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Place-by-place analysis as ideal representations of surface water plastics in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada
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Researchers studying Arctic waters in Nunatsiavut, Labrador found tiny plastic particles (mostly microplastics smaller than 5mm) in local surface waters, with a lot of it coming from everyday sources like laundry lint (washed down drains) and fishing gear. Instead of just averaging results across a huge region like most studies do, they looked site-by-site and found real differences from place to place, some plastic likely came from nearby communities, while other pieces traveled long distances to get there. This matters because Inuit communities rely on these waters for traditional food sources, and understanding exactly where plastic pollution comes
Abstract The Nunatsiavut Government (NG) has long led interdisciplinary contaminants monitoring in Labrador, Canada, with a focus on Inuit-led research priorities. As marine plastic pollution increasingly interacts with Arctic ecosystems and Indigenous foodways, community-based approaches to monitoring and mitigation should be centralized. However, typical Western academic approaches to plastic monitoring in marine surface waters often present results that are not well-suited to community inquiry. For instance, these studies present generalized results that focus on concentration of plastics across broad geographic scales (e.g., sea and oceanic scales) rather than at local scales. The present study investigates plastics in Nunatsiavut’s marine surface waters and outlines two methodological approaches to make results more relevant at the community scale. First, we create a method for identifying whether plastics are likely local in origin or from long-range transport, using both scientific and local knowledge. Secondly, while we make some generalizations about surface water plastics in Nunatsiavut where appropriate, we perform a place-by-place analysis that is more accurate and meaningful for quantifying plastics than regional analyses. At most of our sample sites, plastic was quantitatively (concentration) or qualitatively (plastic characteristics) similar to other studies from the Arctic, although there were differences between sites that would have been lost in regional averages. Most plastics were microplastics (<5 mm; 86%) and fragment plastics (50.6%, n = 86). Further, microfibers from wastewater (22%) and threads from fishing line (15%) were the most common identifiable sources of plastic. Our method for determining locality of plastic found that more plastic likely originated locally (39%) than from long range transport (19%), although 42% of plastic could not be identified by locality due to constraints of our novel method. We close by discussing how community-oriented methods and variations in plastics across sites positioned place as a central analytic for this study.
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