The peak-level virtual signaling over plastic straws — peddled by the left-wing media and 2020 Democratic presidential candidates — is why I dedicated a chapter in my new book 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know to detailing the often overlooked fact that about 90 percent of the planet’s plastic waste comes from a few rivers in and around Asia and Africa.
A groundbreaking study conducted by a team of researchers at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research poured over data on debris from 79 sampling sites along 57 rivers and found that just a handful of rivers in a couple of countries account for an overwhelming majority of the pollutants piling up in our oceans.
“The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95 percent of the global load into the sea,” Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist who headed up the study, told the Daily Mail after the research was published in 2017. “The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterized by high population – for instance the Yangtze with over half a billion people.”
The study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, said that by cutting plastic pollution in the Yangtze River — the third-longest in the world and located in China — and the Ganges River, located in India, ocean pollution could be reduced by half. – READ MORE