The most polluted rivers in Italy

If we want to understand how the sea gets dirty, and what we can all do to avoid it, we must start from its source.pollution. The sea waters, in fact, are not a starting point, but a landing place for everything that destroys the environment and the ecosystem. Starting with plastic abandoned in the wrong places and not disposed of. The source of the filth, however, is in the rivers.

The ranking of the most polluted rivers in Italy sees the bag, which also holds this sad record in Europe. It is a river that flows from the Lepici, Prenestini, and Ernici mountains, between the provinces of Rome and Frosinone, and passes through metalworking and chemical industries. Hence its extremely high level of pollution. Then we have the Lambro In Lombardy, which, according to analyses by the Regional Institute for the Environment, has 40 percent wastewater. All of it polluted. Furthermore, at the top of the list of horrors, we must not forget the Sarno in Campania, where all the waste from the tomato industrial system is concentrated;Aterno-Pescara in Abruzzo, the epicenter of industrial and agricultural waste;Olive in Calabria, with its radioactive and heavy metal waste;Aniene in Lazio, full of solvents and fecal bacteria.

The journey of horror begins from the rivers. The waste starts from here and then, through a series of small streams or even simple surface flows, end up in the seaThanks to the work of 22 scientific institutions from 12 European countries, we finally have a map and a path to the genesis of marine pollution and the waste that accompanies it. The team of researchers (representatives from the CNR and ISPRA for Italy) has put pen to paper in a study published in Nature Sustainability, the key numbers of the phenomenon.

Every year from European rivers 600 million tons of macrowaste (with dimensions greater than 2,5 centimeters) end up in the seaEight out of ten objects are plastic, primarily bottles and food containers, and 40 percent of these reach the sea already fragmented, that is, reduced to microplastic. At that point, they are no longer recoverable, and we can only find them in the belly of some fish or directly on our dinner table.

The study was very useful in demonstrating a series of things we must keep in mind when discussing marine pollution and possible solutions to combat it. River waste includes a variety of materials, such as the Sarno River in Italy, starting with industrial waste (from tomato processing factories in the South to the tanning industry in the North). But now we know for certain that the main source of this waste, first riverine and then marine, we are. With our lifestyles. Still prisoners of a excessive use of plastic bagsDespite laws that have partially abolished it, and uncivilized disposal practices, many people believe that throwing a paper cup into a river means they're not harming the entire ecosystem, and they don't even imagine that their waste will then end up, broken into thousands of fragments, in the sea.

A second consideration, useful for understanding the necessary countermeasures, concerns the quantity of rivers from which the waste arrives. The research examined 42 rivers in 11 countries: all of them carry microplastics at sea. This disproves an old cliché, according to which only large rivers generate pollution. This is not true. And the data published on Nature Sustainability confirm what had already been discovered by another research, on a global scale, printed on Science Advance. From here it was discovered that 80 percent of the waste transported to the sea originates from the source of over a thousand riversSuch data means that river control and cleanup mechanisms must be implemented much more systematically than has been attempted so far. And here comes the only good news, in a scenario far removed from the river water protection objectives set by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This year, ISPRA began monitoring 12 Italian rivers to understand, in real time, the flow of waste: where it comes from and which stretches of sea it ends up in.

The main source of pollution of rivers is from plant protection products In Italy, for example, these pollute 67 percent of surface water and 33 percent of groundwater. These levels are three to ten times higher than the tolerance threshold, and herbicides are among the most prominent. According to investigations by ISPRA, on behalf of the Ministry of the Environment, substances attributable to these chemicals have been found in Italian rivers. 259 types of industrial herbicides.

In general, river pollution, which primarily comes from industrial and agricultural waste, can be of two types: biodegradable, when the river is able to clean itself from what pollutes it, and non-biodegradable, when the waste, for example of an industrial nature, is destined to remain until the river reaches the sea where it ends up flowing.

Read also:

• Air pollution is causing us to live two years shorter. And premature deaths are 9 million.
• How to combat indoor pollution. From plants to natural household products.
• Noise pollution: the damage of human noise on the animal world
• Pollution and children, a health emergency: increased risk of asthma, cancer, and dementia in older adults.
• Pollution-related deaths account for 7 million worldwide. And 7 percent of deaths each year occur in Italy.
• Fishermen fight pollution: in Campania, they're fishing for waste, helping the environment.