Our seas are choking on plastic. Sounds like we flogging a dead horse here. Plastic this, plastic that. But I mean, shit. It’s such a pressing issue and as an environmentalist, at heart, I feel as if it’s an issue that resonates with the majority of you reading this. Now the fact that rivers are responsible for transporting an overwhelming amount of trash going on permanent vay-cay to a galaxy not so far away shouldn’t come as a surprise. But what certainly should, is the dirty fact that just 10 rivers are responsible for this million lane super high-way of synthetic throwaways and leave-behinds.
Eight million. That’s the tragic amount of kak that plagues the oceans every year. Oh yah, that’s eight million metric tons. Are you f**king kidding me? Yip, that’s what I said as a sipped some water to dramatical spit out for effect to emphasize my shock, no horror, after reading that number for the first time. So I guess unraveling exactly how it gets there would be pretty critical. Dead on there mate. 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.
“Rivers carry trash over long distances and connect nearly all land surfaces with the oceans,” making them a major battleground in the fight against sea pollution, explains Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany. Corona is committed to making a change via the Road to Highline, I think it’s about time we all follow suit.
Schmidt and his colleagues dug up published data on the plastic concentration in 57 rivers of various sizes around the world. These measurements included bottles and bags, as well as microscopic fibers and beads. The researchers multiplied these concentrations by the rivers’ water discharge to calculate the total weight of plastic flowing into the sea. They then fed the data into a model that compared them with the estimated weight of plastic litter generated per person per day along each river.
So which rivers are we talking? Well, two of them are in Africa – the Nile and the Niger – while the others are in Asia: the Indus, Ganges, Amur, Mekong, Pearl, Hai he, Yellow and Yangtze. As well as being some of the world’s longest rivers, they are burdened and further pressured by massive populations alongside their banks. Weak infrastructure, poor service delivery, and waste management protocols are definitely on the list of reasons why these rivers are so jam-packed with literally everything. How some evil species of mud/man/plastic hybrid has not emerged from these rivers and challenged us for world domination, I don’t know!!
