All is not lost: deriving a top-down mass budget of plastic at sea

By A. Koelmans, M. Kooi, K. L. Law, E. van Sebille. 2017

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding the global mass inventory is one of the main challenges in present research on plastic marine debris. Especially the fragmentation and vertical transport processes of oceanic plastic are poorly understood. However, whereas fragmentation rates are unknown, information on plastic emissions, concentrations of plastics in the ocean surface layer (OSL) and fragmentation mechanisms is available. Here, we apply a systems engineering analytical approach and propose a tentative ‘whole ocean’ mass balance model that combines emission data, surface area-normalized plastic fragmentation rates, estimated concentrations in the OSL, and removal from the OSL by sinking. We simulate known plastic abundances in the OSL and calculate an average whole ocean apparent surface area-normalized plastic fragmentation rate constant, given representative radii for macroplastic and microplastic. Simulations show that 99.8% of the plastic that had entered the ocean since 1950 had settled below the OSL by 2016, with an additional 9.4 million tons settling per year. In 2016, the model predicts that of the 0.309 million tons in the OSL, an estimated 83.7% was macroplastic, 13.8% microplastic, and 2.5% was < 0.335 mm ‘nanoplastic’. A zero future emission simulation shows that almost all plastic in the OSL would be removed within three years, implying a fast response time of surface plastic abundance to changes in inputs. The model complements current spatially explicit models, points to future experiments that would inform critical model parameters, and allows for further validation when more experimental and field data become available.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75599142ec3fe8eecb02b76faf8665b4c6149588

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Macro- and micro- plastics in soil-plant system: Effects of plastic mulch film residues on wheat (Triticum aestivum) growth. (2018, background): “, 2016b; Rillig, 2012; Zubris and Richards, 2005), most of the research done so far has been focused on microplastics in the aquatic ecosystem (Auta et al., 2017; Cole et al., 2011; Duis and Coors, 2016; Eerkes-Medrano et al., 2015; Koelmans et al., 2014; Koelmans et al., 2017; Nizzetto et al., 2016”
The quest for seafloor macrolitter: a critical review of background knowledge, current methods and future prospects (2020, background): “Models on marine litter come in many varieties, from very simple budget-style mathematical equations (Koelmans et al 2017, Lebreton et al 2019) to full-blown simulations of plastic dispersion based on fine-resolution outputs from OGCMs (Lebreton et al 2018, Mountford and Morales Maqueda 2019, Onink…”