Sources of marine litter along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast: Identification, scoring and contribution

Abstract

The sources of marine litter (ML) pollution along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast in 2019 were identified and categorized to: Public litter, Fishing, Shipping, Sanitary and sewage, Fly tipped, Medical and Non-sourced, following Veiga et al., 2016 approach. Largest was the contribution of Public litter - 48.3% and Non-sourced - 38.5% of the total. Most Public litter items were attributed to recreational activities - 82.9% Public litter Recreation and less to Public litter Smoking-related - 17.1%. Regarding to Non-sourced, the following sub-categories seemed to contribute clearly more: Land (run off) - 8.79% and Tourism beach users - 8.58%. Considerably lower was the contribution of Fishing, Offshore and Shipping. None of the items were attributed to Sewage related. The ML pollution on the individual beaches (10 sites) exhibited largest contribution of Public litter with most significant input of Public litter Recreation, varying from 65.9 to 86.7% between beaches.