A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required

As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are seeking preventative strategies. Central to this is the need for precise global time series of plastic pollution with which we can assess whether implemented policies are effective, but at present we lack these data. To address this need, we used previously published and new data on floating ocean plastics (n = 11,777 stations) to create a global time-series that estimates the average counts and mass of small plastics in the ocean surface layer from 1979 to 2019. Today's global abundance is estimated at approximately 82-358 trillion plastic particles weighing 1.1-4.9 million tonnes. We observed no…

• EC
  European Commission

  Awards: 101008724, H2020
• H2
  Horizon 2020 Framework Programme