaking in it.

Nurdles are 5-millimeter-diameter pre-production plastic pellets manufactured by the bazillions and melted into myriad plastic products, including, probably, parts of the computer you’re using right now.

They are, according to this Sierra Club story, the beginning of plastic’s “life cycle,” ending with oceans polluted in ways unfathomably large and small.

• Large: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, now at least twice the size of Texas is the largest garbage dump in the world. According to the Sierra Club, it might be much larger, “as much as 5 million square miles, or one and a half times the size of the United States. Sailors encounter it within 500 miles of the California coast and 200 miles off Japan.”

• Small: Ocean-going plastics, however, don’t just stick together in a tidy gyre in the water. Plastics eventually break down.
  Entire beaches are now saturated with tiny grains of plastics, including “Hawaii's Kamilo Beach, which has been called the most plasticized beach in the world.”
  Some pieces of plastic are tiny, “specks of polypropylene, polyethylene and polyester as small as 20 microns across, narrower in breadth than a human hair.”

What do you think of all this plastic pollution? Write me here to share your thoughts or comment below.

(Thanks to Karen Erickson of Everett for sending the Sierra link.)