Oceans

Through a review of the scientific literature on the environmental impacts of plastics, the research team shows that plastic pollution is now altering some major processes at the scale of the entire Earth system. This impact extends to global issues like climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and the use of freshwater and land.

This investigation uncovers shocking evidence of how bad actors exploit regulatory weaknesses and legal loopholes in the global plastic waste trade, fuelling a thriving illegal market. The global plastic waste trade continues to pose significant environmental and health risks, and causes huge amounts of pollution of land, air and even soil.

The report presents numbers and figures of the 2024 Great Global Nurdle Hunt. Nurdles are plastic pellets produced from fossil fuels, recycled or biobased material. Each year, due to mismanagement across the entire supply chain and a lack of regulation, over 445,000 t of nurdles spill into the environment around the world, making them a major source of primary microplastic pollution.

Plastic clean-ups have proliferated in response to the growing plastic crisis. Such clean-ups may involve large-scale unsupervised methods of plastic collection that do not discriminate between aquatic life, plastic and organic matter. As a result, the rise of these plastic cleanup technologies has raised red flags in civil society and academia.

This analysis found that a 10-percentage point increase in reusable packaging by 2030 can eliminate over 1 trillion single-use plastic bottles and cups. This shift has the potential to prevent up to 153 billion of these containers from entering the world’s oceans and waterways.

The study shows the widespread use of and contamination by PFAS in disposable food packaging and tableware in six European countries: the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

The Nurdle Hub proposes solutions to plastic pellet pollution and offers a variety of resources and initiatives in order to tackle nurdle pollution.

The Great Nurdle Hunt is Fidra’s flagship project working to end nurdle pollution. We provide the tools and information so that anyone can contribute to, and build evidence of this, issue.