A single litter count may represent a bad day at one river. However, seven years of the same investigation, carried out by thousands of different students, suggests a meaningful pattern. This is the result of the Plastic Pirates campaign, a citizen-science initiative coordinated across Germany. Since 2016, about 23,000 German pupils have conducted river litter audits following clear scientific instructions, a scale that would be difficult without substantial funding. The results of these inventories have been published in the US National Library of Medicine. They can serve as a valuable lesson on plastic pollution worldwide and the impact of various human activities on it, even for people with nothing to do with rivers.
Plastic and cigarette butts dominate the litter count
