Picture of river fork and mountains above it.

Can India clean up its holiest river? It will take a village.

Ridding the Ganges of thousands of tons of plastic trash is a complex puzzle. India is starting to put the pieces together.

Two rivers, the Bhagirathi and the Alaknanda, converge in the western Himalaya to form the Ganges, at the Indian town of Devaprayag—Sanskrit for “holy confluence.” The amount of plastic waste flowing out of the Ganges is estimated at more than 6,000 tons a year.
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