About This Lesson
Use this lesson when teaching plastic pollution, human impacts on the environment, scientific models, cause-and-effect
relationships, transportation systems, watersheds, stormwater, marine debris, engineering design, or environmental
problem solving.
Students investigate how nurdles can accidentally escape during handling and transportation and how spilled pellets can
eventually become pollution at Bob Hall Beach and in the surrounding coastal environment. Nurdles are small plastic pellets
used as raw material to manufacture plastic products. Before becoming familiar plastic objects, large quantities of nurdles
may be manufactured, stored, loaded, unloaded, and transported between facilities.
Students participate in an active investigation in which rice represents nurdles being transported from one location to
another. Rather than focusing only on whether a spill occurs, students collect quantitative data on the amount of material
successfully transported and the amount spilled. They identify variables that contribute to spills, analyze patterns in their
data, and investigate cause-and-effect relationships.
Students then use the evidence they collected to design and test an improved transportation or transfer system. Finally,
they construct a pollution pathway showing how spilled nurdles could be transported by wind, stormwater, waterways,
currents, or other processes until they reach Bob Hall Beach or adjacent coastal waters.
The activity is a model. Rice is not plastic, and carrying rice with spoons does not reproduce industrial nurdle transportation.
Students evaluate these limitations and distinguish between conclusions supported by their classroom investigation and
predictions about real-world nurdle pollution.
