Does video show major water pollution in India?

In late April 2026, a video circulated online purportedly showing the waters of a shoreline filled with plastic garbage to the point the water can only be seen due to the movement of the waves.

Multiple X users posted the footage (archived) and claimed it depicted a body of water in India. One wrote, "Do you really want to give millions of residency visas to the people from India who do this to their own country?"

(X user @WallStreetMav)

In short, the clip is authentic, meaning not generated or edited using artificial intelligence. It was first posted in 2022 and shows a river in Guatemala, not India. Therefore, we've rated the footage as miscaptioned.

A Google Lens reverse image search for the video's opening frame revealed that 4Ocean (archived), a company that cleans plastic from the world's oceans, first posted the recording in June 2022. According to 4Ocean, the footage shows the Rio Motagua, a river in Guatemala.

The company posted a follow-up clip (archived) to Instagram a year later documenting how it had cleaned up the shoreline. Neither video shows signs of being AI-generated.

The Ocean Cleanup, another company that removes plastic pollution from oceans, wrote about doing its own cleanup project of the Rio Motagua basin in June 2022. The Ocean Cleanup called it the "heaviest polluting river on our planet" and estimated it to be the source for approximately 2% of the global oceans' plastic pollution.

While the Rio Motagua has been particularly affected by waste and garbage, rivers filled with pollution of various kinds, including plastic, exist across the planet. That includes India and the United States. In fact, organizations in the two countries have previously shared ideas on projects to clean each other's major polluted rivers.

For further reading, Snopes has previously fact-checked other miscaptioned images and videos, including one of musician Kid Rock speaking at the Pentagon.