
Ten Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in the Oceans (2018) - ForFreedom
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/
======
sambeau
While reading this I think it's worth taking into account that not all the
plastic waste originates in these countries, some of it is western trash sent
there for recycling. At one point China was importing more than half of the
World's plastic waste.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-
conserv...](https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-
conservation/2018/11/where-does-your-plastic-waste-end)

And though China has now stopped accepting the West's waste it still house
mountains to deal with plus the problem has just shifted to Southeast Asia
instead

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/china...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/china-
ban-plastic-trash-imports-shifts-waste-crisis-southeast-asia-malaysia/)

~~~
yholio
I don't understand how this diminishes the fault of the countries. They took
the garbage, got paid for it or profited from the valuable recyclables, then
dumped the refuse into the rivers. 50% of the garbage comes from a single
river that flows entirely within China.

I understand you can't put the blame on a people as a whole and there are bad
actors there, but a sovereign country needs to take responsibility.

~~~
danharaj
So, does selling their externalities to poorer nations absolve a rich nation
of their responsibility?

~~~
crazy1van
It depends on whether the poorer nation misrepresented what it would do with
the trash.

~~~
boomlinde
After a few decades of exported plastic trash ending up in the oceans being
common knowledge it doesn't matter whether the handling was initially
misrepresented. At best it's willful ignorance, but let's not pretend people
have been sending plastic trash to China under the assumption that it would be
dealt with responsibly.

------
api
Unfortunately I find myself agreeing with the critics/cynics here on this one:
people are contorting their brains to let China off the hook for what (if this
study is to be believed) is a mostly Chinese problem. I don't think the point
about China taking US recycling waste is relevant. They're being paid to take
the waste and recycle it, not throw it in the ocean.

I don't think anyone would be doing the same if the Hudson River or the Port
of Long Beach were the source of most of the plastic in the ocean.

China is also the world's #1 greenhouse gas emitter on a per GDP basis:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions)

Sort by GDP per emissions and China is quite exceptional compared to other
large economies and even among developing nations. China just clearly doesn't
care at all about the environment, or if the leadership does care they're
doing a really poor job of enforcing anything.

It's bizarre to me to hear Western liberals give a free pass to China with its
massive and still growing CO2 emissions, internment camps for ethnic
minorities, rivers of plastic, and dystopian total surveillance state. I
suspect it comes from a knee jerk desire to take the opposite position from
Trump and his supporters, but I personally find that to be kind of mindless.
Pushing on China is one of the very _very_ few things I agree with them about.

~~~
nroets
GDP per emission is really a bad measure. It implies that the Earth's
atmosphere is owned by the producers of goods.

Emission per capita is much more fair.

China has come a long long way. Fertility is much lower. They are investing
heavily in renewables.

And they rarely travel by car or airplane.

~~~
api
It's a measure of energy efficiency, so I think it's a fair measure. Note that
China has a much higher emission rate than India, a nation at a similar place
in their development. I bring up CO2 emissions simply to point out that the
plastic problem isn't an isolated thing. China has major systemic
environmental issues.

I agree that China is showing _some_ signs of moving in a better direction
environmentally, though they are still building coal plants. That's not my
point. My point is that people seem to want to let them off the hook for where
they are contributing to major global pollution problems and where they could
(easily in this case!) do something about it. How hard would it be to clean up
the Yangtze River for the world's second largest economy? It would be much
easier than reducing CO2 emissions.

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x38iq84n
So why are western countries punishing themselves by putting a ban on certain
plastic items such as straws, single-use bags or creating deposit schemes for
bottles etc? Sure it would be more effective to call up poor Asian countries
and offer to help them clean up that mess. The effect on environment, per
dollar spent, will be orders of magnitudes larger than engineering any kind of
change in the said western countries.

~~~
lr
As has been noted by several other posters, western countries have exported
their recyclable trash to China for years. That has pretty much come to a
halt, and I don't think it will be long before countries like the US realize
just what a mess they have on their hands. Getting rid of single-use plastic
now is the best thing we can do.

