If as a researcher I could see what the regression models and the statistics tell me is happening with plastic in the rivers and how it gets into the oceans, what would it look like? Well, it would look like this:
This image is of the Yangtze River, just out of the oven at the time of publishing this post, captured by ESA’s Sentinel II, dated May 18, 2022. And it shows our algorithm of presence of plastics, in a sector 153 km from its mouth in the Pacific, showing more than 10 tributaries and visualizing the concentration of floating plastics (Yellow Color).
We are talking about the river to which the discharge of plastics into the ocean is most attributed, for example according to researcher Christian Schmidt of the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in 2017 published the following infographic as a summary of his study:
In this other image
- The Ganges river, in India, which today is said according to the latest studies to discharge more plastic than any other river in the world, here we can see how the tributaries come relatively clean and at specific points, the concentration of plastics increases. Detecting the points of origin of the contamination is one more step to find the best way to solve the problem.
These data may vary and the supremacy of this negative ranking remains for now among the same.
Having technologies like ours is a powerful tool that allows decision-makers to have valuable information in order to make a choice and analyze the problem in real time.
One of the conclusions is that the origin of the problem must be addressed from multiple angles, and the management of public policies is one of them, it is the states that are called to seek that the actors of civil society, companies and administrations of urban centers, take charge of plastic waste and to show these images to the people allows us to make evident and visible what everyone knows and everyone is silent, that the responsibility for the health of the ocean is upstream, is in the way each inhabitant of the planet, decides to consume, reduce, reuse and recycle plastic.
For your reference, here we share with you a top 10 of the rivers that pollute the ocean the most and some sources. Our purpose in the end is to clean up the planet, and to do so we have to monitor and see where this pollution is, make its impact visible to the eyes of all and from there join efforts to make this reality begin to change.
Top 10 Discharge pastic pollutants rivers
Ganges (India):
Indo (India)
Yangtsé (China):
Río Amarillo (China)
Amur (Rusia – China)
Hai (China)
Río de las Perlas (China)
Mekong (Indochina)
Nilo (África)
Níger (África)
Sources:
https://www.fundacionaquae.org/wiki/rios-fuente-plasticos-mar/amp/
https://www.elespanol.com/ciencia/medio-ambiente/20171212/268973574_0.html
https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/149396_EGU_2017_Schmidt.pdf#search=%22plastic%20in%20rivers%22
