Mis­man­aged plas­tic waste (MPW) and urban flood­ing are typ­i­cal­ly con­sid­ered dis­tinct envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges. How­ev­er, there are notable links between grow­ing quan­ti­ties of MPW and the ris­ing inci­dence of floods in cities. A major­i­ty of peo­ple now live in cities, espe­cial­ly along coast­lines and in estu­ar­ies where res­i­dents are both vul­ner­a­ble to flood­ing and sig­nif­i­cant sources of plas­tic waste. Pre­dict­ed increas­es in the fre­quen­cy and sever­i­ty of heavy rain­fall asso­ci­at­ed with anthro­pogenic cli­mate change coin­cide with ris­ing glob­al quan­ti­ties of MPW, much of which is dis­charged into water bod­ies and the sea.

Giv­en the urgent and expand­ing nature of these issues, under­stand­ing impacts of urban floods on sol­id waste man­age­ment and vice ver­sa is cru­cial. Social-eco­log­i­cal sys­tems (SES) think­ing calls for a holis­tic approach to the rela­tion­ships and inter­ac­tions between human actors and envi­ron­men­tal sys­tems which can result in dynam­ic and emer­gent out­comes.

In this review paper, we make a first step towards bet­ter under­stand­ing of the inter­ac­tions between urban flood­ing and MPW by syn­the­siz­ing emerg­ing quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive research on par­tic­u­lar aspects of such inter­ac­tions. More research is need­ed which explic­it­ly focus­es on and elab­o­rates the nature of these inter­ac­tions, and also to con­sid­er poten­tial rela­tions across scales (from glob­al to local) and over both long and short time­frames. We con­clude that an SES approach can make vis­i­ble nov­el pos­si­bil­i­ties for inter­ven­tions which are con­text spe­cif­ic and sen­si­tive to the inter­ac­tions between urban floods and MPW.