90 percent of plastics polluting our oceans come from 10 rivers | Hacker News Reader

90 percent of plastics polluting our oceans come from 10 rivers

digitaljournal.com

41 pointsstartupflix14 comments

In short, the problem isn’t really about plastics, but about waste management.

Previous submissions from the time of the original publication:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15918984

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15459894

What I find most interesting is that none of the top rivers are North American - which to me says that while the North American method of waste disposal is still not as efficient as Europe’s, it does seem to work.

I wonder what the consumption of plastics are in NA vs other industries.

I also wonder if the regulation proposal in the European Union to forbid certain plastics like straws has any effect, as most of the waste comes from second world and third world countries.

A very large partion of the pollution is apparently form synthetic fabrics so I’m not sure how much would that help.

I think that a large reason for this list is that it’s where most people live. And if you do laundry in the river or when your sewage system is directly linked to it you’ll get more plastic. Also the majority of the world’s textiles and garments come from exactly those places.

I think you give too much credit to Europe which is ill deserved over here we have no problem exporting our waste to Poland (which also imports it from all over the world even Japan and Australia) that simply burns it. Currently over a 100 landfills in Poland are burning their trash as we speak.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/poland-to...

https://newsmavens.com/news/smoke-signals/1608/is-poland-the...

We also export our garbage to China, India, Mongolia and many other places. As much credit as people here like giving the EU it’s the mother of don’t look too closely because the reality is much much less pretty than the show we put on.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5309215/Britains-rec...

Do note that while "burning trash" sounds absolutely horrific one shouldn't imagine setting fire to a garbage dump but more a factory where trash goes in on one side, and power and ash come out the other. There's fairly stringent requirements on what sort of thing is allowed to come out the chimney.

All in all it's probably not worse than running a coal plant.

No, one should imagine exactly that as open landfills are set a blaze to burn trash from all over Europe and in fact the world.

Unless this looks like a power plant to you: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iZWE1fyTym4...

This has been going on in 100's of landfills in Poland and in other parts of Europe for years now, this year its exceptionally bad for many reasons. This is institutionalized intentional practice that is been swept under the rug for far too long.

Well jezus that is horrific, but I doubt that that is legal anywhere in europe. Doesn't stop people from doing it anyways obviously but still.

Over here (the Netherlands) burning trash looks like this: http://medias.photodeck.com/67e4af84-ce8c-4b05-86e1-a75e521d...

Here's a link to the actual publication: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368

Which ten?

It's in the article, and the article isn't terribly long. But here you go anyway:

> Eight of the rivers are located in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.

Sorry, I was following the maze of links that all pointed to other articles. Saw that a bit late. Thank you.

A map of all ten rivers appears here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4970214

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