Microplastic releases to the environment (Indicator)

Key Messages: Microplastic releases to the environment slightly increased by 7-9% in the EU between 2016 and 2022. Recent EU legal measures on microplastic releases are expected to facilitate reducing microplastic pollution.

Estimated microplastic releases in the EU

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Microplastics are increasingly recognized as a significant emerging pollutant. Microplastic pollution in the environment comes from the breakdown of larger plastic pieces, intentionally added to products, such as textiles, paints and cosmetics, and unintentionally released mainly from abrasion during use (e.g. car tyres) or improper handling (e.g. pellet losses), geotextiles or artificial sport surfaces. Released particles end up in the air, water and soil, and harm ecosystems and effects on human health are still unclear. Zero Pollution Action Plan aims to reduce the intentional and unintentional releases of microplastics to the environment.

In the absence of official monitoring for microplastic releases, the EEA prepared a proxy indicator (see more info section). The estimated trends show a slight increase (7-9%) in microplastics from pre-production pellets, paints, tyres and textiles in the EU. More specifically, estimated emissions from tyre abrasion increased by 12.3%, from plastic pellets by 7%, and from paints by 5% between 2016 and 2022. The increase in microplastic release between 2016 and 2022 has a high level of uncertainty, but there is also no evidence of a current decrease in emissions.

While the assessment indicates an increase in the releases, pieces of EU legislation were adopted or are in preparation that are expected to help reduce the emissions of microplastics. However, implementing the new legislative measures and assessing their positive impacts will take time. Moreover, it is unlikely that the overall effect of the measures taken will be sufficient to achieve the target and therefore the outlook concludes that the target is off track.

Please consult the relevant indicators and signals below for a more comprehensive overview on the topic.

The 2025 monitoring and outlook uses a composite indicator as a proxy to estimate the quantity of microplastics released into the environment by 2022. The findings originate from a new assessment approach considering available annual data mainly from the Eurostat (ETC/HE, 2024).

The applied composite indicator is based on the normalised values of the main drivers, weighted by their shares in the global emissions of microplastics as estimated in the Impact Assessment Report (EC, 2023). The Report describes six primary sources for the microplastic releases (tyres, textiles, paints, plastic pellets, detergent capsules and geotextiles). According to the impact assessment, these six sources account for 90-93% of the emissions. For the sake of simplicity, the weightings are based on emissions from the four main sources (paints (43%), tyre abrasion (35%), plastic pellets (9%) and textiles (3%)) only. During this study, it was not possible to identify regular and robust data sources that could be used to report directly or indirectly on microplastic emissions associated with geotextiles and detergent capsules.

Thus, even if on average tyres account for 35% of the emissions calculated in the Impact Assessment Report, they represent 39% of them when only the four main sources are considered. Therefore, the weightings considered in this simplified indicator sum up to 100%.

Please see the ETC report for more information on the methodology (ETC/HE, 2024).

References and footnotes

ETC/HE, 2024, Microplastic releases in the European Union, ETC HE Report 2024/15. ISBN 978-82-93970-58-3
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EC, 2023, Commission Staff Working Document, Impact Assessment Report - Combatting microplastics pollution in the European Union - Accompanying the document Proposal for a Regulation Of The European Parliament And Of The Council on preventing plastic pellet losses to reduce microplastics pollution, SWD(2023) 332 final, eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=SWD:2023:332:FIN.
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Microplastic releases to the environment (Indicator)

Estimated microplastic releases in the EU

Zero Pollution Action Plan 2030 target or policy objectives

Other relevant indicators and signals

References and footnotes