and we should be able to reduce plastic pollution to maintain the clean status of all our tourist places.†
† The ‘Blue Flag’ is a certification that can be obtained by a beach, marina, or sustainable boating tourism operator, and serves as an eco‐label. The certification is awarded by the Denmark‐based non‐profit Foundation for Environmental Education, which sets stringent environmental, educational, safety‐related, and access‐related criteria that applicants must meet and maintain. It is awarded annually to beaches and marinas in FEE member countries.
Amrutha & Warrier (2020) presented a detailed source‐to‐sink characterization of freshwater MPs collected from the water, sediment, and soil samples of the Netravathi River catchment, a tropical Indian river. The authors reported that sampling sites close to important religious places were observed to have higher concentration of MPs fibers, which may be due to garments washing.
2.6 Conclusion and Future Prospects
Although the awareness of plastic pollution is increasing, the knowledge of the scale and severity of impacts on humans and ecosystems is limited. With the growing awareness of the potential threat and subsequent consequences of plastic pollution to human populations, more detailed investigations of these emerging pollutants are needed for effective management action and risk assessment to reduce the detrimental social, ecological, and economic impacts. Detailed studies on qualitative and quantitative estimation of macro‐ and microplastics with strong focus on predicting current and future trends across spatial and temporal scales, using portable sensors, etc., is imperative to address the global plastic wastes. Together with a detailed understanding and quantification of the origins, transport pathways, fluxes, and fate of these emerging pollutants, urgent steps to manage plastic wastes such as making laws banning plastic littering more stringent, providing for plastic waste management infrastructure, and making waste segregation at source mandatory, are required to determine and reduce the risks to marine ecosystem as well as all other ecosystems and humans as a whole.
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