Plastic waste pollutes the oceans and is found even in supposedly untouched parts of the Arctic. Scientists on Spitsbergen have now investigated where this plastic waste comes from with the help of a citizen science project in which volunteers collected more than 1,600 kilograms of plastic waste on 16 arctic beaches. It turned out that while fishing remnants such as nets and ropes accounted for the largest proportion by mass, most of the individual parts came from packaging waste. A third of this waste came from Europe, eight percent came from Germany, as the researchers determined. At least five percent of these plastic parts even came from countries as far away as Brazil, China or the USA.
Whether plastic bags, PET bottles, plastic nets, small parts or microplastics: plastic waste is a global problem that does not spare even remote regions of our planet. As a result, plastic residues can now be found in the soil, oceans, rivers and lakes, and even the deep sea and the polar regions are no longer plastic-free. Some of the plastic waste in the ocean comes from fishing, while some gets into the sea via sewage and rivers. The problem: Because the stable polymers of the plastic are hardly biodegradable and can even withstand salt water and the sun’s UV radiation for a long time, the plastic can survive in the ocean for decades, maybe even centuries. The ocean currents distribute this civilization garbage everywhere and sometimes drive it together to form gigantic floating garbage whirlpools.
Collecting plastic on Svalbard
As part of a citizen Science project on Spitsbergen. Over a period of five years, participants from Arctic trips photographed plastic waste washed up on 16 beaches, collected it and sent it to the AWI in part or in full. Between 2016 and 2021, 23,000 parts with a total weight of 1,620 kilograms came together. Most of this plastic waste, by mass, came from fishing or shipping. These included parts of nets, plastic ropes, plastic canisters and various other containers. However, smaller, lighter plastic parts, which belonged to the classic packaging and plastic waste, were much more common. They made up 80 percent of the finds, the team reports.
“We have investigated where exactly the waste that still has origin data comes from,” explains senior author Melanie Bergmann from the AWI. About one percent of the plastic remains washed ashore and collected on Svalbard still had inscriptions or imprints that allowed conclusions to be drawn about its origin. “We know from measurement campaigns and computer models that there are local and distant sources of plastic pollution in the Arctic,” says Meyer. “Plastic waste ends up locally in the sea from ships and from arctic settlements.” This was reflected in the finds: almost 50 percent had inscriptions in a Scandinavian language or Russian. However, about a third of the finds came from areas further south, mainly from Europe. “Plastic waste and microplastics are transported from afar into the Arctic Ocean via numerous rivers and ocean currents from the Atlantic, the North Sea and the North Pacific,” explains Meyer.
Plastic waste also from Germany
Plastic waste from Germany has also found its way to the far north, accounting for around eight percent of the finds. “Against the background that Germany is the European champion both in plastic production and in waste exports, this relatively high contribution seems less surprising,” says Bergmann. The data on the waste, some of which can still be deciphered, revealed that these plastic parts had almost all been in the sea for a long time. The oldest find was a Norwegian plastic bottle from the 1960s, the youngest a shoe from 2013. And the researchers were also able to identify some plastic waste that had traveled a long way from the imprints: A total of five percent of the finds came from distant regions, including four finds from each the USA and China, some others from Brazil and Southeast Asia.
According to the scientists, this again confirms that plastic waste is a global problem – and that more urgently needs to be done to curb this pollution. “Our results make it clear that even rich and environmentally conscious industrial nations like Germany, which could afford better waste management, contribute significantly to the pollution of distant ecosystems like the Arctic,” says Bergmann. “Therefore, in order to tackle the problem effectively, it is not only the on-site waste management – especially on ships and in fisheries – that needs to be improved. At least as important is the massive reduction in global plastic production, especially in the industrialized nations of Europe, North America and Asia.”
Source: Anna Natalie Meyer (Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven) et al., Frontiers in Marine Science, doi: 10.3389/fmars.2023.1092939