The nerdle connoisseur

Alex Coolman

They were a big surprise in a report released last month about beach

pollution: hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic pellets, scattered

across the sands of the Orange County coastline in far greater numbers

than anyone had suspected.

But to Eric Bauer, they were no surprise at all.

Bauer, who worked as a junior lifeguard in Huntington Beach in the 1970s

and is today a lifeguard lieutenant with the Newport Beach Fire and

Marine Department, says he’s been collecting the plastic pellets for

decades.

Among those who know about them, Bauer says, the objects even have a

name, a term with a diminutive tone perfectly fitting to their tiny size.

Nerdles.

If you’ve never heard of nerdles, it’s not because they’re rare.

The pinhead-size pellets, which are the raw material for industrial

production of a wide variety of plastic products, end up on beaches after

they become trapped in urban runoff, Bauer said.

And they show up in very large quantities. Southern California Coastal

Water Research Project, which last month released a study detailing the

types of garbage found on Orange County’s beaches, collected 105 million

of them in just two months.

The sheer volume of these plastic pebbles was in fact one of the most

remarkable findings of the report, said Shelly Moore, a marine biologist

with the group.

But because nerdles are so small, Moore said, they have a way of escaping

the attention of the average beachgoer.

“Most people aren’t looking for them, and they’re not real easy to see,”

she said. “They blend in real well with the sand” because they tend to be

white or clear in color and not much larger than the grains of sand

themselves.

Fortunately for the progress of science, Bauer has been paying very close

attention.

In a special jar he keeps at home, Bauer has amassed a prize nerdle

collection. He’s got dozens of the run-of-the-mill clear, black or white

nerdles, but he also has a select few in hard-to-find colors like blue,

green and the extremely elusive red.

The jar also houses a small plastic doll, another artifact from his beach

scouring. The icon keeps watch over the collection.

“She’s ‘Nerdle Spice,’ ” Bauer noted.

For a long time, Bauer said, the origin of the pellets was shrouded in

mystery.

Some people thought they were bits of coagulated wax from surfboards, he

said. Others thought they were used on container ships as a sort of ball

bearing-style device to help move heavy loads.

The most arcane theory, Bauer said, held that they were the tears of

squid.

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report released in 1992 cleared up

some of the ambiguity about where exactly nerdles came from. The report

also noted that nerdles, far from being a problem limited to California,

are found on beaches all over the world.

There are nerdles in Costa Rica. There are nerdles in the Sargasso Sea.

Nerdles wash up in Alaska and they pepper the coast of Lebanon.

But Newport Beach, especially around the Santa Ana River mouth, is a

particularly rich hunting ground, Bauer says.

And while that’s not really anything to be proud of -- the pellets are

pollution, after all -- it does make this area fertile ground for a

nerdle obsession.

Just don’t go expecting to find a red one unless you’ve got a lot of time

to look.