Abundance of floating plastic particles is increasing in the western North Atlantic Ocean.

Since the start of commercial plastics production in the 1940s, global production has rapidly accelerated, doubling approximately every 11 years. Despite this increase and clear evidence of plastics loss into the oceans, including a substantial standing stock, previous research has not detected a temporal trend in plastic particle concentration in the surface ocean. Using a generalized additive statistical model, we examined the longest dataset available on floating plastic debris collected using plankton nets in the western North Atlantic from 1986 through 2015. There was a significant increasing temporal trend in plastic particle concentration that tracked cumulative global plastics production. We estimated an increase of 506,000 tonnes of floating plastic in the ocean in 2010 alone, or 0.2% of global production. Our results suggest that, while loss of plastic particles from the surface ocean undoubtedly occurs, the input exceeds the collective losses.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Environmental Science and Technology

• Publication date

  2019-11-18

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1021/acs.est.9b04812PMID 31738052
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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