“…Plastic was the most common litter item in all the studied areas (Table 1 and Figure 3), result that corroborates several studies conducted in other benthic environments around the world (Table 2) and in Brazil, in both beach environments (Neves et al, 2010;Oliveira et al, 2011;Tourinho and Fillmann, 2011;Bruno and Santos, 2012;Silva-Cavalcanti et al, 2013;Silva et al, 2015;Corrêa et al, 2019;Rangel et al, 2021;Rosa and Widmer, 2021), surface waters (Bernardino and Franz, 2016;Olivatto et al, 2019), and subtidal benthic environments (Soares et al, 2011;Farias et al, 2018;Carvalho et al, 2021). According to Jambeck et al (2015), the increasing presence of plastic in the ocean is due to the continuous expansion of its production, resulting from its widespread use in various sectors and inadequate waste management practices.…”