This research takes a holistic approach to considering the consequences of marine plastic pollution. A semi-systematic literature review of 1191 data points provides the basis to determine the global ecological, social and economic impacts. An ecosystem impact analysis demonstrates that there is global evidence of impact with medium to high frequency on all subjects, with a medium to high degree of irreversibility. A novel translation of these ecological impacts into ecosystem service impacts provides evidence that all ecosystem services are impacted to some extent by the presence of marine plastic, with a reduction in provision predicted for all except one. This reduction in ecosystem service provision is evidenced to have implications for human health and wellbeing, linked particularly to fisheries, heritage and charismatic species, and recreation.

An Ecosystem Service Approach (ESA) is increasingly advocated for use in both environmental management and academic applications. However, despite extensive conceptual development, there are still very few examples of the effective use of the ESA for operational management. This contribution reports on the field application of the ESA at six marine and coastal case study sites. Each case study demonstrates a variation on an interdisciplinary approach to translate complex natural science data into ecosystem service terminology, and then explores the usefulness of this information in a management context. From these experiences 6 key recommendations are made to aid the future application of the ESA: (1) Invest resources in collective planning of ESA; (2) apply dynamic and connected approaches including multiple ES; (3) undertake ESA at a local scale; (4) employ interdisciplinary research; (5) work proactively and transparently with data gaps and uncertainty; (6) record ESA and resultant impact. For each recommendation an accompanying discussion of state of the art tools and methods is provided to promote their attainment.

Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans threatens ecosystems and biodiversity. The connected nature of the marine environment suggests that coordinated actions by countries sharing an ocean border may provide more effective pollution control than unilateral actions by any one country. However, countries often fail to cooperate, even when joint economic benefits would be higher under cooperation. Here we present a modelling framework to determine the potential economic benefits of cooperative marine plastic pollution management. The framework integrates an estimated plastic transfer matrix from a particle tracking model with game theory to derive the economic benefits of international cooperation for 16 countries bordering the North Atlantic Ocean. Subject to modelling uncertainties, a fully cooperative agreement yields aggregate annual net benefits of around $36 billion and a 64% reduction in emissions. The net benefits of cooperation persist over alternative scenarios and considering the impact of uncertainties but vary in magnitude and distribution.