Tuesday 2nd July 2019
WHAT BETTER WAY to honour nurdle-picker extraordinaire, the wonderful Worth and Swanage lady, Mary Dwen, than by naming Dorset’s very first rotary nurdle filter after her?! Litter Free Dorset recently secured funding for this simple but effective device called a trommel, made by the great team at Nurdle. The trommel separates pesky micro-plastics (including nurdles, pre-production plastic pellets) from sand and will now be used along the Dorset coast by Litter Free Coast and Sea. Mary has spent countless hours on Swanage Beach removing over half a million nurdles using nothing more than a tea strainer. “If I stop one marine animal from choking or starving by doing this, it’s worth it,” she told us a while ago. She’s actually stopped this happening to thousands of marine creatures great and small, and helped keep our seas quite a bit cleaner. Some of Mary’s family and friends were in on the secret which we kept until this morning! The Mayor of Swanage, Cllr Mike Bonfield paid tribute to Mary’s quiet and determined work over the years. Mary won’t be stopping her nurdle-picking just yet but the trommel will helping to highlight the problem and is great way of engaging beach-users.
Charlie Newman giving the Mary Dwen Trommel a go, 2nd July 2019.
