1 Marine Litter Are There Solutions to This Global Environmental Problem?

Imogen E. Napper, Sabine Pahl, and Richard C. Thompson

Modern lifestyles generate considerable quantities of waste on a daily basis. Marine litter (also called marine debris) is solid waste that has been discharged into the marine environment resulting from activities on land or at sea. Plastics represent a substantial fraction of the municipal waste stream as well as marine litter. Plastics are lightweight, inexpensive, durable, and versatile materials that bring many societal benefits, especially in health care, agriculture, transportation, construction, and packaging (PlasticsEurope 2016). Given the durability of plastics, they also have considerable persistence in the environment or a landfill. This is a growing issue; just a few decades ago much of our waste was composed of organic, degradable materials, yet in the past number of years we have produced more plastic items than in the entire century before.

There has been a substantial increase in plastics production, from 5 million tonnes globally in the 1950s to over 300 million tonnes today (Andrady and Neal 2009; PlasticsEurope 2015). The use of plastics varies among countries, and global production is likely to continue and even to increase substantially over the next few decades. Despite the durability of plastics, the main uses are in relatively short-lived applications such as packaging, which accounts for about 40 percent of all production. Although packaging plays an important role in protecting food, drink, and other items, and thus reduces damage and wastage of products, it has also led to a rapid accumulation of persistent plastics waste.

There is increasing awareness of the accumulation of litter in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments from a variety of sources (Eerkes-Medrano, Thompson, and Aldridge 2015). The importance of the sources varies considerably geographically, but on a global scale it is widely recognized that most litter in the marine environment comes from land-based actions such as general littering, dumping of waste and loss during waste collection, and inappropriately managed landfill sites. Litter from shipping and other maritime activities contributes a much smaller proportion (Jambeck et al. 2015; Mehlhart and Blepp 2012).

It has been suggested that the accumulation and fragmentation of marine litter have led to one of the most ubiquitous and long-lasting recent changes to the surface of our planet (Barnes et al. 2009). This debris is widely seen in the environment, where it has accumulated at the sea surface (Law et al. 2010), on the shorelines of even the most remote islands (Barnes 2005), in the deep sea (Bergmann and Klages 2012; Woodall et al. 2014), and in Arctic sea ice (Obbard et al. 2014).

Globally, about 75 percent of all marine litter consists of various plastics, with other materials—such as glass, metal, and paper—contributing much smaller amounts. Even though the large majority of marine litter is plastics, the time scales for the degradation of plastic items are not known with certainty and will depend on the chemical nature of the material, the characteristics of the environment in which they persist, and the manner in which degradation is measured (Andrady and Neal 2009). However, it is clear that, from the substantial quantities of litter entering aquatic habitats daily, it presents a range of negative economic and environmental consequences (Jambeck et al. 2015; Werner et al. 2016).

The accumulation of marine litter has been identified as a major global conservation issue and a key priority for research (Sutherland et al. 2010). It has also been identified as a major issue by the United Nations Environment Assembly and in the G7 Leaders’ Declaration of 2015 (GESAMP 2016; UNEP 2017; Werner et al. 2016). There is broad recognition that marine litter presents a substantial problem, so the key action must be to reduce the quantity entering the water from the land. In addition, we need to define further the scale of the problem in terms of quantities of litter and types of impact, but in our view there is already enough evidence for people to take action to stem the flow of plastics into the environment. In this chapter, we consider the problem and some of the solutions currently being implemented or considered.

The Impacts

Plastics debris in marine environments has been found to affect a wide range of organisms as a consequence of entanglement and ingestion (Gall and Thompson 2015; Sutherland et al. 2010; Wang et al. 2016). Over 700 species of marine organisms have been reported to encounter plastics debris, which can result in severe physical harm and death or have more subtle effects on behaviour and ecological interaction (e.g., the ability to escape from predators or migrate) (Gall and Thompson 2015). A range of sub-lethal effects that have not yet been recognized is also likely.

The impacts of plastics in the marine environment vary according to type and size of debris and can occur at different levels of biological organization in a wide range of habitats (Browne 2015). Encounters between plastics litter and organisms can negatively affect individuals and a substantial proportion of some populations: for example, over 40 percent of sperm whales beached on North Sea coasts had marine litter—including ropes, foils, and packaging materials—found in their gastrointestinal tracts (Unger et al. 2016), and over 95 percent of the population of northern fulmars (Fulmar glacialis) might contain plastics litter in some European waters (Van Franeker et al. 2011). There are further concerns about the potential for ingestion to facilitate the transfer of chemicals to marine life (Bakir, Rowland, and Thompson 2014). Although there is clear evidence of chemical transfer from plastics to biota, there is no evidence that this mechanism adds a substantial additional chemical burden compared with other pathways, such as via food.

