The sand is littered with what look like tiny gleaming pearls. It’s June 2025, and A.P. Aswin, an environmental scientist at the University of Kerala in southern India, is hunched over a square roughly the size of a sofa cushion that he’s marked out on the beach. The water has receded from the high tide zone, leaving the sand smooth and wet. Near the center of the plot, Aswin and his colleagues drive a long plastic pipe into the beach until it’s almost completely submerged. After carefully pulling the now sand-filled pipe back out, the scientists pack the sample away. This is one of 75 similar cores they’ll collect from 25 beaches along India’s southern coast over the next three weeks—a bid to scientifically study the environmental catastrophe washing ashore between Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

A month earlier, on May 24, 2025, the MSC Elsa 3, a Liberian-flagged container ship, was sailing up the Indian coast from Vizhinjam to Kochi when it began to tilt dangerously to its right side. The next morning, the ship sank 24 kilometers (15 miles) from the Kerala coast. Of the 640 containers set adrift when the ship sank, thirteen held hazardous chemicals. The ship was loaded with 84 metric tons of diesel and 367 metric tons of furnace oil.* But the ship was also carrying another pollutant—stored on its deck were more than 70,000 bags of a particularly pernicious cargo of tiny plastic pellets known as “nurdles.”

About the size of a lentil, a nurdle is one of the raw materials used in plastic manufacturing. Frequently shipped around the world, nurdles are melted down and molded into many everyday plastic products, from packaging and PVC pipes to water bottles, toys, and other household goods. But when spilled into the ocean, they can wreak long-lasting havoc on the environment and the organisms that live there.

As rescue efforts focused on saving the MSC Elsa 3’s crew, few noticed the roughly 1.6 million kilograms (3.5 million pounds) of tiny plastic nurdles quietly washing ashore. The nurdles had been packed in 25-kilogram (55-pound) sacks and stacked on the deck. In the days following the wreck, only 7,920 of the 71,540 bags of nurdles were recovered intact. The rest were adrift in the ocean. As nurdles began washing ashore in such large quantities that they could no longer be ignored, researchers suspected that the remaining sacks had burst open.

Salom Vincent, Aswin’s academic supervisor at the University of Kerala, says she and her colleagues wanted to measure the intensity of the nurdle spill: how many pellets were washing up, where they had gone, and how far they had travelled. But the weeks they spent surveying the beaches in the immediate wake of the shipwreck were heartbreaking. “The nurdles were constantly washing up—being deposited on the shore like a carpet with every wave,” she says.

The team’s work revealed two important difficulties of dealing with a nurdle spill. Because they’re so small and light, nurdles are easily carried long distances by waves and ocean currents. And, when they do eventually wash ashore, they can dig deep into the sand. Indeed, the survey revealed that the worst hit spots were near Kovalam and Dhanushkodi—beaches far from the shipwreck site where the researchers found nurdles in astounding concentrations, with as many as 1,500 to 3,500 pellets per square meter of beach.

Now, a year later, nurdles are still being found along the coastline, and the scientists say the spill’s true environmental impact may only just be beginning to emerge.

Undisturbed, a plastic nurdle can take thousands of years to fully disintegrate. But when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, the plastic gets brittle, allowing wind and waves to break the nurdles into ever-smaller pieces. More concerning, Vincent says, is how the nurdles may be affecting local wildlife. When nurdles settle into beach sand or seabed sediments, worms, shellfish, crustaceans, and other bottom-dwellers can mistake the toxic pellets for food.

“Nurdles can act like tiny sponges for pollution, attracting toxic chemicals such as heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants onto their surfaces,” Vincent says. “When marine animals ingest them, these pollutants may enter their bodies and cause harm.”

This is what happened during a similar disaster—the wreck of the X-Press Pearl off the coast of Sri Lanka in June 2021. The United Nations called the shipwreck and associated nurdle spill the biggest environmental catastrophe to hit the Indian Ocean since the 2004 tsunami. The ship was carrying 81 containers of dangerous goods—including at least 34 containers of plastic nurdles, the equivalent of approximately 84,000 bags of plastic nurdles like those found on the Elsa 3. Before it sank, the X-Press Pearl had been on fire for days. Weeks later, hundreds of dead animals—including turtles, dolphins, and even whales—were found washed up on shore.

Part of the problem is that, as a relatively new kind of environmental pollution, people aren’t quite sure what to do when millions of nurdles escape into the environment.

“There is a major gap in the global response to pellet spills,” says Dharmesh Shah, an independent environmental policy analyst in Kerala. “Oil spills have been happening for many years, so we have standard protocols and spill-response mechanisms. But with pellets, we don’t know what to do.”

In November 2023, the Environmental Investigation Agency, an advocacy organization, published a report showing how clean-up technologies aimed at nurdles often fail in practice. After the X-Press Pearl disaster, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a nonprofit organization funded by the petrochemical industry, donated eight “Sweepy Hydro” beach-cleaning machines. But a Bloomberg Green investigation found that just over a year later the machines were not being used because they could only clean the beach’s surface. Some were clogged with wet sand, and their operation was hampered by shortages of fuel and spare parts. In their place, local women were instead removing the pellets by hand six days a week.

Nurdle pollution is also bigger than just shipwrecks. Jace Tunnell, a Texas-based marine biologist, is the founder of Nurdle Patrol. For the past eight years, Tunnell has been training citizen scientists from around the world to track nurdles, and has harnessed this crowdsourced information to create a public database that shows hotspots of nurdle pollution—including, often, in areas around plastic production facilities.

“Nurdles can escape during production, spill onto the ground, and be carried offsite by stormwater if companies do not have cleanup systems, separators, or retention ponds in place,” Tunnell says. “Companies need to keep pellets within their fence line, but many struggle to do so.”

Nurdle pollution, Tunnell adds, is more than a marine issue. “In the U.S., plastic pellets are also transported by rail,” he says. “We’ve done 170 nurdle surveys along railroads, and out of all of those, only 10 didn’t have any nurdles. They’re also in the deserts, far away from the coast.”

Back in India, the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), the owners of the sunken MSC Elsa 3, deposited a bank guarantee of US $136 million with the Kerala High Court. The money is intended to function as a court-held security while the state calculates the damage caused by the wreck. To date, there is no public evidence that the money is being disbursed to support the clean-up.

So for now, local communities and environmental non-profits are cleaning up their beaches by hand, while Vincent and her research team are tracking how these polluting plastic pellets continue to evolve and decay.

“We don’t fully understand the long-term effects that this will have on our coastline,” Vincent says. “But there’s one thing we do know: Only effective policy and strict regulation going forward can save us from these disasters.”

*Correction: This line originally said the ship was loaded with 84 million metric tons of diesel, and 367 million metric tons of furnace oil. It has been updated for accuracy.