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
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.
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