Nurdles: The huge, unregulated supply of plastic air pollution you’ve most probably by no means heard of

NEW ORLEANS — On an overcast day in April, at the fringe of Chalmette Battlefield, a couple of miles out of doors town, Liz Marchio tested a pile of damaged twigs and tree branches at the financial institution of the Mississippi River. “Normally I attempt to glance — oh, there’s one,” stated Marchio, a analysis affiliate for the Vertebrate Museum at Southeastern Louisiana College. She bent down to select up one thing with a pinch of her thumb and forefinger and positioned it in her palm for me to peer.

The item in Marchio’s hand was once small, spherical, and yellowish-white, concerning the measurement of a lentil. It gave the look of an egg, as though a fish or salamander or tadpole may just come wriggling out of it. Marchio passed it to me and grew to become to turn over a tree department floating within the water, the place dozens extra lay ready beneath. She made a valid of disgust. We had come searching, and we had temporarily discovered our quarry: nurdles.

A nurdle is a bead of natural plastic. It’s the elementary construction block of just about all plastic merchandise, like some type of artificial ore; their creators name them “pre-production plastic pellets” or “resins.” Annually, trillions of nurdles are comprised of herbal fuel or oil, shipped to factories all over the world, after which melted and poured into molds that churn out water bottles and sewage pipes and guidance wheels and the thousands and thousands of different plastic merchandise we use on a daily basis. You’re nearly indisputably studying this tale on a tool that is a component nurdle.

That’s the splendid adventure for a nurdle, however no longer they all make their method safely to the tip of a manufacturing line. As Marchio and I persevered to make our method upriver towards New Orleans’ French Quarter, she started amassing nurdles in ziplock luggage, marking in crimson Sharpie the date, location, collection of beads gathered, and the time taken to gather them.

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

At one level, at the facet of a levee out of doors the Decrease 9th Ward, she gathered 113 nurdles in 5 mins. This isn’t unusual: An estimated 200,000 metric heaps of nurdles make their method into oceans every year. The beads are extraordinarily gentle, round 20 milligrams each and every. That implies, below present stipulations, roughly 10 trillion nurdles are projected to infiltrate marine ecosystems all over the world each and every yr.

Masses of fish species — together with some eaten by means of people — and no less than 80 forms of seabirds devour plastics. Researchers are involved that animals that devour nurdles chance blockading their digestive tracts and ravenous to loss of life. Simply as relating to is what occurs to the beads in the longer term: Like maximum plastics, they don’t biodegrade, however they do go to pot through the years, forming the second-largest supply of ocean microplastics after tire mud. (A nurdle, being lower than 5 millimeters round, is a microplastic from the instant of its introduction, one thing often referred to as a number one microplastic.)

There’s a lot we nonetheless don’t find out about how plastics can hurt the our bodies of people and animals alike, however fresh analysis has proven that microplastics may also be discovered within the blood of up to 80 p.c of all grownup people, the place they are able to probably hurt our cells. We would possibly not devour the plastic beads ourselves, however nurdles appear to have some way of discovering their as far back as us.

In lots of the United States, the federal and native govt reply to nurdle spills giant and small in the similar method: by means of doing almost not anything. Nurdles don’t seem to be labeled as pollution or hazardous fabrics, so the Coast Guard, which typically handles cleanups of oil or different poisonous elements that input waterways, bears no accountability for them.

Likewise, maximum state governments don’t have any laws in position round tracking, fighting, or cleansing up nurdle spills; a spill is continuously an instance of serious confusion as native and state environmental companies take a look at to determine who could be accountable for managing it. Within the eyes of the government and each and every state excluding California, which started regulating marine plastics in 2007, nurdles are necessarily invisible. For all legitimate functions, a nurdle that has escaped into the wild might as nicely have entered a black hollow.

“Right here in Louisiana, we’re making those nurdles and principally spilling oil, simply in a unique shape,” stated Mark Benfield, an oceanographer at Louisiana State College who research microplastics, “And nobody notices it, and nobody turns out to do anything else about it.”

