The Great Nurdle Hunt 

\What are nurdles? 
Nurdles are tiny plastic pellets. They have been used in plastic manufacturing since the 1900s (Galgani and Rangel-Buitrago, 2024), and are frequently subject to major spillages wherein millions of tiny nurdles are lost to the environment.  Annually, these spillages release atleast 445,000 tonnes of nurdles into the natural world (Galgani and Rangel-Buitrago, 2024). Being so small, once released they are likely to flush through drains into the ocean (Fidra, 2025a). 
Once in the ocean, nurdles can be highly toxic to animals (Mehrotra-Varma and Tunnell, 2023) and may promote the concentrating of dangerous chemicals (Fidra, 2025a). They are also more or less impossible to remove from marine environments, but somehow are yet to be classed as a pollutant (Mehrotra-Varma and Tunnell, 2023). Not even time will fully degrade a nurdle, as they simply continue to breakdown into yet smaller microplastics (Fidra, 2025a).
With limited regulation and little scope for remediation, citizen science projects such as the Great Nurdle Hunt are critical for raising awareness of the issue. Only by drawing attention to the problem will companies and governments be convinced to actively reduce nurdle pollution (Fidra, 2025a). 

The Great Nurdle Hunt 
For over a decade now the Great Nurdle Hunt by Fidra has been gathering data about the distribution of nurdles around the globe. Anyone can undertake a nurdle hunt simply by counting the nurdles on a small area of a beach, then logging the results on the nurdle hunt site: https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/. As of 2024, the project has resulted in 7,949 nurdle hunts across 81 countries, with only 1 in 10 hunts reporting 0 nurdles (Fidra, 2025b). 

East Grampian Results:
Along the EGCP coastline there seem to be a few nurdle hotspot (fig. 2). The worst area is around Newburgh (fig. 3) with two hunts recording >1000 nurdles and five recording between 100 – 1000*.  Hunts around Aberdeen City returned mixed results, with the highest nurdle concentration identified around Donmouth. Further South towards Montrose also reports mixed results. It should be noted that data is missing from much of the coastline, so it is hard to say definitively which beaches are most polluted with nurdles.                                    *the results key can be seen in figure 1

Scotland Wide Results:
Every hunt undertaken in Scotland is shown in figure 4. The highest number of hunts appear to have taken place along the East coast and around Ayrshire. Scotland’s results are mixed overall, with a few nurdle free hotspots along the Moray Firth and to the Northwest. The Firth of Forth was generally found to be high in nurdles, as well as the coastline between Irvine and West Kilbride. 

Europe Wide Results:
In the European context shown in figure 5, Scotland seems somewhat greener (lower in nurdles) than the European average. Spain and Portugal mostly report from 100 to >1000 nurdles per hunt (aside from the south coast of Portugal), while Italy most commonly reports 1 – 30. France, Spain and Southern England also report far fewer hunts finding 0 nurdles than have been recorded in Scotland. 

All nurdle hunt data and map images are from Fidra (2025a)