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90 percent of plastics polluting our oceans come from 10 rivers
- wildrhythms 8y agoHere's a link to the actual publication: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maxk42 8y agoWhich ten?
- RyanZAG 8y agoIt's in the article, and the article isn't terribly long. But here you go anyway: > Eight of the rivers are located in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
- lucisferre 8y agoIn short, the problem isn’t really about plastics, but about waste management.
- sctb 8y agoPrevious submissions from the time of the original publication: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15918984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15918984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15459894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15459894
- cdolan 8y agoWhat I find most interesting is that none of the top rivers are North American - which to me says that while the North American method of waste disposal is still not as efficient as Europe’s, it does seem to work. I wonder what the consumption of plastics are in NA vs other industries.
- sebazzz 8y agoI also wonder if the regulation proposal in the European Union to forbid certain plastics like straws has any effect, as most of the waste comes from second world and third world countries.
- dogma1138 8y agoA very large partion of the pollution is apparently form synthetic fabrics so I’m not sure how much would that help. I think that a large reason for this list is that it’s where most people live. And if you do laundry in the river or when your sewage system is directly linked to it you’ll get more plastic. Also the majority of the world’s textiles and garments come from exactly those places.
- dogma1138 8y agoI think you give too much credit to Europe which is ill deserved over here we have no problem exporting our waste to Poland (which also imports it from all over the world even Japan and Australia) that simply burns it. Currently over a 100 landfills in Poland are burning their trash as we speak. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/poland-to-curb-waste-imports-as-landfills-burn-amid-chinese-ban https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/poland-to... https://newsmavens.com/news/smoke-signals/1608/is-poland-the-next-big-rubbish-dump-of-europe https://newsmavens.com/news/smoke-signals/1608/is-poland-the... We also export our garbage to China, India, Mongolia and many other places. As much credit as people here like giving the EU it’s the mother of don’t look too closely because the reality is much much less pretty than the show we put on. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5309215/Britains-recycled-plastic-dumped-landfill.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5309215/Britains-rec...