Emerging Challenges and Solutions for Plastic Pollution

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Background

Though the title reduces the topic to three keywords and a phrase, we would like to provide something for everyone, especially young scientists looking for life-long adventure. This special issue focuses on estuarine and marine plastic pollution and targets the identification of and potential remedies for the plethora of challenges that plastic waste in the oceans poses for all ecosystems. Each paper in this transdisciplinary collection will identify a challenge related to plastic pollution at any level of organization and scale and provide hypotheses for potential solutions. Our goal is a collection that sets conceptual frameworks for addressing challenges and finding solutions to pieces of this global conundrum for the next decade.

Plastic Pollution is pervasive at all earthly scales and environments and fluids including air and water. Physical and chemical plastic pollution ultimately ends up in streams, estuaries, sounds, and oceans. Recent advances illustrate the magnitude of the present and future plastic pollution. Though sensitive assays show that all plastics contain toxic compounds, impacts can be prioritized. For example, plastic particles from all recycled categories taste like food, and the chemistry of plastics ensures that they are platforms for the delivery and removal of chemicals that impact biological systems. Work on policy at local to global scales shows some progress, though production and pollution are outpacing policy solutions. It is clear that the extensive damage to the environment, food security and human health will continue to be documented and must be reversed. Potential practical solutions need to be proposed and vetted by stakeholders. It is expected that, because business models will be threatened, the standard undermining of science to slow responses and change is expected. How to manage this topic to level the playing field through laws or regulations is one kind of contribution which would be exciting to include.

The scope of this research topic is broad and targets estuarine and marine Plastic Pollution from STEM, Social Science, Environmental, and Human Health perspectives, especially from a molecular and ecological perspective. Papers should focus on a specific component of the larger challenge, define the challenge and add substance that addresses that component, and terminate their offering with a discourse on potential practical solutions. Authors should think specifically of an offering that can be understood by anyone with a basic scientific and policy knowledge and target informing new researchers and managers

Keywords: marine plastic pollution, marine litter, microplastics, nanoplastics, molecular ecology, microbial ecology, marine biology, marine ecology, environmental and human health, earth-system processes, earth system governance, earth resilience, families of plastics, biological functions of plastics, challenges and solutions, remedies to business, science, policy and law, constraints at all levels of government

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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