Are Estuaries Sources or Sinks of Plastic Pollution? High-Resolution Modeling of Macroplastic Emissions, Transport, and Fate

Rivers have been suggested to be important pathways of litter into the ocean, with estimates between 1.15 – 2.41 million tons of plastic per year globally (Lebreton et al. 2017) or 307 and 925 million items per year for Europe alone (González-Fernández et al. 2021). Similarly, estuaries account for 88% of the global coastline acting as filters for water and sediments (Dürr et al. 2011). However, processes of transport and retention at rivers and estuaries are still poorly understood. In this study, 1) we estimate an emission budget for an urbanized estuary in the Baltic Sea, to assess the emission from floating macroplastics into the sea and 2) assess the transport and retention dynamics using a hydrodynamic model of 20m horizontal resolution and a Lagrangian particle tracking using the Ocean Parcels.

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