Shipping, not land-based sources, may account for a lot of ocean trash

And plastic water bottles are a particularly frequent culprit.

Read the whole story

 

[miken32]

Setting aside all the caveats about the data, one just has to look at the pictures to be made aware of the damage we're causing.

 

[almostinsane]

A better pic or two would have help[ed this article.

 

[THavoc]

On the plus side, there is this:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/02/tech/oce ... index.html

A huge trash-collecting system designed to clean up plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean is finally picking up plastic, its inventor announced Wednesday.

 

[ProdigySim]

Could ocean pollution attribution be the solution?

Really cool to see researchers going out and trying to figure out where the trash comes from. Maybe we should put serial numbers on plastic bottles

 

[Matthew J.]

Eh... put a rope around the island and declare it a landfill. Problem solved.














/s

 

[science is good]

Sad thing, you think of a deserted tropical island as having pristine beaches.

 

[dwrd]

We know where it’s coming from. Developing Asia.

That’s why it’s an issue in the Pacific but not really in the Atlantic.

This whole article is about the Atlantic, and how it's an issue there.

Roughly halfway between Argentina and South Africa, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean...

 

[hapatchi]

We know where it’s coming from. Developing Asia.

That’s why it’s an issue in the Pacific but not really in the Atlantic.

Literally the first sentence in the article mentions that this is in the Atlantic...

 

[Jordan83]

We know where it’s coming from. Developing Asia.

That’s why it’s an issue in the Pacific but not really in the Atlantic.

Er...what?

From the very first sentence of the article, bold added by me -

Roughly halfway between Argentina and South Africa, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, is the most remote settlement on earth.

 

[Jackattak]

Can’t we just build some islands out of this stuff?

 

[foetusinc]

Could ocean pollution attribution be the solution?

Really cool to see researchers going out and trying to figure out where the trash comes from. Maybe we should put serial numbers on plastic bottles

This is actually a thing in the works; the EU is pushing for all plastics to have some form of inherent traceability. Mostly they are interested in automating plastics sorting for recycling, but it could be an accountability tool as well.

 

[Pusher of Buttons]

We know where it’s coming from. Developing Asia.

That’s why it’s an issue in the Pacific but not really in the Atlantic.

Literally the first sentence in the article mentions that this is in the Atlantic...

Shush, that doesn't fit the narrative

 

[THavoc]

Can’t we just build some islands out of this stuff?

We already have.

The one in the Pacific is twice the size of Texas.

 

[firsttimecaller]

On the plus side, there is this:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/02/tech/oce ... index.html

A huge trash-collecting system designed to clean up plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean is finally picking up plastic, its inventor announced Wednesday.

this idea has been floating (apologies) around for awhile, glad to see it seems to be doing something.

i remember a teen inventor had a similar project with investment around it, unsure if this is the same one.

 

[Darmat]

instead of just looking at all this plastic, wouldn't it be more productive to collect and recycle it?

 

[metalliqaz]

I've been meaning to write my sci-fi apocalyptic screen play about a worldwide catastrophe caused by a well-meaning scientist who develops a microbe to decompose all the plastic pollution in the oceans.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Banning plastic bottles isn't the solution though. Even single-use plastic is useful sometimes. Especially in developing countries where hygiene is not guaranteed.

I think disposing of it properly is much more important. I'd never throw a water bottle on the street or in the sea and recycle everything.

 

[jandrese]

instead of just looking at all this plastic, wouldn't it be more productive to collect and recycle it?

Recycling plastic is at best a break even proposition. If you're shipping it out of a remote south Atlantic island it will never be worthwhile monetarily.

 

[dramamoose]

Definitely seems that manufacturers of these bottles (or anything non-biodegradable in a reasonable timespan) should be required to put some money into escrow, explicitly to be used to collect the waste. The rest of this century NEEDS to be about pricing in externalities, and that means cleanup costs. When a mining company opens a mine, they need to put big chunks of cash (or bonds/etc) into a fund reserved for reclamation, which is to be used to cover reclamation efforts. Any extra funds after the area has been restored to either its original or similar terrain, and environmental cleanup is complete, return to the company.

Seems like with serial numbers, manufacturers could track what of their bottles end up where, and receive money back from escrow based on that. (Landfill, pay the costs of proper disposal; recycled, maybe receive all of the funds back, and 'just disappeared', pay a punitive amount that would cover picking the stuff up from the ocean; this amount would be the amount required to be put into escrow.

