Plastic waste discharge to the global ocean constrained by seawater observations.
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Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36914656.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-37108-5 and PMC identifier 10011382.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Marine plastic pollution poses a potential threat to the ecosystem, but the sources and their magnitudes remain largely unclear. Existing bottom-up emission inventories vary among studies for two to three orders of magnitudes (OMs). Here, we adopt a top-down approach that uses observed dataset of sea surface plastic concentrations and an ensemble of ocean transport models to reduce the uncertainty of global plastic discharge. The optimal estimation of plastic emissions in this study varies about 1.5 OMs: 0.70 (0.13-3.8 as a 95% confidence interval) million metric tons yr<sup>-1</sup> at the present day. We find that the variability of surface plastic abundance caused by different emission inventories is higher than that caused by model parameters. We suggest that more accurate emission inventories, more data for the abundance in the seawater and other compartments, and more accurate model parameters are required to further reduce the uncertainty of our estimate.