A nurdle continuously escapes from the plastic manufacturing procedure in mundane techniques, slipping into drains at factories or spilling out of shipment bins whilst being transported by means of trains and ships. When nurdles are being loaded into trains, as an example, they’re continuously blown into rail automobiles the use of massive hoses. The beads can leak across the edges of hoses at factories and out the edges of rail automobiles as they go back and forth to distribution facilities; Benfield and Marchio have each discovered nurdles lining the edges of tracks utilized by nurdle-carrying trains.

On occasion, alternatively, a big spill — continuously all through transportation — will ship thousands and thousands and even billions of nurdles out into the sector , coating shorelines with deposits so thick they may well be unsuitable for banks of snow.

In Would possibly 2021, a container send off the coast of Sri Lanka stuck hearth and sank, liberating an estimated 1,680 metric heaps of nurdles in an incident the United International locations referred to as “the one biggest plastic spill on report.” A few yr previous, in August 2020, a hurricane hit a boat docked on the port of New Orleans, knocking a container stuffed with luggage of nurdles into the Mississippi River. Masses of thousands and thousands of beads escaped from their luggage, coating native seashores in white plastic and floating down towards the Gulf of Mexico. They might stay lengthy after the spill; Marchio pointed to a small dimple at the facet of the primary nurdle we discovered that known it as a most likely remnant of that spill.

“Large spills, like by means of send bins and barge … that’s most probably about every year,” stated Jace Tunnell, director of the College of Texas’ Venture-Aransas Nationwide Estuarine Analysis Reserve and founding father of the Nurdle Patrol citizen science mission, which asks members to rely nurdles on their native seashores and makes use of the information to create a map of the air pollution.

The map may just simply be unsuitable for a map of plastic manufacturing websites: Nearly all of crimson and pink dots, which correspond to in particular top ranges of nurdles, seem within the petrochemical hubs of Texas and Louisiana. “What occurs each and every unmarried day — it’s a protracted downside — is the lack of pellets all through on-loading and off-loading and all through transportation,” Tunnell stated.

Most moldable does no longer biodegrade, and a spilled nurdle does no longer merely disappear. Many wash up on shorelines, like those Marchio and I noticed, the place they simply mix in with the sand, shells, and various particles; if undisturbed, they are going to most likely stay there for masses if no longer 1000’s of years.

A nurdle within the wild is a sneaky factor. Even sooner than it begins breaking down, it’s tough to identify from afar, in contrast to the plastic luggage or bottles we continuously go together with plastic air pollution. It does no longer give off a warmth signature or emit fumes, or create a sheen at the floor of water the way in which an oil spill may. What it does do is draw in poisonous pollution. A nurdle floating down, say, the Mississippi River will soak up the pollution driving along it whilst sloughing off the water, Benfield informed me. It additionally supplies a handy house for phytoplankton, which can pass on to draw zooplankton, which devour the phytoplankton and emit dimethyl sulfide — higher referred to as the odor of the ocean.

For plenty of marine animals, the odor of the ocean is the odor of meals. Seabirds like albatrosses and petrels observe dimethyl sulfide to find patches of plankton from afar, swooping all the way down to pluck their plankton-eating prey out of the water. A nurdle is the scale and form of a fish egg; its camouflage is just about easiest after a while within the water, taking a look and smelling like simple pickings to fish, birds, turtles, and crustaceans alike.

As soon as eaten, nurdles can tangle a creature’s intestines or make it really feel as whether it is complete, stated Benfield. A 1992 EPA file discovered that no less than 80 species of seabirds ate nurdles; Benfield stated that quantity has since greater than doubled. Plastics supply no vitamins to animals, however an animal that fills up at the beads will devour much less meals consequently, which means it will starve to loss of life with out even realizing it was once ravenous — particularly if its digestive tract is simply too small to move the nurdle. Images from the aftermath of the spill in Sri Lanka confirmed fish stuffed with the pellets, white plastic lining their insides.

Saman Abesiriwardana/Pacific Press/Shutterstock

Eranga Jayawardena/AP

Plastics are endocrine disruptors, which means they are able to stunt an animal’s construction, and researchers are learning whether or not poisonous pollution can move from a nurdle into an animal’s tissue and therefore up the meals chain. However measuring the overall affect is tricky, partly as it’s tough to grasp precisely what reasons a marine animal to die in an international this is more and more opposed to marine animals.

