Memorial University of Newfoundland

Published purpose

The Nunatsiavut Government leads one of the most comprehensive plastic pollution monitoring programs in the Arctic, including monitoring of water, ice, shorelines, and animals. This project builds on existing Inuit-led research in this area and uses capacity sharing (rather than capacity building) to work with new and returning partners to extend this work in two ways. First, monitoring will focus on birds caught for food for which there are no existing plastic ingestion baselines in the region (or the world). Secondly, we will link plastic pollution with heavy metal contamination since plastics are known to act as a vector for heavy metals. We will compare this new baseline data to colonial archival samples of birds collected from Nunatsiavut to investigate trends in heavy metals and their relationship to changes from climate change, the introduction of consumer plastics to the North, and other temporal points of significance. Additionally, we will identify sources of macro plastics on shorelines using new forensics based in collective community knowledge, and link these sources to micro plastics ingested by animals to provide input on meaningful intervention into plastic pollution control and mitigation from human activities. This research will be directed and validated by continuous community review and evaluation through land-based workshops aimed at recognizing that local knowledge holders are the main experts within that space and environment. Together, these activities will be used to inform plastic pollution, heavy metal contamination, and Inuit food way governance and mitigation by the Nunatsiavut Government.