~~~
x38iq84n
>Getting rid of single-use plastic now is the best thing we can do.

Is it really? Single-use plastic from western countries is mostly not the
plastic found in oceans. So while they were busy implementing these measures,
they do not even scratch the surface of the issue. Do the proponents of these
ideas care about the environment at all?

~~~
jyounker
Single use plastic bags are the ones that end up on my porch. And on my
street. And the lake at the end of my street. And in my local parks. And in
the creek down the block. And in the river running through town.

Single use plastic is an eyesore. It's garbage that doesn't stay where it's
supposed to.

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ricardobeat
This means cleaning up, or at least putting a stop to the problem, could be a
lot easier than complex ocean trash collection endeavors. Capturing debris
from a river stream should be simpler, cheaper and more effective?

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swarnie_
HN engineers and detail orientated people. Is there any workable option to add
a "trash capture" device/system to the river outlet?

~~~
peterwwillis
For floating trash there's Trash Wheels:
[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-
wheels-...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-wheels-
professor-trash-wheels-baltimore-harbor-ocean-trash-pickup/)

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drinane
Is this right? Seems like a pretty fixable problem...

~~~
britch
Maybe I'm being slow, but what is the obvious solution?

The article doesn't really go into how or why the Yangtze, for instance, has
so much plastic. The Yangtze is is 6,300 km long. It seems difficult to
prevent people from dumping in it along it's entire length.

Are thinking of setting up a filter at the mouth? Processing 4000 tons of
plastic a day, including microscopic beads, doesn't seem trivial to me.

Is your assumption that there's only a few major dumpers?

~~~
hairytrog
It's far more fixable than filtering the water in ocean. The river mouths are
probably where the plastics are most concentrated in the plastic's life cycle.
You could couple the plastic filter/processing plants with other required
systems like power plant cooling and desalination, so that the energy you
expend to filter is being used both to filter and for a secondary purpose.

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weeksie
The vast majority of the waste is fishing nets so blaming this on trash export
is silly.

~~~
DanBC
> vast majority of the waste is fishing nets

about 50%.

~~~
weeksie
I was sloppy with my wording. By far the largest contributor.

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OliverJones
We reap what we sow.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBzCjk)

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luckylion
The headline is click bait. It's not "most of the plastic in the ocean", it's
"most of the plastic in the ocean that comes from rivers". And that long
rivers from more densely populated areas would contribute more is hardly
surprising.

Iirc, most of the plastic isn't even from rivers. It's from the fishing
industry, illegal trash dumping and the wear on car tires.

 _Hi Downvoters, please explain what is factually wrong about my comment.
Thanks._

~~~
barronli
I didn’t downvote you, but am wondering if you could provide any source
supporting your statement? This is a website giving the ocean plastic sources,
saying mostly from rivers:
[https://www.theoceancleanup.com/sources/](https://www.theoceancleanup.com/sources/)

~~~
danw1979
its in the article itself -

"A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be
pouring in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia."

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thegranderson
This focuses on just one source of plastic pollution, of which there are many.
I found this resource helpful to understand more about the broader scope of
the problem:

[https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-
pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution)

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ZeroGravitas
What percentage of the world's population live alongside these rivers?

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nroets
I've cycled 5,000 km this year in China and what I saw is at odds with this
report:

There are cleaners in all public areas. What they collect must surely go to
landfills.

Although I've seen some garbage dumps on the sides of lakes and rivers, I'm
sure the authorities don't condone it. I also saw many signs saying "Water
Source Protection Area" and fences keeping the public away.

Plastic sheeting is used extensively in agriculture, but surely they will
dispose of used sheets properly...

~~~
jandrese
I'm not trying to be overly mean here, but your comment reads like someone
making a political comedy skit entitled "The World's Most Naiive Man Goes For
a Bike Ride".

~~~
nroets
I gave my raw observations last night. Maybe they sound naive.

But I think that, after many years of growth at any cost, China is cleaning up
their act. It may be years before it results in cleaner water flowing into the
sea.

