Plastic waste and marine wildlife

Plastic waste and marine wildlife

Annually between 5 and 13 million tonnes of plastic are lost from land to sea and end up as what is known as ‘the plastic soup’. Marine birds and other wildlife accidentally ingest plastic litter or become entangled. Wageningen Marine Research investigates the impact of plastic debris on the marine environment and its wildlife. Our institute is founder of a permanent monitoring program of plastics in stomachs of Northern Fulmars in the North Sea. Results are used by Dutch and European authorities to evaluate and plan measures to reduce marine litter.

Northern fulmars are seabirds that spend their lives in and around the North Sea and Arctic waters. They frequently mistake small pieces of litter for food and swallow them, even though their stomachs cannot digest the waste. Therefore, dead fulmars are a good indicator of how much plastic there is in the sea.

Around 93% of all the found fulmars have pieces of plastic in their stomachs, an average of 20 items and 0.20 grams per animal. The 'Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic' (OSPAR) stipulates that no more than 10% of fulmars should have more than 0.1 grams of plastic in their stomachs.

Source: Fulmar Litter EcoQO monitoring in the Netherlands (Wageningen Marine Research, 2020)
Source: Fulmar Litter EcoQO monitoring in the Netherlands (Wageningen Marine Research, 2020)

The European Union has now embedded the fulmar research in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) and uses the methodology to monitor all European waters, including other species.

Although the amount of plastics found in fulmars' stomachs is slowly decreasing, the intended threshold is still far from being achieved. And even when the threshold value will be reached, the work of creating a truly clean marine environment will be far from over.

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