Abstract
While land-based sources of marine plastic pollution have gained widespread attention, marine-based sources are less extensively investigated. Here, we provide the first in-depth description of abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) on northern and southern beaches of the English Southwest Peninsula, Great Britain's region of highest ALDFG density. Three distinct categories were recorded: twisted rope (0.28 ± 0.14 m−1, 17%), braided rope (0.56 ± 0.28 m−1, 33%) and filament (0.84 ± 0.41 m−1, 50%), which likely correspond to fishing rope, net and line. Estimating the disintegration of ALDFG from length and filament number suggests that it has the potential to generate 1277 ± 431 microplastic pieces m−1, with fishing rope (44%) and net (49%) as the largest emitters. Importantly, ALDFG was over five times more abundant on the south coast, which is likely attributable to the three times higher fishing intensity in that area.
Highlights
With 4.9 billion tonnes of discarded plastic to date (Geyer et al, 2017), plastic pollution is recognised as a global problem, in the marine environment (Napper and Thompson, 2020)
Degradation into microplastic was observed in all ALDFG cate gories (Fig. 3a–d)
We provide the first comparison of ALDFG between two areas of very different fishing activity in terms of total catch, gear use and target species (Fig. 1b, Tables 1, S1)
Summary
With 4.9 billion tonnes of discarded plastic to date (Geyer et al, 2017), plastic pollution is recognised as a global problem, in the marine environment (Napper and Thompson, 2020). There are no reliable global estimates of the kind provided by Jambeck et al (2015) for sea-based sources (Richardson et al, 2021) This lack of empirical research and reliable estimates is likely due to the difficulty of tracking down marinebased sources of plastic pollution and the widely held misbelief that their annual output is already known (Richardson et al, 2021). Such shortage of research is problematic because sea-based sources contribute much more directly to marine pollution since source and sink are geographically linked. Norway's fishing sector alone generates an estimated 4000 t of such waste annually (Deshpande et al, 2020)
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