8 million tonnes of plastic ends up on the world’s oceans every year but how does it get there? There are multiple ways plastic comes into direct contact with the sea including the wind, drains and illegal dumping. Rivers are the primary conduit, however, with a staggering 90 percent of all plastic waste entering the world’s oceans eminating from just ten rivers

That’s according to data from “Export of Plastic Debris by Rivers into the Sea” by Christian Schmidt, Tobias Krauth, and Stephan Wagner, which was published in Environmental Science & Technology (2017) and later highlighted by UN Environment. The ten rivers in question flow through some of the world’s most polluted cities, especially in Asia.

Those ten rivers are the Nile and the Niger in Africa; the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai He, Pearl, Amur, and Mekong in East Asia; and the Indus and Ganges Delta in South Asia, a new study said.

The study, which recently appeared in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology journal, shows that those ten rivers contribute between 410,000 and 4 million tonnes of oceanic plastic debris a year, accounting for 88% to 95% of total plastic pollutants.

According to the data from the study “Plastic waste inputs from land into the ocean” by Jenna Jambeck and others, published in Science (2015) shows that Egypt among the top three countries with hotspot leaking the most toxic waste into oceans.

Country which pollutes the world seas and oceans the most are:

China over 27 %
Indonesia over 10 %
Egypt over 3 %.

The presence of microplastics (MPs) in the world’s longest river, the Nile River, has yet to be reported. This small-scale study aimed to provide the first information about MPs in the Nile River by sampling the digestive tracts of two fish species, the Nile Tilapia and Catfish . Fish were purchased from local sellers in Cairo, and then their gastrointestinal tracts were dissected and examined for MPs. The most abundant MP type was fibers, the next most abundant type was films, and the remaining MPs were fragments. Polyethylene (PE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polypropylene (PP) were all non-destructively identified by attenuated total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.