river in the Bay of Bengal. In a busy commercial
district, Jambeck walked slowly along a row of
shops and cafés, her eyes on the ground. She
counted litter piece by piece, logging each one
into a phone app that recorded its location.
There were a lot of pieces to log: Patna, a rapidly
growing city of more than two million, has had
municipal house-to-house trash pickup only
since 2018, and the practice of dumping trash
in the streets has long been a problem.
During the 98-day expedition, Jambeck and
her team conducted 146 such litter transects,
each about the length of a city block, in 18 cities
and villages along the river. They recorded 89,691
individual littered pieces. They also cataloged
the products sold in nearby shops—because to
design solutions to the waste problem, Jambeck
said, you need to know what’s “leaking out of the
system” and what’s not.
“Do you want to ban what ends up on the
ground? Do you want a tax? Something else?”
she asked. “Or, if you’ve banned plastic bags, for
example, is your ban working?”
The top three plastic items Jambeck doc-
umented on Indian streets were filmy food
wrappers, cigarette butts, and tobacco
“sachets”—single-serving packets that are sold
by the billions in Africa and Asia to deliver a wide
range of products. About 40 percent of the lit-
tered items carried international brand names,
including brands from companies headquartered
in the U.S. or the U.K. Getting the attention of
such companies was one of Jambeck’s purposes
in doing this research.PLASTIC RUNS THROUGH IT 93