Combating nurdle spills, say Tunnell and Benfield, would contain plenty of deceptively easy adjustments. Corporations can position bins in loading spaces to catch any nurdles that fall all through their loading and unloading from rail automobiles, set up monitors on hurricane drains to catch beads that wash away, or make the luggage they’re packed into sooner than being shipped out of a sturdier subject matter so that they’re much less prone to break up open. Staff can double-check valves on rail automobiles to verify they’re totally tightened and vacuum up nurdles that spill onto manufacturing facility flooring.

Cleansing nurdles up when they’ve unfold thru an ecosystem is far tougher, and nobody desires to be accountable for it. Probably the most promising answers to this point contain machines which are necessarily vacuums with sieves that clear out sand whilst sucking up the nurdles. However they’ve but to be broadly examined, let by myself followed, they usually’d be of little use cleansing up beads within the water.

Nurdles have an important affect at the surroundings lengthy sooner than they’re shaped, as nicely. Nearly all of the plastics vegetation in the USA are positioned along communities of colour, which might be disproportionately impacted by means of business air pollution. The ones vegetation emit a poisonous mix of pollution together with ethylene oxide, styrene, and benzene; there are such a lot of petrochemical vegetation positioned between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that the world has turn into referred to as “most cancers alley.”

The tide might slowly be turning: Closing yr, citizens of Louisiana’s majority-Black St. James Parish controlled to lengthen the development of an enormous new plastics plant of their group, arguing that they’d endure undue environmental hurt, however the vegetation which are already within the house will proceed to pump out each nurdles and the pollution that come from making them.

As the sector strikes towards renewable power and insist for fossil fuels is predicted to top within the close to long run, the oil and fuel business is more and more moving its industry center of attention to plastic manufacturing. Plastic manufacturing is predicted to triple by means of 2050 due to a fracking growth in the USA that makes herbal fuel extraordinarily reasonable to provide. That can result in a upward thrust in nurdle manufacturing. The query on researchers’ minds is the place those beads will finally end up.

Mark Benfield scrunched up his face as he bent on the waist to inspect the sand beneath him, putting his fingers on his knees for toughen and taking a look a bit of like a human-sized query mark. “That is laborious in your again,” stated Benfield. “A couple of many years from now we’ll all have nurdle-related again problems. Nurdle-osis, like scoliosis,” he joked.

We had been status at the seaside at Elmer’s Island Natural world Shelter, at the Gulf of Mexico a few hours’ force south of New Orleans. The seaside was once empty except Benfield, myself, a few LSU scholars, and the occasional crab or seagull. This was once where the place, in 2021, Benfield had discovered masses of nurdles nestled within the dunes, indicating a spill someplace offshore. In the beginning, Benfield idea they’ll were the remnants of the 2020 spill in New Orleans. “But if we began to have a look at the form and the weights, they had been other,” Benfield stated, “so there was once some giant spill of nurdles that we didn’t even know came about.”

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

By the point Benfield and I went to Elmer’s Island, maximum of the ones nurdles had disappeared. Storms had eaten away on the dunes, and the wind most likely driven the beads inland to the marsh simply north of the place we had been status, the place they’d temporarily settle into the dust and turn into unrecoverable. Inside of a couple of mins of arriving, alternatively, Benfield discovered one hidden amid a pile of sticks that had washed up at the sand. “This will have to be beautiful fresh,” he stated; it had most probably washed in with the tide an afternoon or two in the past, regardless that there was once no option to inform when it had spilled or the place it had come from. Benfield produced a ziplock from a pocket of his shipment pants and dropped the nurdle within.

The sound of shells crunching beneath our footwear accompanied us as we made our method up the seaside; infrequently, Benfield would drop to his fingers and knees to test whether or not he was once taking a look at a nurdle or a shell. “I used to come back to the seaside to search for shark tooth,” Benfield stated. “Now I’m on the lookout for nurdles.”

That modified for Benfield after the 2020 spill in New Orleans. Whilst he have been learning microplastics within the Gulf of Mexico since 2015 and located nurdles within the Mississippi River all through earlier analysis journeys, he’d most effective ever pulled a handful out of the river at maximum; that August, they blanketed the banks. Benfield recruited Marchio, who labored for the Jean Lafitte Nationwide Historical Park on the time, to assist report the spill, and in combination they spent days touring to issues alongside the Mississippi River, laying down sq. frames and counting tens of 1000’s of beads within the house of a unmarried sq. foot.

