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Rivers Carry Millions of Tons of Plastic Debris into The Sea

Tuesday, October 17, 2017 20:41

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Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic debris ends up in the sea – a global environmental problem with unforeseeable ecological consequences. The path taken by plastic to reach the sea must be elucidated before it will be possible to reduce the volume of plastic input. To date, there was only little information available on this. It has now been followed up by an interdisciplinary research team who were able to show that plastic debris is primarily carried into the sea by large rivers.

Every year, millions of tonnes of plastic debris ends up in the sea, a global environmental problem with ecological consequences.

Photo: Richard Carey, fotolia

In the meantime, minute plastic particles can be found in the water in virtually every sea and river. This constitutes a serious and growing global environmental problem. There are enormous quantities of input each year and plastic weathers only very slowly. Marine life can be harmed by the tiny plastic particles floating in the water. One example of how this happens is when fish, seabirds or marine mammals mistake the particles for food and consume them.

“It is still impossible to foresee the ecological consequences of this. One thing is certain, however: this situation cannot continue,” says Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist at the UFZ. “But as it is impossible to clean up the plastic debris that is already in the oceans, we must take precautions and reduce the input of plastic quickly and efficiently.”

Rivers as source for global marine plastic pollution.

Photo: Susan Walter, UFZ

However, in order to take practical measures to reduce plastic input, it will be necessary to answer the initial questions: Where does all the plastic come from anyhow? And how does it get into the sea? Schmidt and his team addressed these questions in a study that recently appeared in the current issue of “Environmental Science & Technology” journal. For this purpose, the researchers analysed various scientific studies that examined the plastic load – that is the quantity of plastic carried by the water – in rivers. They converted the results of the studies into mutually comparable datasets and determined the ratio of these figures to the quantity of waste that is not disposed of properly in the respective catchment area.

“We were able to demonstrate that there is a definite correlation in this respect,” says Schmidt. “The more waste there is in a catchment area that is not disposed of properly, the more plastic ultimately ends up in the river and takes this route to the sea.” In this context, large rivers obviously play a particularly large role – not only because they also carry a comparatively large volume of waste on account of their larger discharge. Schmidt says, “the concentrations of plastic, i.e. the quantity of plastic per cubic metre of water are significantly higher in large rivers than small ones. The plastic loads consequently increase at a disproportionately higher rate than the size of the river.”

The researchers have also calculated that the ten river systems with the highest plastic loads (eight of them are in Asia and two in Africa) – areas in which hundreds of millions of people live, in some cases – are responsible for around 90 percent of the global input of plastic into the sea. “Halving the plastic input from the catchment areas of these rivers would already be a major success”, says Schmidt. “To achieve this, it will be necessary to improve the waste management and raise public awareness for the issue. We hope that our study will make a contribution to a positive development so that the plastic problem in our oceans can be curbed in the long run.”

In future investigations, the UFZ team intends to find out how long plastic debris takes to reach the sea once it gets into a river. Does it take only a few months or even decades? “It is important to be aware of this as the impact of a measure becomes apparent only with a corresponding time delay as existing pollution has yet to be washed into the sea”, explains Schmidt. “Only when we are aware of roughly how long plastic debris remains in the respective river system will it also be possible to assess a measure to improve the waste management system in the catchment area.”

Contacts and sources:
Dr. Chistian Schmidt / Susanne Hufe

Helmholtz Centre For Environmental Research – UFZ

Citation:
Schmidt, C., Krauth, T., Wagner, S. (2017): Export of Plastic Debris by Rivers into the Sea. Environ. Sci. Technol. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.7b02368 http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368

Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2017/10/rivers-carry-millions-of-tons-of.html

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Comments

Total 3 comments

Pink Slime

I bet you’ll find it is communist, turd world counties, Democraps and liberals that do all the polluting on this planet. Yeah, betch ya….

Oct 21, 2017, 2:47 pm 0 Reply
Mick

This has to be because of industrial dumping, surely? To reach such levels of plastic contamination of the oceans it would take many thousands of people across the world dumping bin-bags full of empty plastic bottles and trays into rivers and coastal waters every day. I just can’t see that being the case. Now, industry? Yeah, I can absolutely see that being the case, especially in countries like Britain where landfill sites charge government-imposed taxes by the ton.

Oct 22, 2017, 3:50 am 0 Reply
- DK
  
  In relation to that Britain has remarkably good levels of recycling, our problem has been Ewaste which is shipped out to India Indonesia and Nigeria where nitric acid is used to recover components and there are mounds of UK waste after processing. Our plastic problem tends to be from beachgoers, and fly tippers which is small in scale. The usual flytipper in the UK who is corporate dumps his waste on land not sea since the landowner is responsible for the cleanup and the Environment Agency makes sure that the landowner is fined for someone else’s waste, it is an untraceable crime so the sea and rivers tend to be left alone(we also have dumping on land in illegally licensed waste dumps we had 2 in mid cheshire one of which was a PCB dump and is hidden from the public after a fomb retention scandal 20 years ago where the waste was meant to be suspended in fomb but actually was a lake and a builders dump near church minshull), living near canals however I do see the occasional bin bag dragged out from a holidaymaker dumping rubbish overboard from a barge which is inevitably recovered by someone else usually the fishing community. Hardly anything gets to the sea. Most of our other waste is now burnt rather than buried in the UK’s network of incinerators my local one is in Widnes which cause a nationwide plume network blocking sunlight. (Animals also tend not to care where they dump so it is entirely natural that almost humans do the same)
  
  And by the way the majority of waste blows directly onto Britains shoreline where it is cleaned up. 20 years ago perhaps a bit longer this never happened and we had a buildup of nylon fishing line, rope, nets etc with toilet paper since most communities flushed their waste into the sea at night. Since then both the sewage problem and the buildup of plastic waste was solved by EU directives on clean beaches where we were forced to clean up our act to get blue flag status by our own civil service. Any if not all plastic waste around our shores is therefore not from the UK since the EU states tend to write rules and not only refuse to obey them but actively use directives as anti competitive measures against countries which blindly follow. We do not dump, the Europeans do, and we get Spain’s tourist rubbish on the currents.
  
  Oct 25, 2017, 1:08 am 0 Reply

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