Victoria Fulfer

Fulbright Vietnam

In 2020, Vietnam issued a National Action Plan for the Management of Marine Plastic Litter, with the goal of becoming a regional leader in minimizing plastic waste. This plan highlights the need for the implementation of monitoring programs in the major drainage basins across Vietnam, as well as the development of a system for monitoring marine litter based on remote sensing and imaging technologies. The plan has identified rivers as avenues for high impact interventions. Before intervention measures can be taken, areas of high plastic input to the rivers must be identified and input metrics quantified. The 2020 IUCN report showed Nha Trang beaches have a high abundance of plastic debris, but no work has been completed to date to determine the path plastics take from source to shoreline.

From September 2022 through February 2023 I was a Fulbright Student Research Fellow in Nha Trang, Vietnam, home of the Cai River watershed, to attempt to quantify the amount of plastic pollution being transported to Nha Trang Bay. The Cai River passes through the city, which could be a predominant source of plastic pollution, before emptying into the South China Sea, allowing the study of plastic deposition on the shorelines to the north and south of the river outlet. During my time in Nha Trang I conducted a time series of macro- and microplastic pollution at four shoreline sites. The goal of this project was to determine if different shoreline topographies trap debris effectively, and if patterns of debris deposition could be linked to environmental factors (waves, shoreline topography, river discharge) and/or weather conditions (wind, precipitation, monsoon season). Every 5 to 7 days, all sites were visited and transects macro debris was counted along a 100 m stretch of shoreline. Every other week, microplastic samples were taken from the upper beach, wrack line, and intertidal zones of the same sites.

Overall, 81% of debris items deposited on the shorelines of Nha Trang were single-use items (e.g., plastic bags and wrappers, face masks, drink bottles, straws, cigarettes, rubber bands). While heavy precipitation did coincide with a larger debris pulses from the river being deposited on shorelines, correlations with other environmental parameters are less clear. The analyses from this project are ongoing.