As the local people discovered concerning the spill thru native information retailers and phrase of mouth, involved citizens arranged cleanup efforts. Phrase were given out that Benfield was once within the nurdles, and other folks started sending him samples. At one level, Marchio discovered a whole bag of nurdles, almost intact, beneath a wharf in New Orleans. The title of the producer, Dow Chemical, was once nonetheless obviously stamped at the bag, together with a caution: “DO NOT DUMP INTO ANY SEWERS, ON THE GROUND, OR INTO ANY BODY OF WATER.”

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Whilst Benfield, Marchio, and the volunteers busied themselves with seeking to report and blank up the spill, state and federal companies spent weeks seeking to come to a decision who, if somebody, must be accountable for oversight of the spill and any possible cleanup.

Whilst the Coast Guard typically takes accountability for cleanups of oil and poisonous elements that spill into waterways, it has no accountability for unhazardous spills. As a result of nurdles aren’t deemed hazardous to human well being below federal or Louisiana state legislation, a courtroom needed to come to a decision which company, if any, was once accountable for cleansing up the spill, stated Gregory Langley, a spokesperson for the Louisiana Division of Environmental High quality (DEQ). “The issue with courtroom motion is it’s no longer immediate,” Langley stated.

The Mississippi River, after all, was once no longer beholden to the courts; whilst the companies waited and debated whose task it was once to scrub up the nurdles, the present carried them downriver. “When you lose one thing within the river,” stated Langley, “it’s long past.”

About 3 weeks after the spill, the send’s operator paid for a small team of fellows with booms, leaf blowers, and butterfly nets to scrub up a small phase of the river. The voluntary cleanup, the DEQ reasoned, rendered looking forward to the courtroom a moot level; no decision was once made about which company, if any, would were accountable for the spill.

That cleanup team was once most commonly for display, Benfield informed me, and lots of the nurdles had already disappeared, carried downriver by means of the present and blown away by means of the wind. The DEQ nonetheless doesn’t know who can be accountable for cleansing up this kind of spill one day. “All of this is topic to courtroom motion,” Langley informed me. So the DEQ would nonetheless need to stay up for a courtroom choice within the tournament of a long run spill.

Benfield and Marchio have since turn into the de facto Louisiana outpost of a national effort to report, map, and, in the end (they hope) prevent nurdle spills. Within the aftermath of the 2020 spill, Benfield grew to become his lab in LSU’s Baton Rouge campus right into a type of proof room. After I visited, jars of nurdles coated the countertop by means of a sink; dozens extra had been packed into bins, in a position to be shipped to Jace Tunnell in Texas so he may just come with them in educating kits he sends to varsities across the nation. The bag of nurdles Marchio discovered beneath the wharf in New Orleans sat in a single nook, subsequent to a bucket stuffed with a mix of sand, twigs, and nurdles introduced in by means of a well-meaning native who helped with the cleanup in 2020.

When Benfield reveals new nurdles, he analyzes them below a spectrometer to peer what they’re made from; he hopes to in the end construct a database of nurdles in order that they are able to be traced again to their foundation. In a perfect global, he’d obtain samples of nurdles from plastics producers that would make that type of tracing more uncomplicated, however he doubts they’d be open to the theory; there’s no industry case for responsibility, he causes.

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“It’s ridiculous. If I went to the river and tossed in masses of plastic luggage, I’d be in bother,” Benfield stated. Beneath Louisiana legislation, he would most likely be fined someplace between $500 and $1,000 for littering, as a minimum, and need to serve a couple of hours in a clutter abatement program. “However as a result of (the nurdles) are so small,” he persevered, “the corporations break out with it.”

Being the documenter of plastic pellets is thankless paintings. There’s little investment for researching them, and Benfield, Marchio, and Tunnell continuously discuss with the air of other folks resigned to the apparently quixotic quest of tilting at nurdles. “Nurdles infiltrate your mind,” Marchio stated to me as soon as. “I’ve to needless to say my function is tracking, no longer cleansing. If I attempt to blank, I’ll simply get pissed off.”

So what does doing one thing about nurdles appear to be?

