The river of rubbish

Studies of plastic reaching the sea keep finding the same uncomfortable shape. A small number of rivers carry most of it. Estimates vary with method, but every version agrees that the distribution is extremely uneven, with perhaps a thousand rivers responsible for the large majority.

This is encouraging and awkward at the same time. It is encouraging because a problem concentrated in a thousand places is far more tractable than one spread evenly across the world. Barriers, collection points and waste collection improvements in those catchments would remove more plastic than beach cleaning everywhere else combined.

It is awkward because the rivers are concentrated in places with the least money to spend on waste collection, and because the plastic in them was frequently manufactured and sold by companies based somewhere else entirely. A map of where plastic enters the sea and a map of where it was produced look nothing alike, and this makes the question of who should pay genuinely difficult rather than merely contested.

There is also a trap in the finding. If most plastic comes from a thousand rivers, it is easy for someone far from any of them to conclude that their own behaviour does not matter. That conclusion is wrong for a reason that has nothing to do with guilt: the waste system that keeps a European river clean is expensive, and someone paid for it. The plastic is absent, not virtuous.