Adapting Coastal Collection Methods for River Assessment to Increase Data on Global Plastic Pollution: Examples From India and Indonesia

Abstract

Marine debris often begins as litter or waste on land. Rivers play an important role in transporting this debris from communities to ocean systems, and yet we lack data on debris in freshwater systems. This work promotes eliminating the gap in knowledge between debris in marine and freshwater systems through use of a consistent, replicable methodology that can be used to improve data on freshwater shoreline debris. Expansion in the application of this method globally can allow researchers to ground-truth estimates of the debris entering the world's oceans via rivers. Widespread use of this method would provide data on the litter degrading in the world's riverine systems, an important ecological problem in its own right often sidelined in work on marine debris. Improved ground-truthing will also shed light on the missing plastics question: the disparity between input estimates and measurement of plastic waste in the world's oceans. Cataloging the way debris moves through, and remains a part of, freshwater systems is imperative to addressing the global plastic waste problem. Here we share examples of how the method has been applied in the Tukad Badung river in Indonesia and the Karamana river in India.

Same but Different: A Framework to Design and Compare Riverbank Plastic Monitoring Strategies

“…Thirdly, the proposed framework is based on studies that have been applied on European rivers since these are most frequently studied for plastic pollution (Blettler et al, 2018;Owens and Kamil, 2020). However, observations of floating macroplastic transport have demonstrated that typical plastic concentrations and transport loads can be several orders of magnitude higher in other regions (South-East Asia vs. Europe), and during different hydrological regimes .…”

“…Monitoring plastic in the riverine environment is a prerequisite for understanding how plastic is transported and where it accumulates. Reliable and frequent plastic litter observations can aid the development of effective policy measures and mitigation strategies (Owens and Kamil, 2020;Vriend et al, 2020). Long-term observation of beach litter has already shown that monitoring can be used to determine fundamental characteristics of plastic transport in aquatic environments.…”

“…Riverbank plastic monitoring aims to systematically collect data that can aid with developing strategies to decrease plastic pollution. Several of these efforts have been documented in the scientific literature (e.g., Battulga et al, 2019;Kiessling et al, 2019;van Emmerik et al, 2020a), but a large section of riverbank litter identification protocols remains unreported in peer-reviewed literature (Owens and Kamil, 2020). The driving questions, methods, types of observers, and types of data output vary greatly between protocols, which can create difficulties when comparing results between different programs (Owens and Kamil, 2020).…”

Plastic pollution research in Indonesia: state of science and future research directions to reduce impacts

“…Reliable and frequent data on plastic pollution and its effects on fauna and ecosystems are required for the development and assessment of policy measures aimed to reduce plastic emissions to the oceans (Conchubhair et al, 2019;Owens & Kamil, 2020;Vriend et al, 2020). Moreover, data on exposure and toxicity are needed to assess microplastics' human health risks from exposure to, for example, contaminated seafood (Hantoro et al, 2019).…”

Seasonal variation of marine litter in Tangier Coast: Quantitative and classificative study

“…Recently, several studies published to evaluate the impact of entanglement and ingestion of marine debris with 914 species of marine biota [17], the accumulated density of surface and buried debris in two beaches in Senegal and demonstrated that the plastic bags and clothing plastic were the most abundant [18], as well as in Bathing Beach, Qingdao, China [19], fragments and fi laments of plastics [20], the threat to costal ecosystems of non-biodegradable and biodegradable plastic on the vegetation by their leachates which affect the germination, dormancy release and early growth [21,22], on water quality and plant growth [23], discussed the requirement of standardization of marine debris studies and the lake of the date of the sampling and the size of the collected debris on the most of published researches [24], applied a new methodology in the Tukad Badung river in Indonesia and the Karamana river in India to evaluate the transport of litter or waste from land to the seas and oceans by the rivers as resource of marine debris [25]. This study provides the current situation for marine debris on Tangier beach by a seasonal quantifi cation and classifi cation of this debris, and integrate the results of our works published in Oued laou, Aouchtam, Martil costals, Morocco to understand these variations.…”