Despite the high attention given to the amount of plastic debris floating in the open ocean, these only accounts for a small fraction of the plastic annually entering the marine environment. It is widely believed that most marine plastic sinks in the water column and ends up buried in sediments where it remains unless disturbed. While many case studies have assessed the stocks of plastic in marine sediments, from intertidal habitats to the deep ocean, none has attempted to synthetize the published data and calculate a global estimate. Here, we compiled a dataset of published stocks of plastic in marine sediments and used it to calculate the global stock to ultimately demonstrate that marine sediments are a major sink of plastic in the global ocean.
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