China’s Rivers Are the Major Source of Plastic Entering the Oceans

Two workers clean up trash along the bank of the Yangtze River near the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, in central China's Hubei Province on Aug. 1, 2010. Layers of trash floating in the Yangtze River were threatening to jam China's massive Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, state media reported on Aug. 2. China Out/STR/AFP/Getty Images

With 91 percent of the 8.8 million tons of plastic added to oceans each year originating in rivers, the Yangtze and five other Chinese rivers are the dominant polluters.

Pollution of the marine environment with plastic debris is widely recognized as an increasing ecological concern because of the chemical persistence of plastics and their fragmentation into “microplastics,” which can be ingested by small organisms, such as zooplankton, that are eaten by increasingly larger predators in the food chain.