From face masks to 30-year-old drug packs – that’s what gets stranded
Pisa, 9 May 2022 – Packages of drugs expired thirty years ago and much more new surgical masks and FFP2 legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic. These are some of the objects found by a team of the University of Pisa which analyzed the quantities and mechanisms of accumulation of marine litter in the Mediterranean taking as a case study Marina di Pietrasanta, a well-known Tuscan seaside resort in Versilia. The results of the research funded by the Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca Foundation have just been published in the journal “Science of the Total Environment”.
The team of marine biologists and hygienic biologists estimated that from 2020 to 2021 along i 4.7 km of beach of Marina di Pietrasanta about 367 thousand objects are deposited, 90 per cent made of plastic, and that the cost to remove them was about 27,600 euros per kilometer per year. Furthermore, as the study found, most of the waste (on average 710 objects every 100 meters) is beached with winter and autumn storm surges and also the type varies according to the seasons with some objects, for example polystyrene and shoes, plus abundant pieces in the fall while others, such as plastic bags, in the spring and summer.
“The results of our study provide indications for managing coastal cleaning more effectively, and suggest for example the possibility of intervening even in winter when accumulation is greater – explains the professor. Elena Balestri of the University of Pisa among the authors of the publication. “But it should also be emphasized that beached marine litter must not be the amount produced and possibly poorly managed on site but rather by the interaction between coastal currents and anthropogenic activities connected to rivers and ports – continues Balestri – waste management and the related removal and cleaning costs cannot therefore be entirely delegated to individual coastal municipalities, but must be addressed at least on a regional scale by involving public and private bodies and also associations of volunteers “.
Together with Elena Balestri, Annalaura Carducci as well as Virginia Menicagli, Davide De Battisti, Ferruccio Maltagliati and Alberto Castelli, Marco Verani, Ileana Federigi and Claudio Lardicci participated in the responsible research.
Link to the scientific article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.153914