Plastic pollution is a planetary threat, affecting nearly every marine and freshwater ecosystem globally. In response, multilevel mitigation strategies are being adopted but with a lack of quantitative assessment of how such strategies reduce plastic emissions. We assessed the impact of three broad management strategies, plastic waste reduction, waste management, and environmental recovery, at different levels of effort to estimate plastic emissions to 2030 for 173 countries. We estimate that 19 to 23 million metric tons, or 11%, of plastic waste generated globally in 2016 entered aquatic ecosystems. Considering the ambitious commitments currently set by governments, annual emissions may reach up to 53 million metric tons per year by 2030. To reduce emissions to a level well below this prediction, extraordinary efforts to transform the global plastics economy are needed.

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The ubiquitous pollution of the environment with microplastics, a diverse suite of contaminants, is of growing concern for science and currently receives considerable public, political, and academic attention. The potential impact of microplastics in the environment has prompted a great deal of research in recent years. Many diverse methods have been developed to answer different questions about microplastic pollution, from sources, transport, and fate in the environment, and about effects on humans and wildlife. These methods are often insufficiently described, making studies neither comparable nor reproducible. The proliferation of new microplastic investigations and cross-study syntheses to answer larger scale questions are hampered. This diverse group of 23 researchers think these issues can begin to be overcome through the adoption of a set of reporting guidelines. This collaboration was created using an open science framework that we detail for future use. Here, we suggest harmonized reporting guidelines for microplastic studies in environmental and laboratory settings through all steps of a typical study, including best practices for reporting materials, quality assurance/quality control, data, field sampling, sample preparation, microplastic identification, microplastic categorization, microplastic quantification, and considerations for toxicology studies. We developed three easy to use documents, a detailed document, a checklist, and a mind map, that can be used to reference the reporting guidelines quickly. We intend that these reporting guidelines support the annotation, dissemination, interpretation, reviewing, and synthesis of microplastic research. Through open access licensing (CC BY 4.0), these documents aim to increase the validity, reproducibility, and comparability of studies in this field for the benefit of the global community.

Microplastic pollution research has suffered from inadequate data and tools for spectral (Raman and infrared) classification. Spectral matching tools often are not accurate for microplastics identification and are cost-prohibitive. Lack of accuracy stems from the diversity of microplastic pollutants, which are not represented in spectral libraries. Here, we propose a viable software solution: Open Specy. Open Specy is on the web (www. openspecy.org) and in an R package. Open Specy is free and allows users to view, process, identify, and share their spectra to a community library. Users can upload and process their spectra using smoothing (Savitzky−Golay filter) and polynomial baseline correction techniques (IModPolyFit). The processed spectrum can be downloaded to be used in other applications or identified using an onboard reference library and correlation-based matching criteria. Open Specy's data sharing and session log features ensure reproducible results. Open Specy houses a growing library of reference spectra, which increasingly represents the diversity of microplastics as a contaminant suite. We compared the functionality and accuracy of Open Specy for microplastic identification to commonly used spectral analysis software. We found that Open Specy was the only open source software and the only software with a community library, and Open Specy had comparable accuracy to popular software (OMNIC Picta and KnowItAll). Future developments will enhance spectral identification accuracy as the reference library and functionality grows through community-contributed spectra and community-developed code. Open Specy can also be used for applications beyond microplastic analysis. Open Specy's source code is open source (CC-BY-4.0, attribution only) (https://github.com/wincowgerDEV/ OpenSpecy).