EGU25-17676, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17676
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
What river plastic hotspots do not have in common
Rahel Hauk, Adriaan J. Teuling, Tim H.M. van Emmerik, and Martine van der Ploeg
Rahel Hauk et al.
  • Wageningen University & Research, Wageningen Environmental Research, Hydrology and Environmental Hydraulics, Netherlands (rahel.hauk@wur.nl)

Plastic pollution is a global issue, across all environmental compartments. Rivers connect the terrestrial with the marine environment, and they transport various materials, among these plastic pollution. Rivers not only transport plastic, but also accumulate and store it, especially on riverbanks. In fact, plastic deposition and accumulation on riverbanks is a common occurrence. However, our understanding of why plastic is deposited on a certain riverbank is rather limited. Riverbanks along all major Dutch rivers have been monitored for plastic and other litter twice a year by citizen scientists, in some locations since 2018. This provides an extensive dataset on plastic accumulation, and we used these data with the aim of understanding the factors determining plastic concentration/accumulation variability over time and space. We tested multiple riverbank characteristics, such as vegetation, riverbank slope, population density, etc., hypothesized to be related to plastic litter. After having exhausted a long list of auxiliary data and analysis strategies, we found no significant results. Ultimately, we had a close look at ten consistent hotspots of macroplastic litter, along the Meuse, and Waal river. And once again, they seem to have nothing in common. But, there is a pattern, because some riverbanks have consistently very high densities of plastic litter so it does not seem completely random. We have been looking to explain spatial variability, whereas we might have to look at temporal consistency, and we shall not give up our efforts to bring order to this chaos.

How to cite: Hauk, R., Teuling, A. J., van Emmerik, T. H. M., and van der Ploeg, M.: What river plastic hotspots do not have in common, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-17676, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17676, 2025.