Nurdle Soup

Nurdles are a type of microplastic that flood the marine ecosystem and are therefore consumed by a variety of different organisms. These nurdles are full of toxins and chemicals from residual flows from agriculture and industry. As a result, they not only pose a danger to the marine ecosystem, but they can also cause enormous health risks for humans through bioaccumulation. Plastic is not biodegradable, which means that action must be taken as quickly as possible before there is no way back. We are the Nurdle Soup team, a multidisciplinary student team with expertise in sustainable innovation, mechanical engineering and industrial design. We are working on the development of a filtering and counting mechanism in order to obtain data about this still fairly unknown problem. Ultimately we hope to be able to detect and prevent the leakage from industry. We are now iterating on different prototypes, which can separate nurdles of organic material in water in a controlled environment. When the nurdles are separated, both data acquisition and reuse is possible.