Top 5 Rivers of Plastic

These are the top five most plastic-polluting rivers in the world. Each day they emit the amount of plastic equivalent to those stacks of elephants.

Recently I made a retro-styled comparative graphic of the top three plastic-polluting rivers in the wold, based on an article in Nature. I regretted my rather arbitrary use of a “10 ton shipping bale” as my visual metric. Instead I much prefer thinking of the plastic pollution in Asian Elephant mass units. Something I stand a chance of wrapping my head around. I also expanded the rivers from the top three to the top five.

Also, here is a how-to if you are interested in that sort of thing.

And here is a story map presenting the data.

Happy Mapping, John