Legacy plastics: interventions to remove existing plastic from aquatic environments.

In accordance with the ‘waste hierarchy’, preventing plastic from entering the environment must be the policy priority. However, some amount of plastic removal from the environment will likely be necessary to reduce the risk of harm to ecosystems and potentially to humans.

Already, governments around the world are negotiating a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution – the United Nations (UN) Plastics Treaty. At the time of writing, the latest draft includes a potential obligation for member states to:

• Monitor plastic pollution within their jurisdiction
• Identify plastic pollution hotspots
• Adopt effective mitigation and remediation measures to reduce environmental plastic pollution, including clean-up activities within identified hotspots.

Against this backdrop, this report summarises some of the technologies and other interventions that are available to clean-up legacy plastics from the environment, as well as discussing their feasibility, effectiveness and environmental impacts. The report also presents approaches to identify accumulation hotspots – which may help to prioritise areas for clean-up.