Plastic pollution is a growing environmental concern, especially in river systems that transport waste from land to sea. The INCA-Macroplastics (Integrated Catchment model of MacroPlastics transport) is the first spatiotemporally explicit model designed to simulate the mobilization and transport of mismanaged plastic waste (MPW) across entire catchments. It is designed to assess macroplastics’ fate and transport in landscapes. The model calculates macroplastic concentrations and fluxes in and across land with different soil types, stream water and riverbanks and sediments at the scale of a river catchment.
INCA-Macroplastics was developed at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) by François Clayer, Magnus Norling and Luca Nizzetto. The interface presented here have been developed by François Clayer (NIVA).
This model helps researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders:
The model was first applied to the Imus River catchment in the Philippines (Clayer et al., 2024), one of the most polluted rivers globally, to demonstrate its capabilities in a real-world setting.
By filling in the form below, you can access a demonstration page that offers the possibility of testing and exploring some key features of INCA-Macroplastics. If you are interested in a specific and more advanced use of the model, please contact info@ikhapp.org.
The interface enables easy and interactive access to some of the model’s key features. Users can explore how previsions of macroplastic fate and transport in a catchment can be affected by socioeconomic variables and as well as the impact of mitigation measures. Users can easily change the following inputs:
INCA-Macroplastics simulates macroplastic pollution in river catchments by modeling the movement of mismanaged plastic waste (MPW) from land to water. The model considers macroplastic inputs to the environment primarily through waste mismanagement and dumping using data on population density (WorldPop 2025) and dynamics (UN World Population Prospects 2024), waste generation rates, land use, and the fraction of mismanaged waste (Cottom et al., 2024). These inputs are generated through a pre-processing script and automatically loaded into the model via the interface.
During each simulation, INCA-Macroplastics dynamically calculates the transport and accumulation of macroplastics across the landscape, including their movement through soils, urban surfaces, and river networks. The model tracks macroplastic fluxes between land and water, their retention in the environment, and their eventual discharge at the river mouth (Clayer et al., 2024). All outputs are computed at a daily resolution.
The model incorporates variability in meteorological conditions which significantly influence macroplastic mobilization and transport. In this demonstration version simulations cover 16 full years from 2015 to 2030 including real weather forecast for the next two weeks and expected population and waste management dynamics in the next years. The user can introduce new mitigation measures and see the direct impact on macroplastic in different compartments of the environment.
INCA-Macroplastics can in principle receive information on which type of plastic items an operator is interested in. This can be done by introducing data on shape, size and density for different groups of plastic items. The model distinguishes between elongated bottles, soft bags, rectangular containers and other smaller items. In the demonstration version of the model provided by IKHAPP, these inputs are set to default and cannot be changed. These plastic types are defined based on their common shape which is considered to be a determining factor for transport, as it impacts the ability to be dragged with the water current (Carvill, 1993). Hence, each plastic type is associated with a specific drag coefficient and a drag area. In the professional version, the operator has the freedom to define new plastic type.
The interface provides a set of charts and a simplified report helping users to easily understand and compare results from subsequent runs of the model (e.g., after one or more parameters have been modified). Each working section will be open for two hours. During this time, results from every last simulation are saved and plotted together with the results of the next run of the model. This facilitates comparisons and qualitative evaluation of the effect of changing the parameters. Outputs are also provided using an adaptive text format that helps users to get an easily comprehensible synthesis. A result report can be downloaded in PDF and CSV format for each run.
The executable version of INCA-Macroplastics, the model’s open-source code and general information on the framework used to generate it (MOBIUS (Norling et al. 2021)) can be found in a github repository. A complete description of the model and information on its calibration and validation are provided by (Clayer et al., 2024). In the professional version, the model can be set to represent specific catchments, which can be described with a desired level of detail. It enables to run simulation for any desired time span by introducing tailored meteorological data and any available information on macroplastic sources (for example obtained from measurements). Several additional features are available compared to the demonstration version, including the possibility of arbitrarily defining multiple types of macroplastics characterized by desired ranges of shape, size and density, setting rates for mobilization, trapping into vegetation or riverbanks as well as grinding into microplastics.
The professional version INCA-Macroplastic can provide realistic predictions of macroplastic transport and distribution over specific landscapes. This makes it a useful tool to assess ecosystem exposure to macroplastic under variable conditions, and to evaluate the impact of pollution control measures on levels of plastic pollution in a given landscape. If you are interested in a specific and more advanced use of the model, please contact info@ikhapp.org.
Researchers from the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) conceived and coordinated the development of the model.
Researcher François Clayer (NIVA) is the creator of the interface which is jointly presented by IKHAPP and the GIZ 3RproMar project.