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Nurdle Patrol on the hunt for plastic pellets

Tiny, plastic pellets are washing ashore in Texas beaches by the thousands, and now they're showing up on Bay Area beaches.

“Nurdles are very, very small,” said Maya Burke, of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, who recently found two nurdles at a beach near the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

The lentil-sized plastic beads are used to make larger plastic products.

After discovering thousands of nurdles along the Texas shoreline, Jace Tunnell, the reserve director of the Marine Science Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, created a citizen science project called the Nurdle Patrol in 2018.

Tunnell said the group of volunteers, scattered across the Gulf Coast, have collected about 80,000 nurdles since November.