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Tracking Marine Litter With a Global Ocean Model: Where Does It Go? Where Does It Come From?
Summary
Using a global ocean model, researchers simulated the movement of plastic waste released from countries around the world to track where marine litter ends up and where it comes from. The study found that ocean currents create a complex web of connections between distant countries, meaning plastic released in one region can wash up on far-away shores. The results are publicly available through an interactive website and provide a quantitative framework for understanding international responsibility for ocean plastic pollution.
Plastic is the most abundant type of marine litter and it is found in all of the world’s oceans and seas, even in remote areas far from human activities. It is a major concern because plastics remain in the oceans for a long time. To address questions that are of great interest to the international community as it seeks to attend to the major sources of marine plastics in the ocean, we use particle tracking simulations to simulate the motions of mismanaged plastic waste and provide a quantitative global estimate of (1) where does the marine litter released into the ocean by a given country go and (2) where does the marine litter found on the coastline of a given country come from. The overall distribution of the modeled marine litter is in good agreement with the limited observations that we have at our disposal and our results illustrate how countries that are far apart are connected via a complex web of ocean pathways (see interactive website https://marinelitter.coaps.fsu.edu ). The tables summarizing the statistics for all world countries are accessible from the supplemental information in .pdf or .csv formats.