It would certainly raise the costs of plastic goods but...wouldn't that be good?

If we're going to save the planet, we need to be pricing in all externalities for goods within the next few decades. It's the only way to keep capitalism and live sustainably on the planet.

 

[uhuznaa]

A mandatory $1 deposit on each bottle would solve this problem pretty fast, one way or another.

 

[teknik]

instead of just looking at all this plastic, wouldn't it be more productive to collect and recycle it?

plastic recycling doesn't happen so much anymore.

 

[dramamoose]

It isn't getting in the ocean from Denver or Albuquerque!

CHINA! That is the source.

Did you even read the article? It specifically says that China isn't believed to be the source.

EDIT: Developing nations are definitely getting the short end of the stick here. The modern industrialized world ruined the planet for 200+ years, and are only now starting to get serious about fixing it. We got industrial and economic expansion without paying the price that we're now asking developing nations to pay. On top of which, we're still reaping the rewards of their labor/ecological exploitation by getting cheap goods. Rather than tariffs, I would be supportive of regulations that require goods being sold in the US to have been produced utilizing the same environmental standards that exist in the US.

 

[jandrese]

Sad thing, you think of a deserted tropical island as having pristine beaches.

If you get shipwrecked on an island the the beaches are pristine you're super lucky. It means someone is cleaning the beaches and should discover you soon. If the beach is absolutely covered in trash like this then you might be screwed, although you'll have a lot of materials to help you survive.

 

[Pusher of Buttons]

instead of just looking at all this plastic, wouldn't it be more productive to collect and recycle it?

I mean.....yes....

But recycling is a bitch. In many cases now it's not financially prudent, particularly in the developing world. So really it's all about the save the earth narrative which we can't even sell in our own country let alone people with significantly less resources.

 

[tgx]

And how many 'k' cups from that environmental disaster.

 

[jandrese]

There was, as you might expect, all sorts of things in those huge collections of garbage. But the biggest single category—about 30%—was bottles, and 98% of those bottles were plastic. This doesn't necessarily mean that 98% of the bottles dumped in the ocean were plastic; glass bottles are more likely to break, and plastic bottles can more easily travel on the wind, so they might be more likely to show up in this kind of context.

Wouldn't the fact that glass bottles are much heavier than water be a bigger factor? Glass bottles usually can't be easily re-capped like plastic bottles, so one would expect them to fill up and sink to the bottom shortly after being dumped in the ocean.

 

[jandrese]

A mandatory $1 deposit on each bottle would solve this problem pretty fast, one way or another.

$1 is pretty extreme, even a $0.10 or $0.15 deposit does a pretty good job of cleaning up cans and bottles.

 

[numerobis]

instead of just looking at all this plastic, wouldn't it be more productive to collect and recycle it?

Recycling plastic is at best a break even proposition. If you're shipping it out of a remote south Atlantic island it will never be worthwhile monetarily.

If you could throw it into the engines it would burn cleaner than bunker oil.

 

[Jordan83]

It isn't getting in the ocean from Denver or Albuquerque!

CHINA! That is the source.

Did you even read the article? It specifically says that China isn't believed to be the source.

You're right, it couldn't possibly come from there...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article ... e-polluted

China coastal waters

middle of the South Atlantic Ocean

The source you cited talks about the top region. The article you're commenting on talks about the bottom region. Look at a map.

 

[dramamoose]

It isn't getting in the ocean from Denver or Albuquerque!

CHINA! That is the source.

Did you even read the article? It specifically says that China isn't believed to be the source.

You're right, it couldn't possibly come from there...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article ... e-polluted

I didn't say that China isn't polluting or dumping plastic into the water in ridiculous amounts. You claimed that we 'knew' the source of this plastic was coming from China, while the article itself specifically pointed out that scientists ( you know, those people who know way more about this than you or I) don't believe that it is coming from China, and indeed the article laid out a number of different scenarios for how the waste could be getting there, including India/Southeast Asia as well as dumping from ships.

 

[THavoc]

It isn't getting in the ocean from Denver or Albuquerque!

CHINA! That is the source.

Did you even read the article? It specifically says that China isn't believed to be the source.

You're right, it couldn't possibly come from there...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article ... e-polluted

China coastal waters

middle of the South Atlantic Ocean

The source you cited talks about the top region. The article you're commenting on talks about the bottom region. Look at a map.

