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Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers
- iforgotpassword 7y agoWhat's conveniently missing from this article is that most of those rivers run through countries we are or have been shipping our plastic waste to, in order for them to recycle it. But they didn't. And it's not like we didn't know that for years already. But the trash was gone and it's a cheap solution, so why stop?
- Joan_Smith 7y ago> we A handful of companies on both sides of the trade enrich themselves through fraud (promising recycling), and "we" get the blame. Why do you think people bother separating plastics from the rest of their trash, if they know it'll all end up in the ocean?
- DanBC 7y agoNo, this article is wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19910371 > It's "of 57 rivers, 10 contribute 93% of the plastic of those 57" > Schmidt and his colleagues dug up published data on the plastic concentration in 57 rivers of various sizes around the world. ... > The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea. Plastic in the ocean also comes from industrial uses as well as from rivers - about 50% of it is fishing nets.