A global inventory of small floating plastic debris

Microplastic debris floating at the ocean surface can harm marine life. Understanding the severity of this harm requires knowledge of plastic abundance and distributions. Dozens of expeditions measuring microplastics have been carried out since the 1970s, but they have primarily focused on the North...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Environmental Research Letters
Main Authors: Erik van Sebille, Chris Wilcox, Laurent Lebreton, Nikolai Maximenko, Britta Denise Hardesty, Jan A van Franeker, Marcus Eriksen, David Siegel, Francois Galgani, Kara Lavender Law
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: IOP Publishing 2015
Subjects:
marine debris
ocean circulation
model comparison
Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering
TD1-1066
Environmental sciences
GE1-350
Science
Q
Physics
QC1-999
Pacific
North Atlantic
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/10/12/124006
https://doaj.org/article/a5bde09bcf914586b9bed4a008779f81
Description
Summary:Microplastic debris floating at the ocean surface can harm marine life. Understanding the severity of this harm requires knowledge of plastic abundance and distributions. Dozens of expeditions measuring microplastics have been carried out since the 1970s, but they have primarily focused on the North Atlantic and North Pacific accumulation zones, with much sparser coverage elsewhere. Here, we use the largest dataset of microplastic measurements assembled to date to assess the confidence we can have in global estimates of microplastic abundance and mass. We use a rigorous statistical framework to standardize a global dataset of plastic marine debris measured using surface-trawling plankton nets and coupled this with three different ocean circulation models to spatially interpolate the observations. Our estimates show that the accumulated number of microplastic particles in 2014 ranges from 15 to 51 trillion particles, weighing between 93 and 236 thousand metric tons, which is only approximately 1% of global plastic waste estimated to enter the ocean in the year 2010. These estimates are larger than previous global estimates, but vary widely because the scarcity of data in most of the world ocean, differences in model formulations, and fundamental knowledge gaps in the sources, transformations and fates of microplastics in the ocean.

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