Source: Can India clean up its holiest river?
In the past decade, as the world has awakened to the growing accumulation of plastic debris in our oceans, the efforts to solve the mounting crisis have been numerous, imaginative—and insufficient. By 2040, the amount of plastic flowing annually into the sea is forecast nearly to triple, to 32 million tons a year. That means by the time a baby born this year graduates from high school, there will be, on average, a hundred pounds of plastic trash for every yard of coastline around the globe.
The message from scientists is, it’s not too late to fix it. But it’s past time for small steps.
Most of the research about plastic waste has focused on plastic already in the oceans and its potential for harm—it poses a lethal threat to a wide range of wildlife, from plankton on up to fish, turtles, and whales. Less is known about how the waste gets to the ocean. But it’s clear that rivers, especially rivers in Asia, are major arteries.
In 2019 the National Geographic Society sponsored a research expedition to one of those rivers: the Ganges, which flows across northern India and Bangladesh, through one of the largest and most heavily populated river basins in the world. A team of 40 scientists, engineers, and support staff from India, Bangladesh, the United States, and the United Kingdom traveled the full length of the river twice, before and after the monsoon rains that dramatically swell it. Sampling the river and the land and air around it, and interviewing more than 1,400 residents, the team sought to find out where, why, and what kind of plastic was getting into the Ganges—and from there into the Indian Ocean.
Leave a Reply