Buggy sucks up nasty nurdles on beaches It was after a beach clean-up in Cape Town early last year that an exasperated Chris Krauss phoned his father-in-law, Luigi Faccio. Krauss and other members of the #SeaTheBiggerPicture, an ocean conservation initiative, were frustrated by trying to remove microplastics — nurdles — by hand. The lentil-size plastic particles spread insidiously across beaches. “Chris said to me: ‘Listen, can’t we do something, try to organise a vacuum, that we can clean the beaches with?’ ” recalls Faccio. Faccio, who runs Matriarch Generic Engineering in Germiston, was intrigued. Together with the #SeaTheBiggerPicture team, his firm developed the Enviro Buggy, a four-wheeled, self-propelled stainless steel and aluminium vacuum cleaner that sucks up microplastics on beaches.