The Sørkappøya Marine Litter Cleanup (SMLC) integrated environmental mitigation with scientific research, producing two distinct outcomes.
First, the project involved a thorough clean-up of 3 kilometres of Sørkappøya’s coast, representing approximately 15% of the island’s circumference. A total of 4,538.50 kg of legacy litter (i.e. litter resulting
from long-term accumulation) was successfully removed from the study area, eliminating immediate threats posed by stranded litter to local wildlife, mitigating the long-term risk of secondary microplastic pollution caused by litter degradation and fragmentation, and preventing the reintroduction of litter items into the marine environment.
Secondly, all collected litter was analysed to generate quantitative and qualitative data on marine litter pollution in the study area. The analysis revealed a clear dominance of synthetic materials, which accounted
for between 73.0% and 80.6% of the total litter mass per study section. It also identified the fishing industry as the primary source of litter pollution (65.8 to 68.5% of litter mass), validating patterns observed in other parts of Svalbard. The project confirmed Sørkappøya’s status as a local pollution hotspot, with litter densities reaching 1,973.85 kg/km.
In addition, the project provided insights into methodologies dominating current marine litter research, most notably the limitations of scaling up data from small, transect-based samples and the over-reliance on
abundance-based metrics (item counts). While the original plan involved preparing a publicly available report compiling the litter data collected during project fieldwork, the data will instead be shared as an open-access, peer-reviewed article to reach a wider audience and better contribute to the ongoing scientific and policy discussions on marine litter pollution in the Arctic. A manuscript entitled “From clean-up to empirical data: Integrating research and mitigation to assess legacy marine litter on Sørkappøya, Svalbard”, containing the full dataset along with other relevant project details, was submitted for publication in Scientific Reports on 26 July 2026