Nurdles. Such a cute word. Sounds like a pool toy or a board game, perhaps. But they are nothing like that. Nurdles are plastic resin pellets that are the base material for all the plastic things that are generally made. From water bottles to synthetic clothing to plastic shopping bags. These plastic pellets are used to make a huge number of materials that probably fill your house. Over 250 billion pounds a year are shipped around the world to make lots of plastic stuff. I found this bunch in just 30 minutes by quickly looking at the high tide line along an approximately 10 foot long section of beach. The sad part of the story is that this beach, Punta Uva, is widely called one of the most idyllic beaches along the Carribbean Coast of Costa Rica. (insert picture of punta Uva)

These nurdles were by no means obvious. Normally I consider Punta Uva pretty much garbage-free. The beach is almost always empty, just the way I like it. Most of the beaches here on the Carribbean Coast are, especially compared to some of the mobbed beaches in the NY Metro area that I’m used to. The only reason I was actually looking for nurdles was that I read this article about all the plastic floating around in the ocean, from the famous North Pacific Gyre to the various other garbage-dump like vortexes of the seas. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I’d actually find any nurdles here in Costa Rica. It was hard to believe that a beautiful place like Punta Uva would have such a polution problem. But I’ve learned that this isn’t a problem with just any one country or any one beach. This problem is so widespread and insidious that it literally touches us all. In just 30 minutes of looking around a tide line, I found that even in my new country, sometimes dubbed as an eco-paradise, the world’s obsession with plastic still penetrates.

We’re on the eastern (Caribbean) coast of Costa Rica this week. We’re staying in Puerto Viejo looking for a long-term rental. We want to live on the beach near beautiful palm trees and azure waters, and beaches that range from pristine white sands to the black sands of Playa Negra, which come from volcanoes. But what I discovered is that these “pristine” beaches are not so pristine. I guess I didn’t really believe they were totally pristine to begin with. I mean, I’ve been hearing that the coral reefs are becoming quite damaged due to silty runoff from development for quite some time. But those nurdles came as quite a surprise. I mean, they are hard to see. During the first 5 minutes that I looked for them, I actually didn’t notice any. In fact, I could have sworn that those nurdles were actually tiny stones. But then one of them caught my eye and I realized the shape was a little too regular to be a stone. But I didn’t have my microscope down at the beach. So I did what I thought was the next best thing – I bit the suspect object between my teeth. It was then that I became sure that it was made of plastic. It may look like a tiny stone, but it felt like plastic. Once I knew what I was looking for, the nurdles were easy to find. And they were everywhere. I couldn’t stop looking for them. Every time I found one I would cringe. A passerby listening to me would have heard a crazy-woman with her face almost touching the sand, shouting words to myself like, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe this!” I wonder now how many pieces of even smaller plastic were in my search area. I wouldn’t have been able to detect smaller pieces of plastic without a microscope, but I know they are there. After all, this kind of plastic never really disappears. I know from all my reading that it just breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, forming a not-so-delicious seawater soup. Soon we’ll have entire beaches partly made up of ground plastic, that is, if we don’t already have that.

Punta Uva, Costa Rica

When I came home and re-read some articles about floating plastic sea-trash, I kind of freaked. Evidently, plastic floating in the ocean is like a sponge for toxic chemicals like PCBs. I bit a few nurdles on the beach to see if they were plastic or rock. Granted, I spit them out. But PCBs? I think I might be radioactive right now. Think of that next time you get caught in a wave on your favorite beach and manage to accidentally swallow some water and a little sand. Likely, you swallowed some PCB-rich plastic too. You can’t escape it. It’s there, most likely on every beach in the world. And it’s not going away anytime soon. There seems to be no way to clean it up either. We don’t have special nurdle magnets.

