Should we fight nurdles in national parks?

Plastics, politics, and parks as flag-bearers

A chart from page 7 of the TrashBlitz report shows types of plastics pollution.

I want to admire the 5 Gyres Institute, which fights plastic pollution. I was intrigued by its 2025 Plastic-Free Parks TrashBlitz project. But I was baffled by its report.

National parks are not merely public lands, but also a utopian dream of how Americans might relate to our most glorious landscapes. As such, they deserve to be pollution-free and climate-sustaining. But as celebrations of America, and thus of freedom, should they be so authoritarian as to ban disposable plastic products? Like so much else in the world, a proposed law has become a partisan football.

In support of the proposed law, 5 Gyres’ TrashBlitz project documented trash at national parks. The more knowledge the better, right? And yet: knowledge, science, and advocacy—they’re all so in flux.

In the citizen science project, volunteers documented trash at 59 sites, mostly but not entirely units of the National Park Service. The report’s methodology identifies it as “a sample of plastic waste found across U.S. National Parks and federal lands” rather than a comprehensive study, much less a peer-reviewed one. Nevertheless, we could learn something, yes?

We learn that 84.7% of the trash is “plastic or plastic-mixed material” such as “fragments, bottle caps and rings, food wrappers, and cigarette butts.” This did not surprise me, although I’m not sure the precision of the results warrants a decimal point in the percentage.

Then we learn that “pre-production plastic pellets dominated the dataset this year.” A chart shows that the volunteers identified more than 10,000 of these pellets, as opposed to roughly 1,000 each of food wrappers and cigarette butts.

According to a linked report, these pellets are “the raw material used to make familiar plastic products like water bottles, grocery bags, and polystyrene foam takeout containers.” And they’re known as nurdles.

I had never before heard of nurdles (fun word!). I don’t recall seeing them in national parks. That could be my ignorance—they’re typically less than 5 mm in size, and several volunteers are quoted as saying they’d never noticed them either. But might it also be a product of the locations chosen for this study?

Nurdle pollution is especially evident in lakes, rivers, and oceans. Such locations—as opposed to parks of “the traditionally understood sense” such as Yellowstone, Glacier, Arches, and Zion—dominated the TrashBlitz study. For example, 3,070 pellets were found at the Charleston Historic District (near several South Carolina plastics manufacturers, but not a Park Service site).

Now that I know about nurdle pollution, I would support reasonable legislation to curb it. But should those efforts center on national parks? Surely nurdles afflict all aquatic environments, not just Park Service ones. The report’s conclusion that nurdles are a particular problem for parks feels disingenuous. And that finding feels misaligned to its chief recommendation—that everyone support the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act, which would mandate banning the sale of single-use plastics in parks.

Still, I’m hesitant to criticize the report, because if it hadn’t been written and publicized, I wouldn’t have heard about nurdles. Maybe using national parks as a beachhead to fight plastics pollution—as nurdle drama!—is worth it?

I’m not going to answer that question here. I can imagine becoming persuaded that yes is the appropriate answer, but I’m also impressed by the more reasoned approach of organizations like Yellowstone Forever. Instead, I’d like to emphasize the importance of the question.

What role do we want national parks to play in our national discussions? The parks have such stellar reputations, and are associated with such utopian visions, that they become flag-bearers for all sorts of policies. It’s not just nurdles. Whether you want to loosen gun laws or tighten air pollution laws, you often focus on their effects inside national parks.

Which often leads you to focus on their causes inside national parks. Should national parks be leaders in environmental practices? When it comes to clamping down on littering or banning billboards, support is widespread. When it comes to encouraging recycling, even in a remote park like Yellowstone, the results have been positive.

But the parks have always prided themselves on being non-political. And some of today’s environmental-practice reforms are politically controversial. Should park entrance gates give preferential treatments to electric vehicles or carpoolers? Should park restaurants feature only local products (or only organic ones, or only healthy ones)? Should park convenience stores carry only granola bars rather than potato chips? (Should they measure the sugar in those granola bars?) Should nature-oriented parks ban noisy Harley-Davidson motorcycles? Or maybe ban all individual vehicles, forcing people onto buses?

It’s terrific that national parks can inspire in us the emotions that lead to the desire to make parks a flag-bearer for these or other issues of environmental politics. Yet I’m also mindful of the traditional military idea of the flag-bearer: a soldier who symbolizes the unit’s cause and honor, who inspires bravery and cohesion amid chaos, yet who is typically unarmed and a primary target for enemy fire. Who is, thus, the first to die.

In the end, to me, the biggest thing about tiny nurdles is not how to fight them, but how they illuminate the glory of national parks.

End notes:

• Thanks to National Parks Traveler for alerting me to the nurdle study.