The plastics business’s stance on plastic air pollution at massive has lengthy been that recycling must be stepped forward. Extra accountable person habits and waste-management practices, the business line is going, will deliver post-consumer plastics again to producers that may reuse them. However a nurdle nearly by no means reaches a client’s fingers in its base shape, and asking shoppers to resolve the nurdle downside thru recycling can be comparable to asking drivers to scrub up an oil spill by means of protecting the gasoline of their automobiles. In contrast to a completed plastic product, the option to nurdle spills, like nurdles themselves, should be discovered someplace within the plastic manufacturing procedure.

For a short lived second a couple of years in the past, it gave the impression as regardless that the solution may just come from the courts. In 2019, a federal pass judgement on in Texas licensed a $50 million agreement in a case introduced by means of Diane Wilson, a retired shrimper, which alleged {that a} plant run by means of the Taiwanese plastics large Formosa Plastics had violated its allows by means of illegally discharging nurdles into the water in and round Lavaca Bay, at the Gulf Coast in Calhoun County, Texas.

The agreement, which was once the most important of its type in American historical past to end result from a civil environmental lawsuit, integrated a consent decree that dedicated Formosa to “0 discharge” requirements. In different phrases, the corporate’s plant at Lavaca Bay’s Level Convenience needed to prevent liberating pellets into the water or chance fines of as much as $10,000 for each and every violation within the first yr, expanding every year to a most of $54,000 in line with violation.

Formosa isn’t rather conserving its finish of the discount. Since it all started operations in June 2021, stated Wilson, a wastewater tracking facility set as much as stay tabs on Formosa’s pellet discharge has logged no less than 239 violations, for fines totaling $5.3 million and counting. “The imposing of this consent decree is the toughest factor we have now ever carried out,” stated Wilson, who at 73 years outdated has been an environmental activist for greater than 30 years. “You’ve were given to be on them at all times. Maximum of my existence is nearly full-time Formosa.”

For Formosa, which is the sixth-largest chemical corporate on this planet with gross sales of $27.7 billion in 2020, a $5.3 million tremendous is “nearly like the price of doing industry,” Tunnell stated. No less than for now, it kind of feels it’s less expensive to easily stay racking up the ones small fines through the years than to make any possible massive investments that will be had to prevent the nurdles from spilling within the first position.

Within the period in-between, Wilson informed me, fishers in Lavaca Bay proceed to tug up fish with nurdles of their guts; oyster fishers have discovered the beads nestled of their catch like pearls. The realm is house to a mercury superfund web page — an EPA designation for infected business spaces that obtain investment for cleanup efforts — that was once closed to fishing for many years because of the specter of mercury poisoning. Mercury has already devastated native marine existence; now, Wilson says researchers and activists are involved the nurdles might soak up the mercury and turn into vectors that may lift the mercury past Lavaca Bay. “Other people simply forget about it,” Wilson stated.

Mark Felix/AFP by means of Getty Pictures

Mark Felix/AFP by means of Getty Pictures

Whilst Wilson’s lawsuit was once a outstanding victory, it was once additionally a trademark of the trouble of addressing nurdle air pollution piecemeal. Wilson and her collaborators spent years amassing 1000’s of beads from across the house — together with one discharge web page in the course of the water, which Wilson needed to kayak out to — and it was once most effective thru accumulating a mountain of proof that she was once in a position to persuade a pass judgement on that Formosa’s Level Convenience plant was once accountable for the beads that had been washing up within the house. Attributing nurdles to a specific supply is tricky, and repeating the feat will require a equivalent effort for each and every nurdle manufacturing plant within the nation.

“I believe the most productive position to begin is to take a small step backward and acknowledge we have now regulations at the books already that should control air pollution and emissions from production and manufacturing amenities,” stated Anja Brandon, US plastics coverage analyst on the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to give protection to oceans and marine existence. “Specifically on this example, the Blank Water Act, roughly our bedrock environmental legislation.”

The Blank Water Act handed in 1972 after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, stuck hearth in 1969, drawing nationwide consideration to the rustic’s polluted waterways. Lately, the act regulates the release of more than a few pollution into waters across the nation; it’s a significant explanation why most of the country’s rivers are cleaner now than they had been 50 years in the past.