Are you wondering how the nurdles got to my beach in Costa Rica? From all my reading, I’ve learned that there are several possibilities. One likely possibility is that they were washed off a ship. Millions of nurdles are shipped around the world every day, from plastic production plants to manufacturing plants. Just a pound of nurdles has about 25,000 pellets. Even when a ship loses a few handfulls here andthere, they scatter far and wide, travelling around the world. Sometimes they get caught in the North Pacific Gyre, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Yes, we have a garbage dump in the middle of the ocean, twice the size of Texas, and with no way to clean it up. And if those fallen nurdles don’t get stuck in an ocean gyre, they float around on currents until they land on your favorite beach. Or maybe they get eaten by some krill before that (and then the krill gets eaten by a whale). Or maybe a seabird gobbles it up. Back to the source again, maybe the nurdles are being transported by train instead of boat. But a pound or two falls off the train onto the ground. Then it rains and washes the nurdles into a stream, and then a river, and then right back out to sea. No matter how it happens, it all comes to the same thing in the end.

I challenge all my readers who visit beaches: look for your own nurdles. Do your own experiment like I did. Take a short section of beach and see how many you can find. Look close, and don’t mistake a nurdle for a rock. Maybe if we all face the hidden existence of the nurdle, we can all do something to stop this before we have entire nurdle beaches. Before all sea creatures (and us!) are poisoned.

I think maybe the best we can do at this point is to stop using all that plastic. There’s no other way. If we want plastic, nurdles will continue to be produced at a huge rate and will find their way into the sea. I mean, we have bigger problems than just nurdles anyway. I found many larger pieces of plastic on that day at the beach. Plus, many of those lovely facial and body scrubs we use these days actually have plastic pellets in them. Can you believe that? We are actually washing our faces in plastic and then washing the tiny plastic balls right down the drain. It’s mind-boggling. It isn’t just plastic pellets either. It’s the plastic grocery bags, water bottles, sand toys, and every other plastic doo-hickey you have in your house. Our lives are filled with plastic. The nurdles are just the most hidden evidence. They are so numerous, they won’t be hidden for long.

Look for them. I dare you.

More information on ocean trash & nurdles:

What’s a nurdle?

The World’s Rubbish Dump…

Trashed

Why Plastic is the Scourge of Sea Life

Message in a Bottle

I saw this thing clinging to the outside of one of our window screens after a downpour the other day. I had no clue it was so attractive at first since I could only see the underside of it. I sent Arp outside to collect it in a plastic bowl. All of us crowded around it while I snapped a few closeups. It was huge! At least an inch long, maybe even a little bigger. I love those crazy antennas – sort of like the hat of a Vegas dancer. But this bugger only stayed a minute, and then promptly flew off. I let out a startled scream as it took off – it flew fast!

Inside, we all looked it up in our trusty bug manual – National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders.  We are only sometimes successful in making an exact match with the bugs we find and one of the pictures in the book.  We often have to be satisfied knowing the general family.  But this time was an exact match – a grapevine beetle.

Here’s another bugger, a ground beetle, that we found the first summer we moved into this house.

It always amazes me how many interesting insects we find in this area and how the diversity of insects exponentially increases the farther you move away from New York City.  I shouldn’t be surprised, but I can’t help it when I am confronted by some new mini-monster.  I grew up in a town located approximately 30 minutes outside NYC.  That area had very boring bugs – some spiders, lightening bugs, lady bugs, and not much else.  Now that we are an additional 60 minutes outside NYC, it seems like bug heaven.  Those city folks don’t know what they’re missing.

The farm is a family-owned farm and they were nice enough to invite us for a farm tour the other day. We got a look at where our food comes from, and it was a great learning experience for us and the kids. It was a beautiful day to be out in farmland too.

The first time we joined a CSA several years ago we were concerned about getting vegetables we didn’t want or know about. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we had veggies that we HAD to eat. We figured out what to do with them, getting some help from the magazine Everyday Food which always had recipes involving in-season produce. We had shorter trips to the grocery store too, and spent less money overall. We learned about some great veggies, learned some new recipes and we’ve been firm believers in CSAs since.

