And suddenly I care about nurdles.

To the long list of things to worry about, fascism, climate change, and the increasingly menacing greek alphabet letter names for COVID, we can now add nurdles. Yeah, goddamn nurdles which, despite sounding like the stars of an 80's Saturday morning cartoon are actually tiny plastic pellets that are slowly killing us.

Ok, these are Snorks, but you could have told me they were called Nurdles,
and I wouldn't have questioned you. Also, they too live in the sea.

Each hat is another, irreversible
environmental catastrophe.

Huh? No, nurdles aren't the tiny plastic balls that come in facial scrubs, although those too are ruining the planet. Nurdles are the form of plastic that's manufactured and then shipped to factories that then melt them down and make things out of them. And according to this article on The Guardian, when a container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean, 1,680 tonnes--that's metric for ton--spilled out causing a disaster on top of an already heinous disaster. It's like a hat on a hat...of terribleness.

Pictured: the stupid-looking hat
underneath all those other hats.

In addition to picking up toxins, these nurdles are also swallowed by fish and other sea life which think they're food. And who can blame them? Fish aren't terribly smart and besides, not even millions of years of evolution can be expected to prepare them for our addiction to the cheap plastic nonsense we pile on massive, oil-filled, ocean going cargo ships. So in many ways, the real culprit here is us. Consumers. But that requires a level of introspection I'm just not prepared to deal with, so let's blame Amazon, and specifically Jeff Bezos. Like, personally.

Ok, fine, it's not Jeff Bezos fault...exactly. I mean, it is, but it's also Walmart, Target, and Ikea according to a new study put out by Stand.earth and Pacific Environment, two non-profit environmental groups who say that the four companies together generated twenty million tonnes of harmful emission between 2018 and 2020. 

Admittedly, I have no context for twenty million tonnes, 
but like, there's no way that can possibly be a good thing.

People have actually started saying
Happy Black Friday, which is like the turkey
wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving.

The pandemic, the study says, has only made things worse. Well, obviously, but I mean for the environment. The shipping backup leaves container ships idling in ports already choked by their fumes, and being locked up all day has created even greater demand for online shopping. Yup, that's us again. The consumers. Ever year at this time, we eat way too much and then pile into our cars to race to box stores to trample each other to death because retailers have convinced us Black Friday is a holiday. Which it's not. At all.

"I don't get it, we've tried nothing,
how come it's not working?"

-Far too many of us

If anything, it's kind of a scam. One we walk into willingly because we like Roombas and iPhones, but still, a scam, although we tend to call it capitalism to make us feel better. Which it doesn't, but my point is that in a country where a decent chunk of the population thinks vaccinations are a conspiracy, I think it says something that many of the very same people line up year after year because goddamn Walmart or whatever has tricked them into thinking buying shit at midnight on Thanksgiving is a tradition. Or that it can go on like this forever. 

Because between the nurdles and the shipping carbon footprint of shipping nurdles to factories that themselves generate pollution to manufacture products out of nurdles, which are then shipped again across the already garbage filled ocean to ports and from there to distribution centers and stores, we're locked in a pretty unsustainable, possibly unbreakable cycle that will only end when we stop buying so much junk. So...never?

"Yeah, but I mean, 4K...that's like four times the k's..."

-us