1st Working Group meeting: UNEP/EC Project Identifying and quantifying plastic contaminant sources and leakages into the aquatic environment

This Working Group aims to develop a toolkit to identify and quantify the sources of plastic pollution in the aquatic environment which is established under the UNEP/EC project: Global: Identifying and quantifying plastic contaminant sources and leakages into the aquatic environment.

The working group will be comprised of assessment experts, modellers and pollution control experts, and other professionals with technical knowledge on plastic pollution and modelling, including assessment experts from the river basin organisations/regional seas programmes with experiences in identifying and quantifying plastic pollutants entering the freshwater/marine environments. The meetings of the working group will be organised three times during the toolkit development -through either physical or online meetings-, but some work will also
be conducted between the meetings. One more meeting will be organised during the application of the
developed tool to get feedback from the application process to improve the toolkit. Members of the working
group will be selected taking into consideration the areas of their expertise, regional balance and gender
balance and ensuring that developing country situations are fully considered.

The terms of reference of the Working Group have been defined:

To fulfill the development of the toolkit, some of the main tasks of the WG are:
i. Collect information on the existing tools/methodologies as well as on the research results related
to the plastic pollution sources, including plastic leakage from human activities and sector activities;
ii. Identify major human activities and sector activities that are associated with plastic discharge or
emission;
iii. Develop specific methodologies to estimate the amount of plastic pollution or leakage from
identified sources;
iv. Develop data category and quality standards to apply the toolkit and suggest data systems to be
developed during the toolkit application;
v. Review a draft toolkit from technical and scientific perspectives;
vi. Prepare toolkit application modality;
vii. Advise on the pilot application of the toolkit to a pilot country;
viii. Advise data collection in the pilot country
ix. Revise the toolkit based on the feedback from the pilot application of the toolkit; and
x. Finalize a practical toolkit for online publication.

>>> IETC's Projects on Sustainable Plastic Waste Management