5 ms·
No, you aren't wrong. "Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" [0] - The source is Deutsche Welle, which appears to be Germany's equivalent
by heymijo 9y ago
No, you aren't wrong.
"Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" [0]
- The source is Deutsche Welle, which appears to be Germany's equivalent of the BBC. [1]
"It turns out that about 90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order).
These rivers have a few key things in common. All of them run through areas where a lot of people live — hundreds of millions of people in some cases. But what's more important is that these areas don't have adequate waste collection or recycling infrastructure. There is also little public awareness that plastic trash is a problem at all, so a lot of garbage, gets thrown into the river and conveniently disappears downstream."
Someone linked a great map of these 10 rivers in a past thread, but I can't seem to find it.
[0] http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-from-just-10-rivers/a-41581484 http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-f...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle
- ataturk 9y agoNot shocking which part of the world gives absolutely zero fucks about pollution.
- tshannon 9y agoI wonder how practical it would be to have some sort of plastic filter / water processing plant where these rivers dump into the ocean. It would be in all of our best interest to fund something like that, but I wonder if you could do it without a negative ecological impact, i.e. blocking wildlife from traversing the river to and from the ocean.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoDefinitely possible. As always, dollars and effort are what's required. https://www.theoceancleanup.com/technology/ https://www.theoceancleanup.com/technology/
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoYou might be interested in Baltimore Harbor's Water Wheel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l7s6wC50g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l7s6wC50g It uses the water flow, solar, some pontoons and a clever design to fill up a dumpster with debris. This seems like the real issue: someone still needs to take it from the dumpster, but at that point it's a manageable problem.
- protonfish 9y agoOr just have some sort of waste disposal facilities like civilized countries.
- titzer 9y agoI have trouble believing that 10 rivers are responsible for this. For example, the Ocean Cleanup Project estimates that 1 garbage truck per minute enters the world's oceans. Picture that in terms of plastic flowing through rivers, and it just doesn't work. The only explanation is organized, industrial-scale dumping from coastal countries (particularly Indonesia and Southeast Asia) that lack landfill and reclamation infrastructure.
- aninhumer 9y agoI wouldn't be surprised if commercial dumping is a factor, but I don't find the idea of 10 large rivers transporting that amount of waste in a minute that hard to imagine?
- titzer 9y agoIf you work out the math for what the river would have to look like, and then inspect these rivers, I think you'll find that it doesn't match up. At any rate, it would great if this were actually the case, because then it would be easier to bottleneck and corral this trash. But, I don't think this is the case.
- Retric 9y ago1/10th of a garbage truck per minute per river is not going to look like anything obvious just some random junk. The Amazon is dumping 450,000,000 cu ft per minute into the ocean on average, 1/10th of a garbage truck in such a vast quantity of brown water filled with floating crap seems very reasonable. Further, this is an average the bulk is probably dumped during floods when the flow is higher and plastic floats from roads and whatnot into over flowing drainage systems.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago"If"? Please do the math then. OK, fine, I'll do the math for you. Here's a list of discharge rates for most of those rivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_discharge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_discharge add in the Hai river at 717 m^3/s and the total discharge volume of those 10 rivers together adds up to 123,500 m^3/s, that's 7.4 million cubic meters per minute. What do you think a few cubic meters of plastic diluted into over 7 million cubic meters looks like? It looks like a dilution level of around 1 part per million. Is that representative of the hugely polluted outflows of these rivers? It certainly seems like it to me.
- mtreis86 9y agoTen percent is abandoned fishing nets. http://www.fao.org/tempref/docrep/fao/011/i0620e/i0620e.pdf http://www.fao.org/tempref/docrep/fao/011/i0620e/i0620e.pdf
- Paul-ish 9y agoInteresting, on page 19 of this paper[0] it says "The fishing industry is responsible for the largest input (50–90%) of total plastic marine debris to the oceans". Granted, [0] is from 2012, whereas the paper from Schmidt et al is newer. Nonetheless, you would think Schmidt et al would cite this older paper. [0] http://plastics.earthmind.net/files/ART_Hammer_2012.pdf http://plastics.earthmind.net/files/ART_Hammer_2012.pdf EDIT: It appears the 2017 paper is looking at microplastics.
- AareyBaba 9y agoThis is one of the few beaches in Mumbai. The plastic is because the city dumps its sewers into the ocean and the plastic washes up on the beach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEnaEqan7FI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEnaEqan7FI Large sections of the coastline have mangroves which are completely covered in plastic and impossible to clean up.
- andyjohnson0 9y agoFull text of the journal article referenced in the Deutsche Welle article is paywalled, but there is what looks like a research/conference poster at https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/149396_EGU_2017_Schmidt.pdf https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/149396_EGU_2017_Schmidt.pdf that contains quite a lot of detail.