Another source of concern is the colonization of organisms on plastics debris. Species found on plastics debris can differ from the free-floating microbial communities in the oceans: for example, microplastics collected in the surface waters of the North Atlantic were colonized by a variety of organisms, including bacteria, cyanobacteria, diatoms, ciliates, and radiolaria (Zettler, Mincer, and Amaral-Zettler 2013). Plastics have been reported to travel over long distances, and they can contribute to the dispersal of alien or invasive species (Barnes 2002).

Contamination of the marine environment with plastics debris can also have negative economic consequences on aquaculture, tourism, navigation, and fisheries. With fisheries, such debris can reduce or damage catches and vessels. It is expensive to remove on a large scale: for example, the total cost of removing litter of all types from thirty-four UK harbours was estimated at £246,000 per year. Based on this estimate, it was determined that marine litter costs the ports and harbour industry in the United Kingdom approximately £2.1 million each year (Mouat, Lopez Lozano, and Bateson 2010). There is also emerging evidence that even small quantities of litter on beaches can have negative effects on human well-being (Wyles et al. 2016).

Waste Management

The accumulation of plastics litter in the oceans is actually a symptom of a wider, more systemic problem: the linear use of plastics and the rapid accumulation of waste. Litter can be defined as something of little or no value, and the problem can be exacerbated because plastics are inexpensive, thus facilitating short-lived applications. The vast variety of plastic types presents a complication for the viability of recycling, and the quantity and diversity of single-use products puts increasing pressure on waste management infrastructures. Studies have shown that, unless waste management improves profoundly in the coming years, by 2025 the amount of plastics waste entering the ocean from land will be three times greater than it was a decade previously (Jambeck et al. 2015). Consequently, effective waste management and recycling are critical elements in preventing loss into the environment.

Waste management practices are typically designed to help minimize such loss but can differ considerably between nations. Incorrectly managed landfills or waste management systems can cause waste to escape into the environment. In industrialized countries, waste deposited in landfills is often covered with soil or a synthetic material, and landfills are cordoned by fences to prevent any debris from blowing away. However, in developing regions, this is often not the case (Barnes et al. 2009; Jambeck et al. 2015). There are also circumstances in which waste management will not suffice in preventing plastics from getting into the ocean. For example, in the immediate aftermath of a tropical storm, resource management is understandably focused on human health, toxic spills, and air quality as opposed to waste management (Institute of Medicine 2007).

There are solid waste management strategies used as alternatives to landfills, such as recycling (Singh et al. 2017), reusing, or upcycling (recycling to improve the value of a material) (Braungart 2013). However, the applicability of different approaches depends on the quality of the waste, and a common issue is that the end-of-life disposal pathway has not been appropriately considered at the design stage. If the quality is insufficient, then energy recovery via incineration is an option. Even in developed countries with robust waste management infrastructures, there are obstacles to recycling, including the lack of collection points, the contamination of recycling feedstock, and the limited marketability of some recycled materials (Andrady 2005; Law 2017). Residues from plastics recycling can also escape unintentionally into the environment (Moore 2008).

Focusing on the thirty-five top-ranked countries for the mass of mismanaged plastics waste, Jambeck and colleagues (2015) suggest that, to achieve a 75 percent reduction in this waste, waste management would have to improve by 85 percent. This strategy would require time and substantial investment in infrastructure primarily in low- and middle-income countries (Löhr et al. 2017). Within these countries, the main focus is now on improving solid waste collection and management, and some outstanding efforts are being made. Indonesia, for example, set targets at the World Ocean Summit in 2017 to reduce plastics waste in twenty-five coastal cities and to reduce marine litter by 70 percent by 2025 (UN Environment 2017).

Education and Behavioural Change

Education is crucial for promoting change in reducing waste, limiting indiscriminate disposal, and increasing awareness of marine litter, especially if it includes principles of behavioural change and goes beyond merely teaching facts. Programs to help encourage this change are being considered and could be very successful in reducing litter and waste. For example, a study by Hartley and colleagues (2015) found that schoolchildren in the United Kingdom significantly improved their understanding of the causes and negative impacts of marine litter, as well as their self-reported behaviour, after an education intervention related to marine plastics debris. Education of and behavioural change in children are crucial since they have an important influence on their peers, parents, and communities (Hartley, Thompson, and Pahl 2015). Hartley and colleagues (2018a) demonstrated similar results following a European video contest for schools and training specifically tailored to educators. Therefore, making resources available to incorporate marine litter awareness into the school curriculum could spread knowledge of the issues and greatly improve collective understanding.

