“Colleen has done a marvellous job for the community,” says Emma Stromvall-O’Brien, the owner of Shiraya Sushi & Deli, who rewards nurdle hunters with free sushi. “She has got everyone waking up like Sleeping Beauty.” Nurdles, for those not in the know, are tiny plastic pellets which can be opaque, like milky baby teeth, or transparent, like tiny teardrops. Thousands of nurdles washed up onto the shore at Shelly Beach, Warrnambool. Credit:Christine Ansorge They are the raw material used in almost all plastic products.

But nurdles are also an environmental scourge, making up part of the 8 million tonnes of plastic that flush into our oceans every year. Nurdles are particularly dangerous because marine animals - fish, turtles and birds - often mistake them for fish eggs. When ingested, they can obstruct an animal’s digestive system, leading to it becoming malnourished or starved. They also soak up chemical pollutants, releasing toxins into the animals that eat them. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video “This was first measured in 2001 by Japanese researchers who found that the plastic production pellets collected from coastal Japanese waters had accumulated toxins at concentrations up to a million times that found in the surrounding seawater,” says Dave West, the national policy director of the Boomerang Alliance.

Hughson, a video producer, wrote recently that she never made a conscious decision to “all of a sudden become some kind of eco-warrior or nurdlebitch”. She grew up in a beach-loving family in Warrnambool, a former port city that marks the western end of the Great Ocean Road and is famous for its whale-watching. Her plastic odyssey began last August, when she was preparing for brain surgery for a benign - but life-threatening - tumour. Plastic rubbish washed up onto Warrnambool's Second Beach. Credit:Rob Gunstone “I had developed deafness and severe tinnitus and could no longer cope with social engagements. My way of coping was to spend more time taking walks at the beach and in particular, isolated beaches.”

Shelly Beach is one such reasonably remote, rugged stretch of coast, and Hughson was surprised to find it littered with small white plastic sticks. A bit of research revealed that they were cotton buds, the sixth most common plastic waste item found on British beaches in 2016. Hughson started a group called Pick up Sticks to clean up Shelly Beach. “If we hadn't been monitoring Shelly Beach, the nurdle spill may never have been discovered,” she says. On November 18 last year, Hughson received a call from locals Stephanie and Andy Walters.

They said thousands and thousands of lentil-sized pieces of plastic were carpeting the tidelines: “You need to come down and have a look.” The nurdle spill was traced to a sewage treatment plant operated by Wannon Water, which releases treated water into the ocean. Nurdles have contaminated beaches in Britain and Hong Kong, where a devastating spill in 2012 released around 15 billion of the plastic pellets. The hooded plover. Credit:Justin McManus However this was believed to be the first record of a nurdle spill from a sewage treatment plant in Australia.

The stretch of coast between Warrnambool and Port Fairy is a feeding ground for the hooded plover, which is critically endangered in NSW, oystercatchers and migrating shore birds. There is also a small penguin colony in Warrnambool and a colony of the short-tailed shearwater - which has been described as the “poster child” of marine plastic pollution - in Port Fairy. “I had read that 100 per cent of birds had nurdles in their stomachs in a shearwater colony on an island north-east of Tasmania,” Hughson says. She knew she had to act quickly. A week before the spill, Hughson had watched the film Good Will Hunting.

Riffing off this, she set up the Good Will Nurdle Hunting Facebook page to raise awareness: “I didn't realise at the time it would be such a fitting name. Our community has shown so much good will in cleaning up the nurdles.” Warrnambool local Peter Furphy, who is critical of Wannon Water's slowness to act, says the community response was a “fantastic example of the power of Colleen and her authenticity”. “She is a well-loved individual in Warrnambool who has got incredible savviness with social media. We had schoolchildren from around the district on the beach before Wannon Water.” Colleen Hughson (centre) demonstrates how to collect nurdles to grade 6 students from Terang College. Credit:Rob Gunstone Almost two weeks later, a class two state emergency was declared.

“People said if it was an oil spill or a whale stranding they would know what to do,” Hughson says. “But people had never even heard of nurdles.” A year before Warrnambool’s environmental crisis, a Senate inquiry released a report called Toxic Tide: the threat of marine plastic pollution in Australia. Presciently, it recommended more effective enforcement of environmental laws in relation to preventing nurdles entering the waste management system. The government is yet to respond to the recommendations in the report. Environment Department incident controller Tim Gazzard (second from right) talks to his team during last year's nurdle emergency in Warrnambool. Credit:Rob Gunstone It is however poised to release six national targets to tackle Australia’s waste crisis over the next 12 years as part of the 2018 national waste policy.