I think (hope) his comment was sarcasm.

At least I ready it as an implied /s.

Edit: After looking at the article, apparently I was wrong.

 

[adespoton]

instead of just looking at all this plastic, wouldn't it be more productive to collect and recycle it?

It's my suspicion that this is where a lot of it is coming from -- on-land users recycle their plastics, it goes to a transfer station, who then transfer shipping containers of it off to oceangoing vessels...

...which then go out to sea and dump the contents, returning for the next load.

 

[science is good]

Definitely seems that manufacturers of these bottles (or anything non-biodegradable in a reasonable timespan) should be required to put some money into escrow, explicitly to be used to collect the waste. The rest of this century NEEDS to be about pricing in externalities, and that means cleanup costs. When a mining company opens a mine, they need to put big chunks of cash (or bonds/etc) into a fund reserved for reclamation, which is to be used to cover reclamation efforts. Any extra funds after the area has been restored to either its original or similar terrain, and environmental cleanup is complete, return to the company.

Seems like with serial numbers, manufacturers could track what of their bottles end up where, and receive money back from escrow based on that. (Landfill, pay the costs of proper disposal; recycled, maybe receive all of the funds back, and 'just disappeared', pay a punitive amount that would cover picking the stuff up from the ocean; this amount would be the amount required to be put into escrow.

It would certainly raise the costs of plastic goods but...wouldn't that be good?

If we're going to save the planet, we need to be pricing in all externalities for goods within the next few decades. It's the only way to keep capitalism and live sustainably on the planet.

I'm going to plan a little devil's advocate here. So we add those associated cost onto the products, what does that do with the poor that also use those product. Those addition cost just pushed the cost of living higher and moved the poor further down the food chain.

Instead, I suggest finding alternatives. I'm a big fan of refillable water bottle instead of the single use bottles. They cost less and have less waste. While not a complete solution for all circumstance, they can reduce the total number of single use bottle used.

 

[Rand]

It isn't getting in the ocean from Denver or Albuquerque!

CHINA! That is the source.

Did you even read the article? It specifically says that China isn't believed to be the source.

EDIT: Developing nations are definitely getting the short end of the stick here. The modern industrialized world ruined the planet for 200+ years, and are only now starting to get serious about fixing it. We got industrial and economic expansion without paying the price that we're now asking developing nations to pay. On top of which, we're still reaping the rewards of their labor/ecological exploitation by getting cheap goods. Rather than tariffs, I would be supportive of regulations that require goods being sold in the US to have been produced utilizing the same environmental standards that exist in the US.

"China," as a nation, is believed to be the source - just from Chinese ships rather than Chinese territory.

Also, developing nations get some advantages from industrialized nations - they can deploy highly operationalized technology without the expense of inventing or refining it said technology. This is why developing nations can have better wireless coverage than the US - they got to skip landlines and jump straight to advanced wireless technologies. Whether this offsets the factors that you described or not should be the suject of a research paper, so I can't hazard a guess, but they don't have it all bad.

 

[daveishereagain]

A mandatory $1 deposit on each bottle would solve this problem pretty fast, one way or another.

$1 is pretty extreme, even a $0.10 or $0.15 deposit does a pretty good job of cleaning up cans and bottles.

My New England state has recycling ($0.05 deposit) and it works pretty well. When funds get low our collection of water bottles and beer/soda cans is used for beer money. We see people with shopping carts and garbage bags roaming the streets collecting them. It seems to work.
The collection centers are fairly gross places to visit, though. The road collectors don't wash them out before they come, so it can be a bit.......aromatic.

 

[jandrese]

A mandatory $1 deposit on each bottle would solve this problem pretty fast, one way or another.

$1 is pretty extreme, even a $0.10 or $0.15 deposit does a pretty good job of cleaning up cans and bottles.

My New England state has recycling ($0.05 deposit) and it works pretty well. When funds get low our collection of water bottles and beer/soda cans is used for beer money. We see people with shopping carts and garbage bags roaming the streets collecting them. It seems to work.
The collection centers are fairly gross places to visit, though. The road collectors don't wash them out before they come, so it can be a bit.......aromatic.

Also, it's a great fundraiser for local sports teams/youth groups/etc... to go around collecting people's recycling and bringing it to the center. I wish all states had a deposit.