The University of Plymouth (UoP) is one of the UK’s most prominent and dynamic universities with a strategic focus on sustainability and environmental research. Consistently ranked as one of the top three modern universities in the UK, UoP attracts significant funds to support research by staff and PhD students and has recently invested more than £110 million in state-of-the-art facilities. UoP will contribute to the project from the perspective of Marine Ecology. The work will be based in the Marine Biology and Ecology Research Centre which comprises of 8 Professors and more than 25 full time academic staff (www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/mberc) active in all fields from rivers through, estuaries and salt marshes to the open coast and the deep sea). Key staff have collaborated within the International Marine Litter Research Unit for many years and have over 50 publications on marine litter, integrating marine science insights with societal understanding to address upstream pathways and sources of litter (https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/marine-litter).