Green Living Magazine: Green As It Gets

Jack Johnson is easygoing, but he gets super stoked about plenty of things: oranges from his own backyard. His neighbor's breadfruit hummus. The water catchment system he built with his kids and nurdles. 

Nurdles? Suddenly, I feel a bit lost during our recent phone conversation.

Before I can ask, he explains. It’s the raw material that makes up nearly every plastic product on Earth. In Australia, the discovery of nurdles led to a lawsuit against a major plastic plant. And tons of those same pesky pellets wash up on the shores of Oahu, where Johnson lives with his college sweetheart and wife, Kim, and their three children.

“Especially along the windward side of the island, where basically the island acts as a filter in the middle of the Pacific,” Johnson says, sounding more marine biologist than chart-topping, soft-rock recording artist.

In fact, if you sort through the trash that washes up, as Johnson often does, “you find all these little clues,” he says. Meaning, the beach cleanups he leads — just like so many things in his life — are more than meets the eye. 

Click the PDF to read more.