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A decade of summer tourist-litter dispersion and beach connectivity in the gulfs of Chalkidiki (North Aegean Sea): A Lagrangian assessment with open-data tourism-pressure weighting
Summary
Researchers tracked plastic litter from popular Greek beach resorts for a decade and found that almost all of it (over 99%) washes back up on nearby shores within days, rather than drifting far out to sea, meaning trash left on these beaches doesn't just disappear, it pollutes local coastlines and swimming waters again and again. This matters for your health because litter that keeps cycling near shore breaks down into microplastics in the very waters where people swim and where seafood is caught, and the study pinpoints specific tourist beaches (like Kallithea and Possidi) that cleanup efforts should target first to cut pollution at the
Mediterranean tourist coasts are intense seasonal sources of plastic litter, yet where summer beach litter actually travels, and which beaches export it to the wider basin, remains poorly resolved at the scale of individual resorts. We present a decade-long (summers 2016–2025) Lagrangian assessment of floating macro-litter released from twelve tourist beaches on two peninsulas of Chalkidiki (North Aegean Sea). Surface drift was simulated with the OpenDrift OceanDrift model forced by Copernicus Marine 4.2 km currents and Stokes drift and ERA5 winds, seeding plastic continuously through each summer with a novel, fully reproducible source weighting derived from open OpenStreetMap tourist-accommodation capacity. Across all ten summers, 99.83–100.00% of released litter stranded locally within the wider Chalkidiki region, close to its source and, in the great majority of cases (≈88%), within the originating gulf, typically within a day (median net travel 2.2–4.1 km), a strikingly robust pattern. Source–sink connectivity, computed with a geographically calibrated gulf classifier, shows the Toronaios and Singitic gulfs to be net litter exporters and the Thermaikos Gulf the principal net importer (retaining only 78.2% of locally produced litter while receiving cross-gulf inputs). Only a small fraction (≤0.17% in any summer) was still afloat in open water when each run ended, a residual that scaled positively with summer Etesian wind strength (r = 0.41); physical export beyond the analysis domain was negligible (10 of 1.1 million particles over the decade). An export-risk ranking that combines release weight with cross-gulf leakage identifies Kallithea and Possidi as the dominant contributors to cross-gulf pollution and thus priority targets for prevention. A Sentinel-2 floating-debris-index analysis detects no persistent offshore aggregations, consistent with this diffuse, fast-stranding fate. The framework is transferable to any tourism-dominated coast and its outputs translate directly into beach-scale management priorities.\