Six Letter Word
Hunt the word and get to know about the word
We have 26 letters, but the words we create with these letters are enormous. And, among the vast list of words, I am asking about one six-letter word.
What six-letter word came into your mind when you saw the title?
There are plenty of six-letter words, but here it’s all about the one word.
To get concatenated from a large bunch of words, the word that I’m going to explore here is that it ends with “rdle.”
From this, we can eliminate a lot of words, and it’s just a small bunch of words.
Another clue is that the word starts with the letter “N.”
From the clues, I could think of two words, Nerdle and Nurdle. (P.S. Based on these clues, I’m unsure if there are any other words apart from what I mentioned.)
Is it Nerdle or Nurdle?
Many would have known that nerdle is an online game people play with maths and numbers. When I think of Nerdle, the other two words related to Nerdle are Quordle and Wordle. Wordle and Quordle are also online games people play to guess five-letter words. All three of these are online games. And, I am not going to talk about the games.
The word is Nurdle.
It’s all about the Nurdle here.
So, what’s Nurdle?
Nurdles are plastic pellets that form fundamental building blocks of the plastic products of today’s world. Technically, nurdles are also plastic but act as the basic block for making the products. We melt the nurdles and cast them into molds to produce various plastic products we see and use. We make nurdles from polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, and other chemicals.
Nurdles are generally smaller, with a diameter of 2 to 5 mm. They are often in shapes like lentils or peas and are in a variety of colors, but the majority of nurdles are clear or white. Also, people might see black, blue, green, and yellow nurdles.
From the image, we can conclude that it’s hard to notice unless it’s in bulk. Even if the nurdles are in bulk quantity, we might misinterpret with something else like crystals or salt.
We get what’s nurdles, but what could be the ways they get spread out in the ecosystem?
The manufacturing companies make nurdles and send or ship them to the product manufacturing companies, and those companies melt the pellets into the products they want. Every year enormous amounts of nurdles are produced, but not everything is into a product. The nurdles tend to spill from the production, transportation, manufacturing, and other stages. When the nurdles spill, wind and rain wash them, ending in oceans. We often ship nurdles in large containers via ships across oceans, which can leak out of damaged packaging and containers and spill in large quantities in disaster situations. Either spiling on land or sea, ultimately, the nurdles go into the oceans.
The disaster spill situations we hear generally are about oil spills in oceans but not about nurdles. For instance, in 2021, near Sri Lanka, the X-Press Pearl cargo ship caught fire and sank. They had charred fuel oil, burnt debris, and nurdles; not many know this. People spoke about how the oil spill from the ship affected the oceans and ecosystem, but we hardly heard of what happened to the spilled nurdles. The nurdles washed ashore several days after the fire outbreak and went deep into certain ocean areas.
Recently people are getting to know that many nurdles are getting spilled. Mainly after the 2021 incident happened, some people learned that an estimated 11.5 trillion nurdles end up in the ocean yearly for various reasons. Also, they got to know that nurdle spills have become a common phenomenon in oceans. Many are aware of the effects of plastics in oceans, but how do nurdles affect us?
The nurdles affect the environment like other plastics, but the impact is worse than other plastics. Depending on the density, the nurdles can float in the water or sink beneath them. Species like fish, turtles, sea birds, etc., assume nurdles as food because of their size and shape and eat them. For some, nurdles get clogged in the digestive tracks and can weigh them down until they are unable to swim and die. For some, the nurdles give the feeling of being full, eventually leading to starvation and death.
Apart from the ocean, animals on the land also consume nurdles which immediately leads to death. When species eat Nurdle, they bio-accumulate in the body, which can be lethal for other higher species in the food chain, such as humans. Scientists have found microplastics in human organs recently, and this is fatal.
Also, The nurdles affect the characteristics of sand, like the temperature and permeability, which can affect animals like sea turtles that incubate their eggs on beaches.
Another disastrous issue is that nurdles also attract toxic pollutants like chemical toxins from water and adsorb the toxins. The contaminants remain in the nurdles and get to build up in the tissues of species that eat the nurdles. And, if humans eat such species, think of the worst consequences we could face.
We understand that the Nurdle impacts the ecosystem, but how long are nurdles there?
The first reported appearance of nurdles on beaches dates back to 1970. However, plastic production began in 1940, so nurdles have likely been entering the ocean since then. Nurdles remain on the surfaces for decades and centuries, polluting the biosphere.
In the past few years, the count of nurdles has been increasing drastically, and still, there is no warning in many places; In fact, many don’t know about the word Nurdle. Also, as the count increases, nurdles increasingly find their way into the natural environment, particularly the ocean, threatening various marine wildlife.
So, How can we save the ecosystem from nurdles?
First, still, there are a lot of people who don’t know what Nurdle is. We must make people aware of the nurdle’s existence and impact. When people are aware of the issue, they can think of some solution.
Before going for a solution, as we know, “Prevention is better than cure,” we can prevent the nurdle spill in all stages, like handling the manufacturing and transportation process carefully and packing the nurdles with the utmost care. Workers can vacuum up nurdles that spill onto factory floors.
Apart from preventing, Companies can develop new solutions to catch nurdles during loading and unloading. The pellet handlers can ensure no damage while transporting and improvising the entire process.
People will ask that this is a mistake made by the plastic manufacturers and not the consumers and what we can do about this. But as a consumer, we can reduce and avoid the usage of plastics. Since our needs increased, the manufacturing of nurdles gets increased. Also, we consumers can ensure that we recycle and reuse products.
The large plastic items that go into the seas get fragmented into small pieces as time passes and acts like nurdles; hence we should improve the methods of disposing of plastics. Also, if you live near a body of water where nurdles or any plastic waste are present, you can join in on cleanup efforts or start your cleanup of the area.
The unfortunate fact is that the spilled nurdles remain in the oceans or wash up on shores and remain on the shores unless we remove them, and it’s tough to retrieve. Over time, nurdles will break into smaller particles but will always be out in the environment unless removed by humans. People have found nurdles on beaches and near waterways like rivers and streams, lodged between rocks or amassed in seaweed or debris on beaches.
Some organizations keep drives on shores where people manually remove them from sea shores. Some organizations are collecting the nurdles using vacuum cleaners and other machinery and recycling the nurdles. One of the promising solutions so far involves machines that are vacuums with sieves that filter out sand while sucking up the nurdles, but still, the testing is in progress; Yet people are using the machines. Many organizations work differently to reduce and remove the nurdles, yet the outcome is poor.
We get a clear picture of the nurdles; now it’s time to think of innovative solutions to save the biosystem from plastics and nurdles.
