Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean
Dumping lots of plastics into our oceans
Considerable progress has been made in determining the amount and location of plastic debris in our seas, but how much plastic actually enters them in the first place is more uncertain. Jambeck et al. combine available data on solid waste with a model that uses population density and economic status to estimate the amount of land-based plastic waste entering the ocean. Unless waste management practices are improved, the flux of plastics to the oceans could increase by an order of magnitude within the next decade.
Science, this issue p. 768
Abstract
Plastic debris in the marine environment is widely documented, but the quantity of plastic entering the ocean from waste generated on land is unknown. By linking worldwide data on solid waste, population density, and economic status, we estimated the mass of land-based plastic waste entering the ocean. We calculate that 275 million metric tons (MT) of plastic waste was generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million MT entering the ocean. Population size and the quality of waste management systems largely determine which countries contribute the greatest mass of uncaptured waste available to become plastic marine debris. Without waste management infrastructure improvements, the cumulative quantity of plastic waste available to enter the ocean from land is predicted to increase by an order of magnitude by 2025.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Fig. S1
Tables S1 to S6
Data S1
Resources
References and Notes
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Science
Volume 347 | Issue 6223
13 February 2015
13 February 2015
Copyright
Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 25 August 2014
Accepted: 16 January 2015
Published in print: 13 February 2015
Acknowledgments
We thank M. A. Barlaz and N. Starr for critical discussions and L. Amaral-Zettler, M. G. Chapman, G. Leonard, and R. Williams for helpful reading of the manuscript. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. This work was conducted within the Marine Debris Working Group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, with support from the Ocean Conservancy. Our data and model can be found at http://jambeck.engr.uga.edu/landplasticinput and in the supplementary materials.
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