Legal Regulation of Upland Discharges of Marine Debris: From Local to Global Controls and Back

Abstract

Although land-based discharges account for much of the problem of marine debris, na-tional and local regulation of such discharges has been utterly inadequate. In marked distinction to the regime for control of sea-based pollution, international rules to induce appropriate national and local policies on upland discharges have been largely ignored. For most regions no such rules have been developed. Regional rules that do exist (mainly for the Northeast Atlantic, the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Southeast Pacific, and the Arctic) rarely have addressed the specific problems of marine debris and, to the extent they have, have focused on symptoms (waste disposal) rather than on causes (waste generation).