We're in Guatemala. We're focusing on the Montagua river
And it's a river which flows from Guatemala City towards the Caribbean coast
and what we found out is that there is actually one big plastic or debris source near Guatemala City
And then it flows down and we see it stuck on all the banks
And close to the source it's a lot of soft plastics and on the beaches we only find hard floating plastics
It's very important to identify the sources where is the plastic actually coming from?
I think it's one of the main tasks
This is point number one. This is the start so this is the source, actually
The source of the trash
Today we're at the the River Klang in Malaysia in the state of Selangor
It's one of the major rivers in Malaysia not only because it's a fair amount of water
but also because it drains the large metropolis of Kuala Lumpur
Which means that unfortunately a lot of plastic waste that is mismanaged ends up
Through urban canals and other ways of transport into the river
and that makes it one of the most polluted rivers in the world
So, The reason why we do this research is because we want to know
how much plastic is transported through a river like the Klang
You want to know if there's any variation over time and space
if there's any response for example through rain events
And how it interacts with, for example, the tide
So, what we see here is a significant amount of debris on every sandbar
What we're doing here is, we're measuring the fluxes of plastics in the in the river
and we're doing this by Counting
So there's two students helping us now
and they're literally counting the plastics
and they are dividing the plastics which they see in different categories
That's what they're repeating every half an hour and that's what they do for six hours
These measurements only give us information about the amount of plastic items per unit of time
So for example the amount of plastic items per hour
But we also want to say something about the mass of plastic to expect
And, for example, the ratio between plastic items or plastic mass and different debris that we find in the river
So for example organic debris
and in order to estimate that we also deploy small nets
it's a custom made trawl
in order to sample the debris that we find in the river
so let's try to do a little bit of active trawling today
We have to really maintain its stability today
The sampled debris that we take from the river we analyze in turn
and we can say something about the ratio between organic and plastic mass
and we can say something about the polymer type of the plastic that we find
because that really says something about where the plastic comes from
We used our net for only 10 to 15 minutes and this is basically what you would typically get
So really a laundry basket full of waste
of course there's a lot of organic material as well
But there's so many plastics as you can see
There's toys, there's like little drinking bottles, hard plastic rings: very dangerous for fauna etc.
A lot of food wrappings especially these ones, the instant noodle packaging
And especially if you do that for different rivers all over world
It helps us to identify the fundamental principles of plastic transport
from land into the river and from the river into the ocean
We're now at the beach, a very remote beach
What are we going to do here is, we're gonna do measurements
square-meter measurements
We put this down on a pile of trash
and then we define the amount of pieces per plastic type
I see a lot of the foamy things. See?
they're pretty small they're all decorated
And we also see a lot of the hearts, the peel heart things: the lids
And the foamy things so, decorated foams
This is the dirty part of the job
Only when you've been in this places you really realize the the problem
So I think when you're in the office and you see these pictures you're not really aware.
You can't smell it and you can't see the size and you can't see the perspective
so how much it actually is
And how dirty and how big the problem actually is...
So, only really if the whole scientific community:
students and researchers from all over the world
comes together and tries to tackle this problem jointly
you can really answer the fundamental questions that we need to answer
to solve this challenge and to move forward and reduce plastic pollution
in every part of the aquatic environment