Personal plastic items for adults and children are everyday beach finds. Lighters and toothbrushes are more common than you might think. Forgotten toys are run-of-the-mill.
Fishing gear lost at sea washes ashore too. Plastic buoys, trawl floats, hagfish trap funnels, and trap door clips all end up on the beach.
Shotgun shell wads and fragments of broken crates are wrack line staples.
At sea or on the beach, plastic items eventually degrade into fragments that make for a dirty drift. However, there are a few nurdles in the left panel below—they aren’t fragments. Instead, they’re small round pellets used worldwide to produce plastic products. Some of them, inevitably, make their way to the beach after spills.
