A groundbreaking study conducted by a team of researchers at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research poured over data on debris from 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers and found that just a handful of rivers in a couple of countries account for an overwhelming majority of the pollutants piling up in our oceans.
“The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95 percent of the global load into the sea,” Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist who headed up the study, told the Daily Mail after the research was published in 2017. “The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterized by high population – for instance the Yangtze with over half a billion people.”
The study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, said that by cutting plastic pollution in the Yangtze River — the third-longest in the world and located in China — and the Ganges River, located in India, ocean pollution could be reduced by half.
The Philippines has been ranked third on the list of the world’s top-five plastic polluter into the ocean, after China and Indonesia, while reports show that almost half of the global plastic garbage come from developing countries, including Vietnam and Thailand. (Jes Aznar/Getty Images)
This picture taken from a drone on May 23, 2018 shows a warehouse filled with recyclable plastic collected from the Bantar Gebang landfill, in the city of Bekasi on the outskirts of the Indonesian capital. (SANTIRTA MARTENDANO/AFP/Getty Images)
Of the top ten rivers that produce the most pollution, eight of them are in Asian and two, the Nile River and the Niger River, are in Africa.
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