Nurdle

The team at Nurdle are committed to cleaning up the microplastics that devastate beaches across the UK. These tiny pieces of plastic are extremely hard to remove and even harder to get rid of once they end up in our oceans. Yet, removing these microplastics is vital as they are toxic to the environment. They kill the animals and sea life that eat them when they mistake plastic for food, they pollute the sea and they can even affect us humans.

Over the last few years, Nurdle have developed equipment that can help people clean up microplastics more efficiently. They have designed and developed three different tools – Karcher Microvacs, a Microplastic Trommel and a Microplastic Machine for larger clean-ups.

The trommel is a large barrel sieve with a handle to turn it, which removes and separates microplastics from sand. The user shovels sand from the beach, turns the handle which rotates the contents, sieving off the sand. With one person shovelling and another turning it’s really great fun and you can remove buckets and buckets of microplastic from the beach!

So far, Nurdle have been able to donate over 30 trommels to communities that need them. The plastic that is collected is then made into products that are sold to fund further clean-ups.

There are endless places where these machines would be useful, and Nurdle receives enquiries from as far away as Australia, the USA and Bali. However, the costs to move and deliver the machines are inefficient and prohibitive. Instead, Nurdle are looking to increase their impact significantly by helping communities to build their own machines from scratch.

Funds from the Matthew Good Foundation will be go towards version 3 of Nurdle’s larger microplastics machine, so it’s ready for to conduct large-scale microplastic clean-ups this winter.