Citizen-focused activities such as beach cleans are also well recognized for their educational value. They are also effective in terms of litter removed (Nelms et al. 2016) and might even have benefits for human well-being (Wyles et al. 2016). These activities can be combined with monitoring exercises and the involvement of local communities. Annual cleanup operations are now organized internationally (Barnes et al. 2009) and often run by voluntary organizations. Volunteer involvement in two of the largest cleanup schemes in the United Kingdom (Marine Conservation Society Beach Watch and Keep Scotland Beautiful National Spring Clean) has been estimated to provide a value of £118,500 annually to cover the cost of beach cleans, which suggests that the total cost of voluntary action to remove marine litter is considerable (Mouat, Lopez Lozano, and Bateson 2010).

Additionally, we need to consider the role of society and the processes of social perception and influence among a range of actors (Hartley et al. 2018b). Unless the efficacy of solutions is properly evident and understood, there is a significant risk that interventions made in haste will not be socially acceptable and/or might lead to unintended negative consequences.

In simple terms, it is important to raise awareness of the need to dispose of end-of-life items properly and not to litter in addition to raising awareness of the often unnecessary use of plastics, such as single-use bags, cutlery, plates, and drinking straws. However, educating the public about the damage alone is unlikely to achieve the substantial change required; we need to harness powerful motivators for managing waste differently, such as the great affinity that many children (and adults) feel with the ocean (Pahl, Wyles, and Thompson 2017). Moreover, beyond raising public awareness, systemic change is necessary to reduce the substantial accumulation of end-of-life plastics waste. This change will require a transition within the industry, right from the product design stage, in order to ensure that maximum value can be recovered at end of life. In the absence of such changes, educating the public is, to some extent, merely educating them about a broken system.

Industry and the Circular Economy

Industry has a key role to play in reducing the potential for end-of-life plastics to become waste and litter. The current use of plastic materials is predominantly linear, and this is leading to the rapid accumulation of persistent waste. Long-term sustainable solutions lie in moving from a linear economy toward a more circular economy (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2016; European Commission 2012). This approach involves utilizing more sustainable patterns of production and consumption and the circular use of materials that will ultimately lead to a reduction in waste, for example by designing products for reuse/recycling and avoiding the unnecessary use of plastics. Most plastics are inherently recyclable, yet many single-use items are not designed to be widely compatible with recycling programs. A key challenge, therefore, is to ensure that end-of-life disposal via recycling is appropriately considered at the design stage. For these interventions to be successful, a tax might be required on non-recyclable products, or an incentive might motivate the use of recycled materials in new products so as to encourage reuse and/or design for recyclability.

In addition, we need greater awareness of the applicability of alternative approaches, which from a narrow perspective might appear to present environmentally friendly alternatives. These approaches need to be considered in terms of their overall environmental footprints and how they interact with existing schemes of collection to ensure that there are not unintended negative consequences, for example plastic products designed to have greater degradability or made from renewable rather than fossil carbon sources.

Materials with enhanced degradability can reduce the amount of highly visible macroplastic waste. However, it is challenging to deliver products that are durable while in service yet can degrade in a meaningful time scale if they become litter in the environment. Some formulations merely fragment, compromising the potential for product reuse and accelerating the production of microplastic fragments (Thompson et al. 2009). Even when disposed of properly, most degradable formulations are not compatible with recycling and can be disposed of only as residual waste in landfills or incinerated. These plastics do have a role but might present solutions in specific settings only where the associated waste collection is specifically managed and provides conditions suitable for degradation and products are labelled accordingly to facilitate appropriate disposal. Similarly, altering the carbon source for plastics by utilizing plant-based carbon, rather than fossil carbon from oil and gas, is a distraction to some extent. Although this approach utilizes a renewable and hence a more sustainable carbon source, by itself it will not reduce the generation of waste or the accumulation of litter and might even conflict with other uses of the resource.

