When adventure tourists set foot on the remote, uninhabited shores of Svalbard in the High Arctic, a region renowned for its stark polar beauty, few are prepared for the sight that awaits them these days: Beaches strewn with plastic debris stuck firmly into the permafrost.

The debris includes discarded fishing gear, workers’ helmets and boots, an assortment of popped Nescafe capsules, cheap cans of deodorant and more. The sight is so disturbing that visitors reflexively reach down and begin to collect the garbage. Birgit Lutz, a polar explorer and Arctic guide, turned her clients’ instinct — to witness and to protect — into a citizen science project that has provided the first quantitative analysis of plastic pollution in the High Arctic.

The findings from that project, which is being used as evidence by the United Nations as it deliberates an international Plastics Treaty, was first published in Frontiers in Marine Science in 2023. It describes that while two thirds of the plastic debris come from fisheries along the Arctic coastline, almost a third is of European origin.

“In Germany we pride ourselves in our great recycling system and yet we find these things in the Arctic [that are from our country],” said Melanie Bergmann, senior scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany. Bergmann collaborated with Lutz to devise a rigorous, unbiased method of assessing the extent of plastic pollution for the project. Together with her student, Anna Natalie Meyer, she sleuthed the origin of 23,000 pieces of garbage that Lutz and her teams of volunteers collected during the survey. Eight per cent of the trash with identifiable markings had German writing, “I was surprised”, she said.

In terms of weight, the overwhelming majority of the debris that litters the beaches, however, is fishing gear, large nets and fishing lines that have frozen into the ground. This is “ghost gear.” which was discarded into the ocean, either by accident or illegally, and it continues to kill fish until it washes onshore. For legal fisheries, an estimated 2 percent of all fishing gear is lost to sea annually, an amount that quickly snowballs to staggering quantities, when this estimate is extrapolated onto the global scale. Annually, this includes some 14 billion fishing hooks lost (still attached to longlines), and plastic fishing nets that could cover the area of Vermont more than three times over. One 2018 report estimated that ghost nets, lines, and ropes accounted for almost half of the plastic found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Lutz says that removing a single washed-up fishing rope from the permafrost on a Svalbard beach can take several hours. “You may see 20 centimeters on the surface, and then you start pulling and digging and then we need knives and all kinds of tools,” she said. “And you have to imagine we do all of this in polar bear country,” which is cold and dangerous.

But almost all the tourists she guides volunteer immediately for the task. The survey started in 2015 and the repeated quantitative analysis led to the estimate that approximately 87 percent of the plastic debris, by weight, on Svalbard beaches, is fishing gear. But, by volume, 80 percent of the trash comprises a litany of smaller items like plastic packaging and household items.

In a dedicated effort alongside the general survey, Lutz’s team of citizen scientists collected three large bags of this general waste, weighing 1,620 kg, or as much as an average sedan. The bags were shipped to Bergmann’s laboratory in Bremerhaven where the items were meticulously cleaned and examined with magnifying glasses and microscopes, over a period of four months. A tiny fraction, 1 percent of the items, had discernable writing on their surface. Russian, Chinese, and Norwegian script immediately gave away the culprit source nations, but more investigation was required when the script was in Spanish, Portuguese, or English.

The researchers found that two countries were the main source of bulk of the trash —Spain and Germany.

“It was real detective work,” Lutz said of the quest to attribute a source to each piece of junk. Meyer, who was a bachelor’s student working on her dissertation in Bergmann’s group and is the lead author on the study, called the companies that manufacture the identified items in an effort to determine whether they supply certain fishing or tourism vessels with provisions. Cleaning products, fishing crates, personal protective equipment, all fell under her lens. When the results came through “I became suspicious of the items from Brazil and Argentina,” Lutz said. These countries do not send fishing vessels to the Arctic. “One possibility is that [the trash] comes with the Gulf Stream, but the other is that it comes with the tourist vessels.”

Many of the outfitters that tour Antarctica in the austral summer (December through February), based out of Brazil and Argentina, bring visitors to the Arctic in the boreal summer (June through August). “I always thought that the tourism vessels, because I have seen it like this, they don’t throw anything overboard. I was convinced of this. But maybe I wanted to believe [that is so],” she adds. All ocean currents are connected, so it is not impossible for trash to move across Ocean gyres, but the researchers say that it is more likely that the trash is released locally by tourist vessels.

Even inland rivers can serve as reservoirs for plastic pollution that could make its way to the Arctic. In the documentary feature The North Drift, filmmaker Steffen Krones finds a beer bottle floating about while kayaking in the Arctic Circle and traces its origin to the river Elbe in Germany.

“From the river Elbe, into the North Sea” is one potential route, Bergmann explains, “and then of course you get the transport to the north through the Skagerrak-Kattegat strait, which drifts into the Arctic. That’s two [possibilities], which would take one to two years”. It is possible that this is how trash from European countries without an Arctic coast, which contribute a third of the general debris found in Svalbard, could reach the high Arctic.

The United Nations is determined to reach an international, legally binding treaty for plastics production and disposal this year. Final treaty negotiations are scheduled to take place in South Korea in November, and a resolution will almost certainly include provisions to tackle marine debris and ghost fishing gear.

As polar tourism continues to grow, an efficient system for waste management is also clearly desirable. Harbors routinely charge vessels to process their trash. “At HELCOM,” an intergovernmental organization that works for the protection of the marine environment of the Baltic Sea, “you have a one fee system” Bergmann said, citing it as an example other ports could emulate. “So, if a ship goes into a port, they have to pay one fee irrespective of how much waste they put into those bins in the port reception facilities,” This incentivizes ships to process their trash in harbor instead of dumping it out at the sea.

Education and public communication are also paramount. “I have faith in people” Lutz said, “I think always if you inform people, most of the people will make the right choice”. In many ways the Arctic, which is mostly out of sight and out of mind, has become emblematic of the global reach of human-caused pollution. Positive change here would be good news for all of us.