As you can see, all J needs is a fresh string bean to make her happy. This girl is really into fresh food, much more so than M. She’ll run to the table if we tell her broccoli is on the menu. M likes veggies too, just not to the same extent as J. She seems perfectly happy with fresh, whole foods (though all bets are off if a bag of potato chips materialize).

What we noticed immediately about the farm was the dirt – it was DARK. Adina, our host and guide, explained that ages ago their farm had been at the bottom of a lake (we were surrounded by mountains in all distances). All sorts of material decomposed to create the beautiful, black dirt. They also find fossils and arrowheads periodically – how cool is that?!

Here we are with Adina, standing in one of the roads the tractors take. To the left is corn ready for harvesting. We got to pick some and eat it right there – and it was SWEET. We learned last summer that corn starts losing sugars the second it gets picked, so there’s nothing better than freshly picked corn. J chowed down on 2 ears immediately.

We were then joined by Adina’s MIL Doris, who moved to the farm after marrying Frank (whose father started the farm in 1939). She is a gregarious woman whose love for the farm is utterly infectious. She also said that the baby corn they had was not the same species that is commonly used for Asian cuisine but that it tasted just as good. Trish can confirm that was true.

Another interesting fact was that they had several plantings of corn, all at different stages of growth. This allowed them to have a supply of corn to sell throughout the summer. I’ve always had this idea that people plant One Big Crop resulting in One Big Harvest when people work night and day to harvest the crop. I only know of farms through books or the media, so while it may be true for a monoculture farm, it’s not the case here.

Food we’ve gotten so far includes green beans, corn, popcorn, a variety of lettuce, arugula,tatsoi, bok choi, swiss chard, potatoes, beets. carrots, radishes, white turnips, garlic & garlic scapes (the garlic greens, which can be easily substituted for garlic), shallots and their greens, shell & sugar snap peas, spinach and kirby cucumbers.

We also got a sneak preview of what to look forward to, the highlights being heirloom tomatoes and artichokes.

Touring the farm was great for us and the kids and it does inspire us to farm. I don’t think I want to make a living at farming, but I’d love to grow the food we eat.

Here are our upcoming heirloom tomatoes, with a field of beautiful black dirt. You can see a tractor way in the back. On a windy day, the bamboo stakes whistle sweetly.

A field of onions. (I think)

M running next to the Field of Onions. You can see a couple of other crop in the distance, as well as the mountains. The bushy stuff to the left of the track is basil. It smelled wonderful, and we picked some to use for dinner that night.

Two crops of corn – the one on the right with the pollen is almost ready, the next batch after the ones we got to pick earlier. Doris told us that each hair in an ear goes to exactly one kernel. I’d never paid attention to that before. Corn can also self-pollinate, which must make it a relatively easy crop to grow.

Ah dirt. Every child should have the opportunity to wallow in it.

Behold a baby radish!

J didn’t have the same energy as M, who ran a LOT.

My hot patootie

Cameron P. Wake, a research associate professor at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said that winter temperatures in the Northeast have increased an average of 4.3 degrees over the last 30 years.

That’s quite a bit more than the figure of 0.6 degrees that a future preacher was learning to memorize in Jesus Camp. Yesterday I was reminiscing about Christmas as a kid, and how my perfect Christmas involved a snowy night and a nice fresh blanket of snow to play in the next day. I think this last occurred in 1979 or so. M’s been asking where’s the snow and we’ve been wondering ourselves. This warmth might feel good and be good for our heating bills, but it is truly disturbing.

OK – the title over-dramatizes our life without mindless tv watching, but it was coincidental that our current subscription started the day I cancelled the satellite tv. They seemed to have paused a bit after cashing our check (a sweet $10 subscription that came out of nowhere) and sent 3 at once. I think we last had a subscription maybe 3 years ago, and it’s like welcoming an old friend back into the house. Except this friend never runs out of cool stories and let’s us decide which vacation slides to skip.