Rivers of plastic? biodiversity/fish yield decline vs. plastic trash increase.

BLETTLER MARTIN

Wuhan

Simposio; 2018 Great Rivers Forum, Confluence: Great Rivers Civilizations. High Quality Development for a Sustainable Future.; 2018

Solid waste mismanagement is a global problem that is recognisable to a wide population and the source of the problem is often this same wide population. In particular, the non-biodegradability of synthetic plastics resulted in the accumulation of millions of tons of plastic wastes.Plastic pollution causes biodiversity decline given by encounters between wildlife and plastic items. Ingestion is the most frequently observed interaction, followed by entanglement, which affects motility, often with fatal consequences. So far, interactions were reported for more than 1,500 species of plants and animals worldwide in about 1,100 scientific studies. However, only 10% of them were completed in rivers. From a scientific point of view, the knowledge about how contaminated are the great rivers in the planet is still scarce and biased, revealing the lack of a holistic scientific view. It is particularly important to encourage field-studies estimating river plastic emissions to the world?s oceans. Monitoring efforts must be focused in most polluted rivers worldwide, and particularly in countries with poor solid waste management.Microplastics (