Place-by-place analysis as ideal representations of surface water plastics in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada

The Nunatsiavut Government (NG) has long led interdisciplinary contaminants monitoring in Labrador, Canada, centring Inuit-led research priorities. As marine plastic pollution increasingly interacts with Arctic ecosystems and Indigenous foodways, community-based monitoring and mitigation become essential. Yet dominant Western approaches to marine surface-water plastic monitoring often produce results poorly suited to community inquiry, emphasizing broad oceanic-scale concentrations rather than local patterns. This study investigates plastics in Nunatsiavut’s marine surface waters (>333 µ m) and advances two methodological approaches to improve community relevance. First, we develop a method to assess whether plastics likely originate locally or from long-range transport. Second, while we address regional patterns where appropriate, we conduct a place-by-place analysis that more accurately and meaningfully quantifies plastics than regional averages. Across most sites, plastic concentrations and plastic characteristics resembled those reported elsewhere in the Arctic, although site-level differences would have been obscured by aggregation. Most plastics were microplastics (<5 mm; 86%) and fragments (50.6%, n = 86), with wastewater microfibres (22%) and fishing-line threads (15%) as the most common identifiable sources. Our locality assessment method indicated that a greater proportion of plastic likely originated locally (39%) than from long-range transport (19%), while 42% remained indeterminate due to methodological constraints. We conclude by showing how community-oriented methods and site-level variation position place as a central analytic in surface-water plastics research.