International Legal Protection of the Marine Environment from Plastic Pollution

Abstract

The subject of the work is the norms of international law regulating the protection of the marine environment from plastic pollution. The purpose of the work is to analyze the existing international legal regulation in the field of protection of the oceans from plastic pollution and to develop recommendations aimed at improving the level of protection of the marine environment. In the process of preparing the work, various methods, means of cognition and logical techniques were used, such as analysis, synthesis, deduction, induction, etc. Currently, plastic pollution is one of the main threats to the oceans, every year a huge amount of plastic debris from various sources located both directly in the marine environment and on land enters the marine environment. Plastic pollution is detected even in the most remote corners of the planet, while the level of pollution in them is comparable to industrially developed areas. High concentrations of microplastics are found even in the Arctic sea ice, while it is at least two orders of magnitude higher than in the heavily polluted surface waters of the Pacific Ocean. These facts speak both about the urgent need to develop legal protection of the marine environment from pollution, and about the high degree of relevance of the research topic, its practical and scientific significance. The conducted research allowed us to come to a number of conclusions and proposals of a practical and theoretical nature. Among them is a proposal on the need to include in Annex 1 to the International Convention on the Control of Harmful Antifouling Systems on Ships those antifouling systems that are a source of microplastics entering the marine environment. Among other things, based on the data on plastic pollution of the world's oceans, it is concluded that the current system of legal protection of the marine environment from pollution does not cope with this problem.