“Those regulations haven’t been up to date to satisfy the wishes of the instant,” stated Brandon. In lots of the nation, she defined, “plastic nurdles have necessarily gotten off scot unfastened as a result of they’ve but to be labeled or in particular categorized as a pollutant.” The uncommon exception is California, which in 2007 changed into the primary and to this point most effective state to move a legislation classifying nurdles as pollution to be regulated below the Blank Water Act, mentioning their contribution to clutter on seashores and the likelihood that they may well be unsuitable for meals by means of marine animals.

Lawmakers in Texas and South Carolina have presented equivalent regulation, regardless that each expenses appear caught. The Texas invoice, presented within the Space by means of consultant Todd Hunter remaining yr, by no means moved ahead, whilst the South Carolina invoice handed the state senate in 2021 however was once lately shelved within the Space.

Remaining the nurdle loophole, says Brandon, will require classifying nurdles as a pollutant below the Blank Water Act on the federal stage. Lawmakers have proven some toughen for this manner: In 2020, then-Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) presented the Smash Unfastened From Plastics Air pollution Act, which might have installed position wide-ranging rules on plastics and recycling.

Similar expenses had been reintroduced within the Space by means of Alan Lowenthal (D-CA) and within the Senate by means of Jeff Merkley (D-OR) in March 2021, however neither invoice has moved past committee. In April 2021, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) presented the a lot shorter and extra tightly centered Plastic Pellet Unfastened Waters Act, which might give the EPA regulatory keep an eye on over nurdles during the Blank Water Act; that invoice has additionally been stalled.

The plastics business is antagonistic to each expenses. “We don’t suppose that plastics belong within the surroundings. They belong within the economic system,” stated Joshua Baca, vp of the plastics department on the American Chemistry Council, a significant plastics business business team. That stated, he persevered, “The Smash Unfastened From Plastics Air pollution Act is actually a nasty piece of regulation. It has a really nice name. However it may be very deceptive to the typical individual.”

Law just like the Smash Unfastened From Plastics Air pollution Act or the Plastic Pellet Unfastened Waters Act, Baca argued, are disguised makes an attempt to easily close down plastic production in the USA extra widely. “We normally suppose that the most productive manner here’s to consider this holistically in some way that appears at loss throughout all the price chain and places in position best possible practices to keep away from the loss inside the surroundings,” he persevered.

Baca pointed to Operation Blank Sweep, or OCS, a voluntary program run by means of the American Chemistry Council and the Plastics Business Affiliation that’s supposed to curb nurdle leaks and spills however maintains no oversight mechanism and imposes no penalty for failure to conform.

“A lot of our corporations are placing state of the art generation inside their amenities … to make certain that they prohibit the lack of pellets happening,” Baca stated. After I requested Baca for more info, he demurred, mentioning the imaginable use of proprietary generation.

Formosa Plastics, the topic of Diane Wilson’s lawsuit, is not just a player in Operation Blank Sweep but in addition a member of OCS blue, a “data-driven VIP member providing” of Operation Blank Sweep that “complements the dedication to leadership, dimension, and reporting of unrecovered plastic releases into the surroundings from resin dealing with amenities.” Individuals obtain plaques commemorating their enrollment.

Neel Dhanesha/Vox

“I believe they’ve a large number of just right practices that must be necessary, however they’re voluntary,” stated Tunnell. “That clearly does no longer paintings. There must be responsibility.” One option to create that responsibility, Tunnell informed me, can be to categorise plastic pellets as hazardous elements outright, which might no longer most effective deliver a lot tighter scrutiny to the manufacturing procedure but in addition give the Coast Guard the authority to coordinate and carry out cleanups on every occasion a spill happens. That is one thing just like the nuclear choice for nurdles, and would certainly be the topic of stiff opposition from the plastics business if it ever turns into a question of dialogue.

For Tunnell, the stakes are existential. A failure to forestall nurdles from spilling can be like giving up on the way forward for our global. “On the finish of the day, it comes all the way down to the following era,” Tunnell stated. “Those plastic pellets will likely be round for centuries. It’s no longer like they dissolve. They’re simply gathering and gathering, and despite the fact that you’re in highschool at the moment, your great-grandkids will see the similar pellets at the seaside. So I believe we owe it to my great-grandkids and their great-grandkids to do something positive about this now.”