More than 1,000 waterways account for 80 per cent of river plastic in world’s ocean, new study finds

I previously thought most of the waste came from just a handful of rivers, Colin Drury writes

Pasig River in Manila (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

It has been a mainstay of environmental thinking for the last four years.

In 2017 two separate studies found that almost all river-borne plastic in the world’s oceans came from just a handful of waterways.

One study said 10; the other 20. What they both agreed on, however, was that if you could clean up that small number of major continental rivers – such as the Nile and Amazon – it would almost single-handedly help to rid the planet’s seas of plastic.