Recycling Plastic and Saving Earth’s Oceans, One River at a Time

Pilot projects are popping up around the world to pull trash out of Earth’s rivers before it ever reaches the ocean.

The newest project to reach the waters is a 52-foot-long hydro-powered floating robotic “trash wheel” in Panama City, Panama that sucks up plastic from the river to later be recycled. Across the Atlantic, in Nairobi, Kenya, 10 trash booms have already captured more than a million pounds of plastic in the Athi River. The collected plastic in Nairobi is being used to make bricks and pave new walkways, parks, and community gardens.

“The rivers in Nairobi didn’t look like rivers before our partners came along. They looked like dump sites. They were just completely covered in trash so you can’t see the water,” says Molly Morse, senior manager at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory. Ultimately, the “big goal here is to prevent plastic pollution from getting into the environment in the first place,” Morse explains.

It is estimated that about 300 metric tons of plastic wash into the ocean from rivers every single hour. The collection process is much easier in the rivers themselves rather than trying to collect the trash once it has reached the ocean – and these pilot projects are proving just how efficient they can be if only given the chance.