Four Rivers juxtaposes diagrams of the four waterways most heavily polluted with plastic wastes. Passing through numerous urban and manufacturing centers, these rivers are fouled with an estimated 8,000,000 tons of plastic garbage a year, most of which gets disgorged into our oceans. Between ¼ and ½ of that mass comes from one river – the Yangtze. The Ganges, Xi (the Western tributary of the Pearl River) and Huang (Yellow River) round out this rogue’s gallery. Rodriguez depicts the background of this drawing as a grid within a grid to refer to the streets of an urban center as well as the typical layout of windows in factories and warehouses. His point: the (mis)use of plastics is part and parcel of our reliance on the cheap labor and lack of environmental regulations in global manufacturing centers in places such as China and India. Our demand for inexpensive stuff fuels the industries and governments that put profits above the health of people and the environment. There’s nothing about this type of pollution that is technologically or technically impossible to fix—it’s purely economics.