Countries are coming up with ways to save their suffocating rivers and oceans, bringing them back from ecological disaster.
Rivers are the primary plastic polluters of the oceans, according to The Ocean Cleanup. They estimate that 1,000 rivers, spanning every continent, are responsible for approximately 80% of the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans annually, a number that falls between 0.8 to 2.7 million metric tons each year. Small urban rivers, they found, are among the worst polluters, with the remaining 20% of the plastic waste being distributed across another 30,000 rivers.
A River Trash Interceptor In Action. (Image: Green Matters).
So what are governments, NGOs, and corporations doing to save this vital resource for all life on the planet? Here are a few examples that are showing positive results.
Indonesia Takes On The 'World's Dirtiest' River
Cleaning up the Citarum River is one of Indonesia's longest-running endeavors to combat its water crisis. The Citarum is the longest and largest river in West Java, stretching about 297 kms. It flows past thousands of settlements on the island, connecting villages and the people of the most densely populated province in Indonesia with 25 million inhabitants.
Green Cross Switzerland and Pure Earth have listed the Citarum as one of the world's 10 most polluted places. It is truly an ecological disaster, with the Citarum's waters clogged with household waste and chemicals from thousands of factories, primarily from the textile industry, which dumps its waste into the waterway.
Heaps of garbage pile up along the riverbanks, with communities forced to live among the refuse. According to the Asian Development Bank in 2013, as many as 9 million people live near the river, where fecal coliform bacteria levels were more than 5000 times the recommended limit.
Citarum River, People Often Dump Trash Directly Into The River If They Don't Burn It. (Image: Guardian)
The extreme pollution causes a range of diseases including dermatitis, rashes, respiratory problems, kidney failure, chronic bronchitis, and tumors. This is because locals often have to use the polluted water directly from the river for bathing, washing clothes, as well as for drinking and cooking. Environmentalists estimated that at its peak, 20,000 tons of garbage and 340,000 tons of wastewater were being dumped into the river every single day.
A Girl Bathing Her Sibling With Water From A Trash-Polluted River In Ciwalengke Village, Citarum River Basin. (Image: Mongabay)
Finally, in 2018, the overwhelming pollution forced Indonesia's President Joko Widodo to announce a seven-year program to bring the Citarum River back to its natural, clean state. The ambitious program seeks to make the Citarum's waters drinkable by 2025, at an estimated cost of $4 billion. Since then, 7,000 military troops, police officers, and volunteers have been deployed to clean up the river.
The goals may be ambitious but according to Pak Cece, a village leader in a riverside community, there has been some improvement. "People can now fish in the river, and children can also swim, especially when it rains," Cece said in 2023.
In February 2023, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with the support of the European Union (EU) and in collaboration with the Indonesian Coordinating Ministry for Maritime Affairs and Investment, trained 40 companies operating along the Citarum River, including private and state-owned companies, on responsible business practices through the application of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs).
Citarum River, Section Flowing Through Bojongsoang Subdistrict In Southern Bandung. (Image: Mongabay)
Generation Foundation, an Indonesian non-governmental organization, together with Waste4Change and RiverRecycle, have put in place a system to collect plastic, removing between 20 and 100 tons of waste every day. They place floating modular booms along the Citarum River to guide pieces of trash to a collection point and scoop them up using a trash wheel.
The extracted waste is then dried into biomass fuel, while unrecyclable plastics are transformed into low-sulfur fuel to help fund the project.
An Excavator Removes Garbage From Cikapundung River, A Tributary Of Citarum. (Image: Mongabay)
The efforts have seen early success. At the UNFCCC COP 26 summit in Glasgow, U.K., West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil presented the progress made in restoring the Citarum, saying that the river's status had improved from "heavily polluted" to "mildly polluted."
