WARWICK, R.I. — Rex Willmouth crouched in the sand at Rocky Point Beach with tweezers in one hand and a sieve in the other.

Wilmouth and several volunteers recently covered 11 sites in the Ocean State looking for itty-bitty pieces of plastic, part of the inaugural International Plastic Pellet Count, which included 700 sites around the country and the world.

As Environment Rhode Island’s state director, Willmouth has long known about the hazards of single-use plastic, but when sifting through the sand he was looking for an even more pervasive problem: nurdles.

Manufacturers use the tiny plastic pellets, smaller than a fingernail, to melt down and form into the various plastic products they sell. But, as Willmouth described it, shipments of nurdles frequently spill out of ships, trains, and trucks and end up in the environment.

In waterways, fish can mistake the nurdles for food, then get the little bits of plastic stuck in their digestive tract, which can harm them, Willmouth noted.

“And then when we eat the fish,” he said, “we end up with plastics in our bodies, as well.”

To look for the tiny bits, Wilmouth picked a quadrant on the Warwick beach about 1 square foot on the wrack line and started sifting.

Surveying is largely meant to help figure out where the sources of the pollution may be coming from, he said. For example, at the West Bay sites Wilmouth and other volunteers visited, they didn’t see any nurdles, while surveyors in areas on the other side of Narragansett Bay, including Colt State Park and Bristol Narrows, did find the little pellets.

Although Willmouth didn’t find any nurdles, he did pick up bigger bits of plastic, such as bottle caps, pens, and single-use coffee cups.

Because most finished plastic products are made using nurdles, both the smaller and larger plastic litter are connected to the same problem, a dependence on non-degradable plastics, Wilmouth said.

Environment Rhode Island, along with several other groups, is pushing the General Assembly to pass a bottle bill that would allow residents to return plastic bottles to recycling receptacles for a refunded deposit fee.

The legislation in one form or another has made its way before legislators for years but has yet to pass both chambers and get signed into law, despite the fact support for the bill is widespread. Earlier this year, a study commission formed by the General Assembly recommended implementing the bottle bill, and a recent poll showed most Rhode Islanders want to see it passed.

Wilmouth hopes the report that comes out of the May 3 count, which will be put together by the organization Nurdle Patrol, can be another tool to push state officials to move on policies that would prevent plastics from entering and harming the environment.

“It’s a major issue,” Wilmouth said, “and we need to continue trumping up support for this.”