
Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers - harambae
https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-from-just-10-rivers/a-41581484
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DanBC
No, 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.

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iforgotpassword
What'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
> 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?