Cleaning Up The Oceans
The Ocean Cleanup is perhaps best known for its efforts to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an effort that the company's young founder Boyan Slat began pursuing in 2013 after his widely viewed TED Talk on the subject. According to CNBC, the company is now pursuing a dual focus, since instead of just the ocean (as their name would suggest), they are also developing a suite of river cleanup technologies.
"Our goal is to rid the oceans of plastic. We focus on rivers because we believe it is the fastest, most cost-efficient way to stop the plastic tap that continuously leaks into our oceans," Slat has said.
The company's first river cleanup device, known as the Interceptor Original, was introduced in 2019. It is a fully solar-powered catamaran barge, featuring a barrier and conveyor belt system specialized to isolate and extract plastic trash from rivers. Water flow is not disrupted, thanks to the catamaran-style design, allowing plastic to flow passively into the device while water continues downstream.
The Interceptor System In Operation In Ballona Creek, California, Us. (Image: The Ocean Cleanup)
The barrier catches debris as it flows past, leading to a conveyor belt with a permeable mesh floor. Here, the trash is raised on the conveyor belt to a chute that feeds it into one of six dumpsters situated on a separate barge. Once full, the dumpster barge is swapped out, and the trash is transported to a local waste management facility.
Aside from the cost of removing, emptying, and replacing the dumpster barges, the solar-powered Interceptors eliminate the need for expensive, polluting fuels, allowing for cost-effective operation and minimal labor requirements.
But because the massive Interceptor wasn't suitable for smaller rivers, the team developed another solution, a stand-alone floating barrier to collect the waste, as well as a smaller mobile conveyor to remove the trash and transport it to waste bins on the shore. This system is currently being deployed in Kingston Harbor, Jamaica, where Slat said the rivers are too narrow for the Interceptor Original.
The "Trashfence" Solution - A Waste-Catching Fence. (Image: The Ocean Cleanup)
For rivers that see extreme levels of trash, they have deployed the Trashfence. It works on a simple premise: an 8-meter-high steel fence is anchored into the riverbed to hold back massive amounts of trash when a large storm hits. Once the water recedes, the collected waste is then removed with an excavator.
However, their first iteration failed when overwhelmed by the sheer volume of trash it collected, as was the case with some of Guatemala's most polluted rivers.
"The forces from the trash flowing against it were just too big, and the Trashfence collapsed, unfortunately. So we're currently working on version two, which we hope to have ready for the next rainy season," said Slat.
As of their latest update, The Ocean Cleanup now has 15 Interceptor systems deployed in 8 countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
'Trash Wheels' In The Us
Founder John Kellett Poses Proudly Next To One Of His Company's Trash Wheels. (Image: Here & Now)
In the US, one of the pioneers in cleaning up rivers is Clearwater Mills. Their "trash wheels," which debuted in Baltimore in 2014, were among the early attempts at tackling river waste. Clearwater Mills founder John Kellett was inspired to design the trash wheel after years of witnessing trash flowing into Baltimore's harbor every time there was a major storm.
Kellett says his company has four trash wheels, each with a fun name such as Mr. Trash Wheel, Captain Trash Wheel, or Professor Trash Wheel, and that they have become local celebrities.
The wheels work much like the Interceptor, with a V-shaped trash-catching boom that extends across the river, with rubber skirts that extend about 20 feet below the water's surface. Anything floating downstream gets caught on the boom and is pushed towards an opening where spinning water wheels, powered by the river's current and attached solar panels, scoop up the trash. The rotation of the wheels then powers a conveyor belt that lifts the trash and debris up and out of the water, into a dumpster. Attached cameras allow the team to monitor the dumpster's fill level.
"And when that dumpster is full, we have another floating barge that carries an empty dumpster. We swap the full one out, put the empty one in, and keep on catching trash," Kellett said.
As of 2022, the four wheels have collected a combined total of nearly 2,000 tons of trash and debris. Sticks and leaves constitute the majority of the weight, as plastic is very lightweight, but the total includes approximately 1.5 million plastic bottles, 1.4