In summary, industry has a key role in helping to maximize the benefits that plastic products can bring to society while helping to minimize emissions of plastics during life in service and at end of life. This requires greater recognition of unintended consequences via extended producer responsibility. Had this approach been in place when the patent on the use of microbeads in cosmetic products was first filed some fifty years ago, much unnecessary contamination and the eventual need for costly legislative measures could have been avoided. Similarly, it is now clear that some types of garment construction release fibres more quickly than others (Napper and Thompson 2016). This is not in the interests of consumers because clothing wears out more quickly and results in a more rapid release of fibres into the environment. The key step is to consider this at the design stage to minimize the avoidable emission of synthetic textile fibres. In addition, the development of washing machine filters to capture any released synthetic fibres in the washing cycle might be advantageous. The introduction of appropriate labelling on products to indicate their environmental footprints in terms of recycled content, material use, and recyclability could be instrumental in guiding product choice along the supply chain. Such information is just as important to major retailers as it is to consumers since it paves the way to helping ensure sustainability and ethical choices made upstream—taking the burden off the consumer.

Policy Measures

The United Nations Development Goals request that nations “prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution” by 2025 (UNGA 2015). This can be facilitated by policy measures to help reduce the unnecessary use of plastics. However, there are numerous applications in which plastics are clearly the best materials, and here policy measures can help to nudge behaviours toward more circular material use, such as deposit return schemes. Ultimately, these measures need to help us move toward more resource-efficient circular material use (Lieder and Rashid 2016). The European Union has set this in motion in its “Action Plan for the Circular Economy,” implementing a waste hierarchy in which prevention, reuse, recycling, and energy recovery—in this order—are favoured over landfills (European Commission 2015).

Solutions linked to management strategies and policies are also already in place to reduce marine litter (GESAMP 2015). They include the use of targets, taxes, education, and bans. Banning microbeads in cosmetics is an example of such legislation. However, based on the level of concern and the scale of the marine litter problem in general, it appears that the measures currently used are insufficient. In some cases, there are difficulties associated with enforcement: for example, the regulation of dumping at sea (MARPOL–The International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships) is extremely difficult to monitor.

Taxes introduced on plastic items have been instrumental in changing consumer behaviour. A fifteen euro cent tax on plastic bags in Ireland led to a 90 percent reduction of their use in the early 2000s (Convery, McDonnell, and Ferreira 2007). The tax has successfully removed the widespread use of plastic bags throughout Ireland and inspired similar taxes globally. In San Francisco, a ban on conventional plastic bags has been introduced, forcing the use of alternative bags such as cotton tote bags (Romer 2010). Unfortunately, these taxes do not always work effectively. South Africa has struggled to achieve similar rates of reduction in plastic bag use through taxes (Dikgang, Leiman, and Visser 2012).

Plastics debris does not recognize international boundaries, and regulations need to be enforced at the international scale. Global commitments and goals provide a good basis for this enforcement, but measures and actions then need to be applied at national and regional levels. There are substantive differences at these levels in the causes of plastics pollution, both on land and at sea, therefore effective solutions must take into consideration local conditions, such as waste management infrastructures (Jambeck et al. 2015; Van Franeker and Law 2015). Hence, design and implementation of effective, efficient, and legitimate actions need to be based on a thorough understanding of the issue as well as the local context.

Conclusion

Although the suite of potential solutions is well recognized, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. In the current thirst for action, a major challenge is matching appropriate solutions to particular problems. We think that, to address this type of challenge, an interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach will be necessary to reconfigure how modern societies engage with plastics. Profiting from the current groundswell of public opinion, transformative change could be achieved by harnessing the potential of the social and behavioural sciences to understand and influence the decisions and behaviours underlying the plastics challenge. In addition, the arts and humanities can help to inspire creative change yet be firmly integrated within the evidence base of the natural sciences.

Beyond integrating different academic perspectives, such an effort should work with stakeholders, practitioners, policy makers, and industry. This approach would be able to capture how plastics are currently viewed and managed in society, truly representing the user perspective. It would also identify and respond to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations plus constraints along the supply chain. More importantly, the approach could demonstrate how the current situation can change by facilitating evidence-based dialogue with design and waste management, economic and legal studies, and arts and other creative disciplines. Looking at the system in such an integrated way could trigger an irreversible course toward more sustainable design, use, and disposal of plastics and be adapted to other societal challenges.

There are solutions to the global problem of marine litter. To a large extent, such litter is a symptom of a more systemic issue originating on land that relates to the design, use, and disposal of waste (particularly single-use plastic items). Solutions to this problem require coordinated actions among industry, policy, and the public at levels from local to global. This will involve the interactions of consumers, producers, policy makers, managers, local residents, tourists, industries, and many other key players. Unity, collaboration, and ownership of solutions among these groups will provide the greatest potential for success. Currently, the scopes, time frames, and dynamics of all these initiatives are distinctly different, and close collaboration and orchestration at all levels are lacking.

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2. Slow Violence: The Erosion of Marine Plastic Debris and of Human Health