Saving Sea Life

The Stinger Robotics Yellow Team gave an in-depth presentation about the consequences of nurdles in the ocean to Congressman Greg Landsman over Zoom in early December.  The team is a FIRST Lego League Challenge robotics team, which is an international robotics competition specifically designed for Lower and Middle School students that presents an annual challenge for teams to research and design and program Lego Education robots to complete tasks.

Nurdles, or plastic pellets, are small lentil-sized pieces of plastic that are the building blocks for most plastic products. Nurdles are by definition a microplastic because they are less than 5mm in size.

One by one, students shared their research and the serious long-term effects nurdles have on sea creatures. 

“[Nurdles] get washed away by the current and end up in groups with plastic bottles, shoes, and plastic bags,” a student explained. “Usually, marine animals only eat them because they think they are fish eggs. But nurdles, when eaten, never digest because of what they are made of, making the animal seem always full until it dies of starvation. When a marine animal eats another animal that has eaten nurdles, it gets passed on to that animal and the next and the next and so on.”

The team also shared that only 9% of plastics are recycled. 

At the end of the presentation, students asked Landsman to sign the Plastic Pellet Free Waters Act, which would ban companies from dumping nurdles into the ocean. 

After considering the information students shared, and asking them follow-up questions, Landsman announced he would sign on as a sponsor and would reach out to the bill’s author to help make it a reality.