Abstract
Rivers transport land-based plastic waste into the ocean. Current efforts to quantify riverine plastic emission come with uncertainty as field observations are scarce. One of the challenging aspects is the lack of consistent measurement methods that allow for comparing rivers over space and time. Recent studies have shown that simple visual observations provide a robust first-order characterization of floating and superficially suspended plastic transport, both in quantity, spatiotemporal distribution and composition. For this study, we applied this method to the river Seine, France, to provide new insights in the spatiotemporal variation in riverine plastic transport. First, we studied the response of plastic flow to increased river discharge by comparing measurements taken during low flow and high flow periods. Second, we investigated the variation of riverine plastic transport over the river length to improve our understanding of the origin and fate of riverine plastics. We demonstrate that during a period with higher river discharge, plastic transport increased up to a factor ten at the observation point closest to the river mouth. Upstream of Paris plastic transport increased only with a factor 1.5, suggesting that most plastics originate from Paris or areas further downstream. With this paper we aim to shed additional light on the seasonal variation in riverine plastic transport and its distribution along the river length, which may benefit future long-term monitoring efforts and plastic pollution mitigation strategies.
Highlights
Land-based plastics, mostly conveyed through rivers, are considered one of the main sources of marine plastic pollution (Jambeck et al, 2015; Lebreton et al, 2017)
The river Seine [32,000 km2 catchment area; 350 m/s mean discharge (Gasperi et al, 2014)] is a 777 km long river located in Northern France, that flows into the English Channel at Le Havre
This study focuses on floating macroplastic debris transport
Summary
Land-based plastics, mostly conveyed through rivers, are considered one of the main sources of marine plastic pollution (Jambeck et al, 2015; Lebreton et al, 2017). It is expected that most riverine plastics are emitted in Southeast Asia (Lebreton et al, 2017; Schmidt et al, 2017), several European rivers, such as the Danube (Lechner et al, 2014), Thames (Morritt et al, 2014), and Rhine (Mani et al, 2015) are found to contribute significantly to marine plastics pollution. Marine plastic litter has hazardous effects, such as plastic ingestion by marine fauna (Thompson et al, 2004; O Conchubhair et al, 2019), which has recently been observed in the North and Baltic seas (Rummel et al, 2016). Seine Plastic Transport Tenfolded understanding of the origin and fate of plastics are necessary to effectively implement prevention and mitigation strategies
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