Kara Lavender Law

TL;DR: By identifying and synthesizing dispersed data on production, use, and end-of-life management of polymer resins, synthetic fibers, and additives, this work presents the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics ever manufactured.

TL;DR: This work combines available data on solid waste with a model that uses population density and economic status to estimate the amount of land-based plastic waste entering the ocean, which is estimated to be 275 million metric tons.

TL;DR: Results from 22 years of plankton tows in the North Atlantic showed the pattern of plastics accumulation was indeed as predicted by theories of ocean circulation, but, despite the steady increase in plastic production and disposal, the concentration of plastic debris had not increased and no trend in plastic concentration was observed in the region of highest accumulation.

TL;DR: This paper used a rigorous statistical framework to standardize a global dataset of plastic marine debris measured using surface-trawling plankton nets and coupled this with three different ocean circulation models to spatially interpolate the observations.