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  • NEWS FEATURE

Plastics tsunami: Can a landmark treaty stop waste from choking the oceans?

As nations meet this week to negotiate an agreement on plastics pollution, researchers warn that a lack of information will make it hard to enforce any agreement.
  1. Meera Subramanian

    1. Meera Subramanian is a freelance journalist in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

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Household plastic waste is piling up at the sea fisherman's settlement of Belawan in Medan, North Sumatra province, Indonesia.

Plastic waste litters a fishing settlement along the coast of Medan, Indonesia. Credit: Sutanta Aditya/NurPhoto via Getty

On a warm windy day in early April, Jace Tunnell steps out of his car at Morgan’s Point, a spit of land that juts out into the Houston Ship Channel in Texas. Tunnell, a marine biologist and reserve director at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, sets his watch and gets to work, walking along the high-tide line and picking up every plastic pellet he can see.

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Nature 611, 650-653 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03793-3

References

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  3. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Reckoning with the U.S. Role in Global Ocean Plastic Waste (National Academies Press, 2022).

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  4. United Nations Environment Programme. From Pollution to Solution: A Global Assessment of Marine Litter and Plastic Pollution (UNEP, 2021).

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