Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

A Recent Study Show 95% of Plastic in the Sea Comes From Just 10 Rivers

posted by Fnord666 on Friday November 10 2017, @09:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-river-runs-through-it dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

A recent study paints a sobering picture about the state of our oceans.

According to the paper, published last month in Environmental Science and Technology, rivers deposit up to 4 million metric tonnes of plastic into the sea -- and about 95 per cent of that comes from just 10 waterways.

Previous studies suggested about 67 per cent of plastic in the oceans came from 20 rivers. For this study, researchers out of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Science used a larger data set to reach their findings, sampling from 79 sites along 57 rivers around the world.

Eight of the 10 rivers are in Asia. [...]

  • Yangtze River, Yellow Sea, Asia
  • Indus River, Arabian Sea, Asia
  • Yellow River (Huang He), Yellow Sea, Asia
  • Hai River, Yellow Sea, Asia
  • Nile, Mediterranean Sea, Africa
  • Meghna/Bramaputra/Ganges, Bay of Bengal, Asia
  • Pearl River (Zhujiang), South China Sea, Asia
  • Amur River (Heilong Jiang), Sea of Okhotsk, Asia
  • Niger River, Gulf of Guinea, Africa
  • Mekong River, South China Sea, Asia

Source: https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/ninety-five-percent-of-plastic-in-sea-comes-from-just-ten-rivers/89034/

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
A Recent Study Show 95% of Plastic in the Sea Comes From Just 10 Rivers | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 58 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday November 10 2017, @10:12PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday November 10 2017, @10:12PM (#595373)

    Considering that plastics isn't the only human byproduct massively flowing down those rivers, You have to applaud the researchers for approaching them to make their measurements.
    The more dams they build, the less the rainy seasons can flush all that stuff into the sea, and the more toxic those rivers get.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   3  

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday November 10 2017, @11:13PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 10 2017, @11:13PM (#595396) Journal

    The more dams they build, the less the rainy seasons can flush all that stuff into the sea

    You wish. Humans aren't yet such masters of nature to stop a huge rain pour to overflow the dams.

    Sure, I don't expect a perfect solution but, unless you collect whatever the dams caught and immobilize it, the first serious rainy season [odt.co.nz] will just dump concentrated waste into the sea [asiancorrespondent.com] (prev links are photos).
    This last photo is on Yangtze, from this FA, from June 2016 [asiancorrespondent.com]

    SEVERE flooding has washed up an onslaught of garbage in the Yangtze River along the Chongqing Municipality in southern China, another blow to the country after days of heavy rain displaced over 33,000 and killed at least 25 people.

    Photographs of trash covering the surface of the river were published on state-owned China News Service’s (CNS) Twitter account. Huge volumes of floating rubbish is a problem that repeatedly plagues cities and villages along the third longest river in the world.

    I suspect is actually cheaper to prevent the garbage get into those rivers in the first place.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford