Only a very small fraction of the world's freshwater is in the rivers. Even so, they are fundamental for the distribution of water and life on the planet. Along with the flow of its waters, the rivers are responsible for distributing various types of nutrients, necessary for vegetation and animal life.
The Amazon River is the largest volume river in the world! 20% of all the water that reaches the oceans through rivers comes from it alone. Because it is such a large river, it’s also home to over 3,000 different species of fish already studied, not to mention what has not yet been discovered.
No wonder, most of the world's largest cities are crossed by rivers. Throughout history, humanity has always depended on them to develop, whether as a source of freshwater, food, trade routes or access to the sea. And like everything else that surrounds big cities, rivers also suffer from human pollution and they distribute that pollution wherever they go until they reach the oceans, including plastic waste.
The numbers are not yet definitive, but it’s estimated that nearly 3 million metric tons of plastic reach the oceans every year from the rivers. That's seven times the weight of a building like the Empire State. And while most of these rivers are in Asia and Africa, one of them is right here in our backyard, the Amazon River.
A study indicates that the Amazon River alone take, every year, 40 thousand metric tons of plastic to the oceans. And it's only us who can keep this from happening. EPISODE 7: RIVERS TO THE SEA EPISODE 7: RIVERS TO THE SEA I'm here at Colombo, near Curitiba and behind me is the Atuba River, which we talked about in the last episode.
Atuba is a tributary of the Iguaçu River, the one that ends at the big falls. I'm saying this so you can get the idea of how a seemingly small river can later join the others and then have a gigantic impact. And that's why we need to protect the fountains, the springs, and the tributaries, after all, the whole river and the waste that’s in it flows into the sea.
The childhood memories here are the best possible. When I was a child I’ve swam, I’ve fished in the river, I’ve never drank the river water, but the river was clean, right? There was no trash in the river, no chance, nowadays that's not possible anymore.
So I feel for my children that they cannot enjoy what I enjoyed here. The river is everything to us, right? The river, water is our future, it’s our most precious possession.
I think that every citizen has a duty to take care of the river, the environment, nature, not only wait for the public power, the rulers, but we also do our part, right? I think that one of the things we least know how to do at the moment is to protect freshwater ecosystems. Because we protect a fragment of forest and a piece of river that is inside, but at the moment we interrupt this river with a dam or that we pollute this river, what do we do with the rest of it?
You pollute the rest of the river, you lose perspective. By the time we have a dam, it is no longer a river, it has become an artificial lake. The same thing about the Amazon deforestation, it's barring a river.
So the most important, I think, is to turn the cities ahead of the rivers and think of the rivers as a continuous ecosystem. Remember for example that in the Amazon River we have the largest freshwater migration in the world, catfish that leave the ocean and go to Peru, to Colombia, thousands of kilometers away. And what, then, what happens?
All over the watershed will end up somewhere in the ocean, that is, that plastic that I throw, what the industry doesn’t care, somewhere in Brazil, on land, will also contaminate the oceans. My only recipe for this is to involve society, but to make they see, to be next to the rivers, so they’ll be able to understand these connections, these consequences. So far, what is known is that the rivers that most pollute the oceans with plastic are in Asia, especially in China.
But that doesn’t mean that we should not pay attention to what happens there, because the problems they face to prevent plastic from reaching the sea are very similar to what we face here. Lack of waste management and legislation applied in practice. There are 10 rivers, essentially, in the world that deliver, by far, the bulk of the plastics into the oceans.
And you know, China has two of them. So this is a problem. And it's a problem, again, if you look at the rivers and the city's on those rivers, a lot of that problem is simply lack of proper solid waste treatment, lack of recycling, very low recycling rates with plastic and in rural China, you know, virtually zero.
It’s interesting, when you have the garbage waste on land, they’re under the responsibility, under control of the radiancy, or what the call the city, or municipality. But when the garbage goes to the sea, it isn’t the municipality responsible, it is responsibility of the province, or the central government. So, if the mayor say: “Oh, it’s not my responsibility, it’s your responsibility”, the governor say: “No, it’s close to your area!
” This is because they don’t want to give more money. If they give more money it’s not suitable for the project, it becomes like corruption. So right now we need a regulation, we call it to “how to harmonize” the regulation, that everybody when they see it, they have the responsibility to render the problem of the marine litter.
