Imagine you’re counting tiny plastic pellets at the rate of one per second. One… Two… Three…
Now, imagine keeping that up, without so much as a coffee break, for the next 316,881 years — or about as long as human beings have walked the Earth.
Congratulations. You just counted the 10 trillion microplastic pellets, or nurdles as they’re sometimes called, that are dumped into the world’s oceans and waterways every year, according to research by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
And while no one can say with certainty how many of those pellets first find their way into the water here in South Carolina, testing indicates that the number is significant. Think millions, not thousands, experts told the Charleston City Paper this week.
In April of last year, for instance, a single Columbia-area volunteer was able to collect 4,940 nurdles in just 10 minutes at one location along the shoreline of the Congaree River.
Meanwhile in Charleston, volunteers routinely collect hundreds of pellets from sites on the Cooper River using the same process, according to Charleston Waterkeeper Andrew Wunderley.
“You just get down on your hands and knees and collect as many as you can in 10 minutes, which allows you to compare nurdle density site to site,” Wunderley said. “That’s how we were able to determine that the Cooper River is a hotspot versus other areas in the estuary.”
It’s findings like those that led Wunderley and his Columbia-area counterpart, Congaree Riverkeeper Bill Stangler, to begin moving forward this summer with separate legal actions against the companies they say are responsible for the nurdles pouring into the Cooper and Congaree rivers.
“I shouldn’t be able to go to a sandbar and pick up thousands and thousands of plastic pellets next to a designated wilderness area because some company decided it didn’t want to be responsible,” Stangler told the City Paper. “We filed this federal lawsuit to tell them ‘You can’t do this — and we’re going to hold you accountable.’”
Tiny pellets, giant problems
About the size of a small lentil, nurdles are manufactured and shipped around the world to manufacturers who melt them to create the plastic products we use every day — water bottles, toothbrushes, lawn chairs, home electronics, car parts and all the rest.
All told, industry experts say that adds up to about 60 billion pounds of nurdles produced annually in the U.S. alone. And because they’re so small, all it takes is a gentle breeze — and a bit of human carelessness — to move them from factory floors and shipping stations to the surrounding land and waterways.
That’s how 10 trillion plastic pellets a year wind up in the ocean, where scientists say they pose a serious threat to marine wildlife — and the food chain that ends at South Carolinians’ dinner tables.
Why? Because once they’re in the water, nurdles act like sponges, absorbing the toxic chemicals like mercury and pesticides around them. And because they look like food, fish eat them.
Then we eat the fish.
“These microplastic pellets are a serious threat to human health,” said Carl Brzorad, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) attorney who’s representing the Charleston and Congaree waterkeepers. “They get into wildlife, they get into fish and ultimately, they get into people.”
“And we know that someone is spilling large numbers of these pellets because we keep finding them immediately downstream in staggering numbers.”
‘Only a tiny fraction’ of the microplastic problem?
Filed June 18 in Orangeburg, the Congaree lawsuit is an enforcement action under the federal Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which allow citizens to sue if federal and state regulators aren’t addressing known violations.
The suit alleges that Alpek Polyester USA and the Eastman Chemical Company, which it says “co-operate” a nurdle production plant in Gaston, S.C., have “released large numbers of microplastic pellets onto the lands and waters surrounding the Plant and extending at least 26 miles downstream.”
In a July 21 statement, Alpek said it “remains fully committed to environmental compliance,” and noted that a recent S.C. Department of Environmental Services inspection “found no issues of non-compliance.”
On the same day, an Eastman spokesperson said the company “take[s] seriously the allegations made by Southern Environmental Law Center,” while stressing that it owns only a “a limited portion of the manufacturing equipment” at the site, which it says is otherwise owned and operated “in its entirety by Alpek.”
Nevertheless, the lawsuit states that the Congaree Riverkeeper “has recovered more than 10,000 pellets around and downstream of the plant” since February 2025.
“These pellets were generally recovered in time-limited sampling events by one to four individuals,” the suit continues, “and reflect only a tiny fraction of the total microplastic pollution that the plant has released into the environment” in and around the Congaree River and the Congaree National Park.
According to Stangler, the lawsuit was a last resort, after discussions with the companies broke down.
“We spent a year documenting the problem, building a case and trying to negotiate with the company to see if they would step up and do what’s right,” Stangler said. “But in the end, we had to start a federal lawsuit to hold them accountable.”
‘Significant harm to the Charleston Harbor’
At the same time, about 100 miles south, legal action in Charleston is still in its preliminary phase, and focuses on the other end of the nurdle problem — what happens to them when they’re shipped to plastic-products manufacturers.
In a May 28 letter, the SELC notified four entities — Agru America, Frontier Logistics, Ray-Mont Logistics and the S.C. Ports Authority — of the Charleston Waterkeeper’s intent to sue for violations of the same federal statutes at play in the Congaree case.
“These violations stem from the ongoing discharge and release of substantial numbers of plastic pellets, known as ‘nurdles,’ into the environment,” the letter states. “This unlawful pollution is causing significant harm to the Charleston Harbor, its surrounding waterways, and to the mission and members of Charleston Waterkeeper.”
According to the letter, the Charleston Waterkeeper has recovered more than 25,000 nurdles in “close proximity” to the sites since 2021.
In a July 21 email, Agru America, which uses nurdles to produce plastic pipes at a facility on the Cooper River, said it was aware of the letter, adding “we take environmental responsibility seriously and are reviewing the notice carefully.”
Neither the logistic companies, which transfer nurdles from railcars to shipping containers at their North Charleston Terminal facilities, nor the Ports Authority, which hosts their operations, returned a request for comment by press time.
In 2021, Frontier Logistics settled an earlier Charleston Waterkeeper lawsuit for $1 million without admitting responsibility after large numbers of nurdles washed up on Sullivan’s Island.
Asked if he plans to move forward with the lawsuits after the notification period is over, Wunderley said that would depend on how many nurdles keep turning up downstream — but noted that, so far, the numbers weren’t falling.
As a result, he said, lawsuits are sometimes a necessary enforcement mechanism.
“If industry self-regulation worked, we wouldn’t find the pellets,” he said. “But we find them easily and in high numbers.”
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