4 ms·

I 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

• titzer 9y ago
  If 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 ago
    1/10th 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.