As you can see, this is a global issue, and beyond that waste that we produce and can see, there’s also the waste that we produce while we doesn’t know that we are doing it. And what I'm talking about here is a recent discovery: our clothes release plastic microfibers that end up by the trillions on the oceans annually. That's because most of what we use is made of synthetic fabrics, that is, petroleum, the same substance that makes plastic.
So when you're wearing those leggings, that bikini, that satin top, you're actually wearing plastic. And these plastics, or rather, these clothes when they are washed here in the washing machine, for every five kilos it loses about 600 thousand, reaching up to 17 billion plastic microfibers, which goes directly to the rivers and directly to the oceans. It doesn’t matter where you live, near or far from the sea, because today there’s no way to filter these microplastics.
And in the end, the fish confuse them with food. So that salmon, that squid, that shrimp will eat parts of our clothes and then it will go right back to our plate, bringing with it small doses of poison. We're pretty confident that we are ingesting, that people are ingesting microfibers daily.
It's hard to test on people, so I can't say that 100 percent, but if you look around on sort of a hazy sunlight day coming into your house, you can see dust in the air and that dust is most likely made up of a lot of microfiber. We started thinking about an object or something that people could put into their wash and collect fibers from the wash. And so, the Coral Ball was born and it was inspired by coral, so a sea creature inspired a thing to protect the ocean.
It's smooth on the outside so it's easy on your clothes, but on the inside it has stocks where the fiber gets tangled, it kind of just gets stuck. It's a mechanical catch. And when a little bit of fiber hangs on, what we see happening is then another little piece of fiber hooks onto that and eventually you get what we're just calling fuzzballs.
Here's a fuzzball. You get just a little bit of fiber tangling up with more and eventually you get something that's big enough to see, big enough to grab and big enough to keep from getting into the nearest river, bay or ocean. I can almost assert that you don’t need as much clothing as you have, but if you are going to buy a new outfit, give preference to natural fabrics such as cotton, wool, linen.
These also release fibers, but as they are natural, they decompose in the environment. About to the ones that you already have at home, my tip is to wash it less while using the water at room temperature. So there’s less friction and they lose less fibers.
I’ve taught here a super easy way to make a deodorant, which you can spray on your clothes after use and that greatly lessens the need to wash. Less water, more economy, less microfiber, the account closes much better. Reduce consumption, this is the best alternative to avoid pollution of rivers and seas.
But when you think that we live on a planet with 7. 5 billion inhabitants, 40% of them living on the coasts and half living up to 3 kilometers away from a freshwater source, we have to find a way to live with these ecosystems without causing further damage. The way to avoid an ocean of plastic also passes through the regeneration of our rivers.
Nowadays, with the merit of environmental education, everyone has heard about the importance of nature. But when it comes to going to work, going to school, when it comes to shopping, when it comes to choosing where to visit, people seem to forget that. They prefer to shop at the supermarket instead of seeing what is sustainable, they prefer to go to a mall instead of going to a national park.
So I would say, this revolution is absolutely fundamental: Visit the nature, reconnect with it, have that emotional experience of being in a forest, taking a plunge, seeing a plain up there from the mountain. This reconnection with nature should lead to a change of behavior, bring people together and create the spirit of community. Organic community gardens, it’s not the original nature but it’s way to produce the food with the care of being organic and avoiding the waste.
This kind of activity, day by day, transforms the world. Alone, we may not succeed, but each one of us doing it will be the great transformation, much better than waiting for some entity, a UN, a government, a company to do it, we are the ones who have to start the revolution. And if you live near a river or a stream like that, then you are the best one to fiscalyze it.
If you see someone throwing trash or pouring sewage into the river near your home, take care, inspect and report it. Take a picture, call the city hall, what we cannot do is leave our rivers polluted. Remember that what passes by here will go for thousands of miles and affect the lives of many more beings than you imagine.
So the challenge I leave for you is in the next week go check the river near your home. Take a picture, share and report any irregularities that are happening near your home or any river that you see. And what's more, what about starting a move to clean a river that is dirty with your neighbors?
That would be wonderful. And in the next episode we will put in the tip of the pencil this story that plastic is cheap. Is it really cheap?
To know more, keep an eye, subscribe on the canal, give a like and share it and we go together, saving our rivers, one litter at a time.
