Fitz boosts UCT's global impact
Peter Ryan
The Fitz featured in a recent news article reporting that, according to the Times Higher Education (THE) University Impact Rankings, UCT is ranked 77th in the world. The THE evaluated 1963 universities, using the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a metric.
For Goal 14, Life Below Water, UCT was ranked 13th in the world, thanks in part to Fitz-led research and activities. Professor Jeff Murugan, acting deputy vice-chancellor for Research and Internationalisation is quoted as saying,
“UCT’s FitzPatrick Institute is leading impactful research in this field and has developed a method of using bottles to identify the main sources of litter in marine systems. This tool has now been adopted by research teams based in Australia, Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom, with the findings from these studies contributing to the UN Plastic Treaty negotiations.”
Prof. Murugan was referring to studies using plastic bottles and lids as marine litter tracers developed by Emeritus Prof. Peter Ryan and Fitz research associate Dr Maëlle Connan, along with former Fitz students, Ben Dilley, Vonica Perold, and Eleanor Weideman. These studies revealed that, in contrast to the widely held assumption that most plastic marine litter came from land-based sources, illegal dumping from ships at sea is responsible for most drink bottle litter at remote beaches throughout the Southern Hemisphere. By comparison, many loose lids from drink bottles drift long distances at sea, with most foreign lids in the western Indian Ocean coming from Indonesia.
By July 2024, the first paper in the series, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, had been cited 120 times. Last year, Peter and collaborators drafted a summary document for the United Nations Environment Programme about widespread littering by ships in the Southern Hemisphere, which was tabled at the UN Global Plastic Pollution Treaty negotiations.
To learn more about our research into marine litter, visit our Plastics in the Environment page.