A working draft, obtained by Fairfax Media, says one of these targets is to phase out “problematic and unnecessary” plastics by 2030. The Boomerang Alliance says the unintentional release of nurdles into the environment is already an offence in every Australian state. “To date, we have found no instance where our environmental regulators have issued a fine or penalty,” Dave West says on its website. Terang College students Gemma, Abbey and Charlotte collect nurdles on Second Beach, Warrnambool. Credit:Rob Gunstone In Warrnambool the beach clean-ups are continuing.

Nurdling is a painstaking task, which involves passing sand through a sieve, much like gold panning. “Everytime we get a big swell, the nurdles wash back onto the beach,” Hughson says. “A couple of weeks ago I picked up 4000 in an hour.” There are still more questions than answers. Wannon Water managing director Andrew Jeffers says the original source of the illegally dumped nurdles in its sewage treatment plant “continues to remain a mystery”. He says Wannon Water has installed additional screens to ensure no more nurdles enter the ocean and is continuing to clean up local beaches.

The cost of the response from Wannon Water alone is more than $330,000. Jeffers says Wannon Water will continue its investigation in an effort to help avoid future events and bring “a greater sense of closure” for all who have been involved. “We are also considering the possibility that the original source may never be known,” he says. Local investigative journalist Carol Altmann is outraged that no one has been held responsible for a “major environmental crime … equivalent to someone stealing half a million bucks”. “Wannon Water still hopes for a breakthrough but that won’t happen unless someone who knows what happened speaks up,” she writes on her website.

“And somebody knows. The person who poured the zillions of nurdles into the system knows.” Meanwhile, Altmann writes, people like Hughson continue to pick up the pieces. Hughson says the nurdle spill has changed the trajectory of her life. “I have got a passion and a drive and a purpose,” she says. Plastic waste Colleen Hughson collected from Warrnambool's beaches. Credit:Colleen Hughson

“When I was younger I used to care a lot more about the environment, but for some reason life got busy. It sounds awful - I got too busy to care. I guess now I have gone back to caring a lot more about what I do to the planet. I have a stronger connection to what’s important in life.” Hughson is currently making a series of short photo animations for an art exhibition next month organised by fellow nurdle hunter Megan Nicolson. “This is my way of showing the plastic waste that I've been collecting off Shelly Beach in a fun and interesting way,” she says. A seahorse made from waste plastic collected from the Warrnambool coast. Credit:Colleen Hughson “I do hope some people will recognise plastics in the pictures that they use and start to question whether a) they've disposed of them properly b) whether they could do without those plastics in their lives.”

Shiraya Sushi & Deli used to churn through huge amounts of plastic, including takeaway containers and little fish-shaped soy sauce bottles. When Hughson told Stromvall-O’Brien about nurdling - and asked if she could reward nurdle hunters with free sushi - the restaurant owner began to think about how she could reduce her plastic use. Now Stromvall-O’Brien wraps sushi rolls in paper and puts bottles of soy sauce on the table. The response has been encouraging: “Not many people demand plastic containers and most people are applauding. “The one who is the hero of it all is Colleen,” Stromvall-O’Brien says. “She started making everyone think.”

There is nothing like an environmental crisis to focus the mind of a community. Furphy says the nurdle spill coincided with the release of Blue Planet, a British nature series narrated by David Attenborough which depicted albatrosses feeding their chicks plastic and dolphins potentially exposing newborn calves to pollutants through their contaminated milk. Examination of a dead shearwater on Lord Howe Island reveals its stomach to be loaded with plastic fragments. Credit:Ian Hutton Furphy would like to see Australia lead the world in best-practice waste treatment plants that screen out nurdles before sewage is discharged into the ocean. “It was shocking for us to see one of the most beautiful beaches in Warrnambool - hundreds of miles away from industry in Melbourne - with all these plastic pieces,” Furphy says.

“It absolutely crystallised the consciousness of a lot of people. Shelly Beach is like the canary in the coal mine.”