Due to the vast scale of the world’s oceans, it is difficult to see how they will be cleaned up other than through the passage of time.  Even large scale, buoyant pollution would require enormous resources to be reduced by a significant amount, and pollutants like microplastics and soluble chemicals are even more difficult to deal with.  Thus it is almost certain that the best way to protect the oceans is through reduction of pollutants entering them.  The Jambeck study, cited earlier on the Ocean Pollution Volumes page,  concluded that population size and the quality of nations’ waste management systems were the two largest drivers of how much of a nation’s plastic, and by implication, other pollutants, ends up in the sea.  Instead of legislation or impractical bans on certain materials, national and international authorities may do more good by working toward comprehensive waste collection and landfilling/recycling standards, most specifically in developing countries.  This is especially true since financial or logistical aid is more likely to be welcomed while mandated reductions, which could impede economic growth, may be resisted.[1]

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The other remarkable observation is that very large gaps exist in our knowledge of where to spend resources.  For example, microplastics can now be found everywhere in our oceans, even on shores as far away as Antarctica.  Despite this, we do not fully understand whether micro plastics are more or less dangerous than chemical pollutants, which are also omnipresent. 

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It seems a focus on policy and private sector resources, on those activities which give a greater impact per unit of effort, and also increased academic and research time and money will help to discern which solutions will have the greatest impact.[2]

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[1] The concentration of polluters and the impact of waste management is remarkable.  In the case of plastics, despite being the largest global producer of such waste, the United States has good infrastructure for capturing it before it gets into the marine environment, and was estimated to rank 20th globally in contribution to marine waste.  If the top five polluting nations, out of the 192 studied, in this study were to improve their capture rate by 50% the global reduction in ultimate plastics reaching the sea was estimated at 26%.

[2] Note that this is done both directly by comparing or studying the success of different mitigation strategies, and indirectly which gives us a better understanding of microplastics’ impact on wildlife and would help to prioritize reduction of plastic pollution versus chemical pollutants.