Simmer the water, along with the bouillon tablets, sauce and spice mixture. Cook the noodles according to the package directions. Chop the pak choi into strips and divide between bowls along with the tofu and noodles. Pour the broth over the top, garnish with cilantro and fried onions and voila, your steaming bowl of noodle soup is ready.
Tasty noodles, as we know them, should definitely not be confused with the nurdles that are on the daily menu of many birds and marine animals on our planet. Nurdles are small plastic balls used to produce-you guessed it-plastic. Or rather, plastic end products, such as shampoo bottles and toothbrushes. Every year many billions of these nurdles are produced and shipped around the world and, because they are so small, billions of them also end up in the environment every year. Up to a weight of 167,000 tons per year.
As recently as mid-March, millions of nurdles ended up in the North Sea after a Portuguese freighter collided with a stationary oil tanker . Besides the fact that all these indigestible grains pollute the sea, when they come into contact with chemicals and a burning ship, they also clump together to form "plastic plankton. Unsuspecting birds regularly mistake the clumped nurdles for a tasty morsel, devour it and die a painful starvation, as the plastic lump sticks in their stomachs, clogging the gut entrance and suppressing their sense of hunger.
The nurdles that are not eaten wash up on the beach or sink to the bottom of the sea, where they disappear almost invisibly among the grains of sand. Although a group of volunteers from The Beach Gang has developed a vacuum cleaner to sift the nurdles out of the sand, with the current billion-dollar production of the plastic balls, it's still mostly just mopping up with the plastic tap open.
Are you looking forward to lying on a plastic beach in a few years? Then help us reduce the number of nurdles in the production chain! At Plastic Soup Foundation, we are committed to a plastic-free future. And we could really use your help with that: sign our petition for a global plastic treaty or donate.
Rynaldo Koerhuis (b. 1995) consults, sells and writes. For The Plastic Soup Foundation, he writes a blog twice a month on a current topic.
