Riverine systems act as converging pathways for discarded litter within drainage basins,
becoming key elements in gauging the transfer of mismanaged waste into the ocean.
However, riverine litter data are scarce and biased towards microplastics, generally lacking
information about larger items. Based on the first ever database of riverine floating
macrolitter across Europe, we have estimated that between 307 and 925 million litter items
are released annually from Europe into the ocean. The plastic fraction represented 82% of …