Plastic pollution is widespread across the Amazon Rainforest’s rivers, plants and animals, according to a recent study.
Previous research suggests up to 10% of total plastics in the ocean arrive there via the vast network of waterways that’s the Amazon Basin. To understand how and where plastic pollution is present within the basin itself, researchers looked at 52 field studies dating back to 2000 that reported on plastic within the biome across all nine Amazonian countries.
The first evidence of animal death caused by microplastic pollution surfaced in 2009, when scientists investigated the death of a manatee likely suffocated by a plastic bag.
Since then, the researchers found 51 more studies published as of April 2025 showing evidence of plastic contamination in fish, manatees, turtles and birds, as well as in soil sediments and drinking water sources.
“Even wild animals that have little contact with people and that live deep in the forest, far away from cities, are already contaminated with microplastics,” lead author Jéssica Fernandes de Melo, an ecology and biodiversity conservation researcher at the State University of Santa Cruz, Brazil, told Mongabay by phone. “We’ve also seen birds using [macroplastics] to build their nests.
“You could be bathing in the middle of a small stream in the middle of Amazonas state and see a piece of plastic floating along the water. To me, that is already very shocking,” Fernandes de Melo said.
Municipalities in more remote areas often lack recycling or adequate waste management programs, leading to an accumulation of plastic waste in the environment, Fernandes de Melo said.
Two-thirds of the animal species found to be contaminated are consumed locally, which also raises concerns about impacts on human health, the authors write.
However, most studies found plastic fragments in fishes’ digestive systems, which are rarely eaten. It’s still unclear if there’s plastic within their muscle tissue, which would pose a higher risk to human health. The level of plastic contamination in drinking water is also poorly understood, the authors write.
“Plastic contamination in the Amazon presents a highly worrying scenario,” the authors write, “While the evidence suggests that plastic is omnipresent, research is clearly in its infancy.”
The first study to specifically measure plastic contamination in the biome — rather than opportunistically finding evidence of plastic pollution — was only published in 2018. While there’s been more research on the issue since 2020, there are still no studies on the impact of nanoplastics, the review highlighted. In large regions of the Amazon, no field studies have been carried out, with most of the research concentrated along the main stem of the Amazon River.
“We need to understand how serious this problem is, but there is also a gap, a significant lack of research in this area,” Fernandes de Melo added.
