The Life Changing Moment
In Josh’s final year of Environmental Science at University he went to escape the stresses of revision and ventured to his nearest beach – a quiet bay in East Cornwall called Whitsand. When he got down to the beach to clear his head he was not expecting to see what he saw.
Billions of micro plastic nurdles washed in with every wave. It was heartbreaking and truly the most shocking environmental issue Josh had ever seen, and it was only 10 miles from his home. This was the day he founded Nurdle as he simply had to do something about this.
Young Nurdle
Nurdle as a business looked totally different all those years ago. Josh went to work removing the pollution with dustpans and brushes and floating the micro-plastics in water to get them off the beach. He then built a business plan and obtained a grant from Plymouth University to remove this pollution and up-cycle it into products, reinvesting the profits into further removal. But one thing constantly held him back, there were billions of pieces on the beach and he couldn’t make a real dent in the problem. He created a giant sieve in his kitchen to remove the micro-plastics from Tregantle Beach in Whitsand Bay.
Using wood, nails and very few practical skills, Josh built a sieve that lasted 2 hours; before falling apart.
He took the idea to his granddad and made plans to create a more substantial solution; the Trommel v.2!
Nurdle growing up…
When this was put on social media he had a flurry of messages asking to buy them, how to make them, to join in on beach.
Never did he imagine people would care enough to remove this pollution, but they certainly did.
He started manufacturing Trommels and selling them to businesses to donate to beach cleaning organisations, the beach cleaners get their tool and the business gets great advertisement and CSR boost, still to this day they are an effective means to remove microplastics and a beneficial tool for businesses who value sustainability.
With the help of Hope Buck, a dedicated environmentalist, Nurdle delivered 40 Trommels around the world, including two in South Africa and two in California.
Nurdle now…
Removal…
Nurdle is much larger than the young pup tackling nurdles back at University. But the key values remain the same. We now tackle microplastics, not just focussing on Nurdles, and we don’t just tackle one beach. In fact we’ll go far and wide searching for microplastic pollution to clean up.
We built a machine too! Which is towed by a quad bike and clears up the most severe pellet accumulation and microplastics. Trommels are great, but they were never going to solve the problem.
The machine was launched in January 2020 and has now completed 15 beach cleans, removing over 25,000,000 pieces of plastic.
It can even remove plastic smaller than a grain of sand.
Oh, we also partnered with Karcher – a world famous cleaning brand. They’re helping us in 2021 design version 2 of the machine and provided us with some specially adapted micro vacs (check out our blogpost here…)
Now, Josh has taken Nurdle’s back to its roots.
In a post Covid-19 world, where funding is difficult to obtain – Nurdle needed to generate a revenue stream.
The machine has conducted 15 beach cleans in 6 months, it’s simply not enough.
How are we going to get it out there more?
We want to pay a full time member of staff to take it out every working day, of every week, of every year.
If we can remove 25,000,000 pieces of plastic in 15 beach cleans, imagine what a full time member of staff can do…
The phone case is our solution – a stylish fashion accessory made from micro-plastics.
