2026-10-05 · percent of river plastic emissions
Most river plastic comes from a handful of rivers
Ten rivers carry a large fraction of plastic entering oceans.
A handful of rivers do most of the damage. Lebreton et al.'s river plastic share estimate puts 90% of the plastic rivers carry to the ocean in just ten waterways. The remaining 10% is spread across the rest of the world's rivers — 5.2% from Asia & the Pacific, 2.8% from Africa, and 2% from the Americas. For ocean plastic, geography points to a short list of places to act.
1 cell = 0.1 percent of river plastic emissions (0.1% of river plastic to oceans) · 1,000 cells
Context
The shares come from Lebreton et al.'s river plastic share estimate, published in Nature Communications; the figures here are the edition's 2026 rounding of that estimate. The study modeled how plastic moves from land through rivers to the ocean, identifying which waterways dominate the total.
The grid's remaining bands show where the other tenth comes from: Asia & the Pacific at 5.2%, Africa at 2.8%, and the Americas at 2%. No region outside the top ten comes close to the concentration those ten rivers represent.
Share estimates like this carry real uncertainty — plastic loads in rivers are hard to measure directly and are typically modeled rather than counted. Read the split as an order-of-magnitude picture of where river plastic originates, not a precise census.
Lebreton et al. river plastic share estimate.
Share and export
Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-10-05-ocean-plastic
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