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

• succleaf 7y ago
  No, the headline is not right. It isn't "of all the plastic in the sea, most of it comes from 10 rivers" It's "of 57 rivers, 10 contribute 93% of the plastic of those 57" > Schmidt and his colleagues dug up published data on the plastic concentration in 57 rivers of various sizes around the world. ... > The results, published last November in Environmental Science & Technology, show that rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea.
• britch 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.