Defining plastic pollution hotspots

Plastic pollution in the natural environment poses a growing threat to ecosystems and human health, prompting urgent needs for monitoring, prevention and clean-up measures, and new policies. To effectively prioritize resource allocation and mitigation strategies, it is key to identify and define pla...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Science of the total environment 2024-07, Vol.934, p.173294, Article 173294
Main Authors: Tasseron, Paolo F., van Emmerik, Tim H.M., Vriend, Paul, Hauk, Rahel, Alberti, Francesca, Mellink, Yvette, van der Ploeg, Martine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
data collection
environment
Environmental governance
human health
International policy treaties
Marine litter
Plastic pollution
Plastic prevention and reduction
pollution
pollution control
resource allocation
temporal variation
Waste management
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:Plastic pollution in the natural environment poses a growing threat to ecosystems and human health, prompting urgent needs for monitoring, prevention and clean-up measures, and new policies. To effectively prioritize resource allocation and mitigation strategies, it is key to identify and define plastic hotspots. UNEP's draft global agreement on plastic pollution mandates prioritizing hotspots, suggesting a potential need for a defined term. Yet, the delineation of hotspots varies considerably across plastic pollution studies, and a definition is often lacking or inconsistent without a clear purpose and boundaries of the term. In this paper, we applied four common definitions of hotspot locations to plastic pollution datasets ranging from urban areas to a global scale. Our findings reveal that these hotspot definitions encompass between 0.8 % to 93.3 % of the total plastic pollution, covering
ISSN:0048-9697
1879-1026
1879-1026
DOI:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.173294