I'm admittedly not the biggest saint on the sustainable living front, but I also don't see how all of this is getting into the oceans? AFAIK, any plastic that comes into my house either ends up in the recycling (where it's presumably recycled or sent to the landfill if it can't be recycled), ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) or (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling. Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.
It's easy to blame others for this sort of stuff (and, as I already said, I admit I could do more on this stuff). But I can't help but think that first world countries with relatively advanced recycling/trash systems aren't contributing much to this and can't do much about it by implementing additional regulations...
"Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" [0]
- The source is Deutsche Welle, which appears to be Germany's equivalent of the BBC. [1]
"It turns out that about 90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order).
These rivers have a few key things in common. All of them run through areas where a lot of people live — hundreds of millions of people in some cases. But what's more important is that these areas don't have adequate waste collection or recycling infrastructure. There is also little public awareness that plastic trash is a problem at all, so a lot of garbage, gets thrown into the river and conveniently disappears downstream."
Someone linked a great map of these 10 rivers in a past thread, but I can't seem to find it.
This is one of the few beaches in Mumbai.
The plastic is because the city dumps its sewers into the ocean and the plastic washes up on the beach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEnaEqan7FI
Large sections of the coastline have mangroves which are completely covered in plastic and impossible to clean up.
I wonder how practical it would be to have some sort of plastic filter / water processing plant where these rivers dump into the ocean. It would be in all of our best interest to fund something like that, but I wonder if you could do it without a negative ecological impact, i.e. blocking wildlife from traversing the river to and from the ocean.
Interesting, on page 19 of this paper[0] it says "The fishing industry is responsible for the largest input (50–90%) of total plastic marine debris to the oceans". Granted, [0] is from 2012, whereas the paper from Schmidt et al is newer. Nonetheless, you would think Schmidt et al would cite this older paper.
Full text of the journal article referenced in the Deutsche Welle article is paywalled, but there is what looks like a research/conference poster at https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/149396_EGU_2017_Schmidt.pdf that contains quite a lot of detail.
I have trouble believing that 10 rivers are responsible for this. For example, the Ocean Cleanup Project estimates that 1 garbage truck per minute enters the world's oceans. Picture that in terms of plastic flowing through rivers, and it just doesn't work.
The only explanation is organized, industrial-scale dumping from coastal countries (particularly Indonesia and Southeast Asia) that lack landfill and reclamation infrastructure.
When you put something in the bin it means it "goes to the recycler" not "it gets recycled". The recycler sorts through the trash and recycles what they can. The price of oil, currently low, makes it less viable to recycle plastic. Not every container that has that little symbol on the bottom is really commonly recycled.
The vagueness of what happens at the recycler coupled with the fact that the packaging industry puts symbols on container that the average person thinks they mean they will be recycled, lead me to believe that a lot of this is done to make us feel better. I think we all should try to minimize the amount of packaging we use. Water bottles and plastic bags are completely unnecessary.
Exactly 0% of these systems are 100% perfect 100% of the time.
Coastal regions are especially problematic in this regard, since all it takes is wind to carry uncontained litter out to sea.
Recycling bins get blown or knocked over distributing their contents on a frequent basis. People collect recyclables from bins in an attempt to earn income, the stuff collected is not reliably delivered to the recycling center. I've seen drunken idiots kick over recycling bins in SF on more than one occasion, from locations with line of sight to either the bay or the Pacific.
Vehicles transporting trash and recyclables are not 100% perfect. I've followed numerous "Recology" trucks in the SF bay area with trash flying out from under the mesh net they use to cover the trailer - it's unattached on the long edges.
Population centers are continuously adding uncontrolled trash to the environment. When they happen to be coastal, much of it goes to sea.
Recycling is most effective at giving people an impression of a 100% closed system and enabling them to continue purchasing individually packages plastic disposable^Wrecyclable goods. The actual implementation of recycling goes off a cliff the moment the bins move outside, but most people don't interact with it after that point, so the theatre is mostly effective.
This isn't even considering the fact that recycling companies are sometimes corrupt and simply dump the waste wherever is convenient rather than fulfilling their obligations.
> (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling.
1. How do we know that the stores actually recycle the items we give them? There are many accounts around the web that most of this stuff (plastic bags, plastic shipping material, batteries, bulbs, ...) is just emptied into a regular dumpster instead of being properly disposed. Have things changed? Do retailers have internal audits for this or is this just empty marketing?
2. Even if the plastic bags are picked up a 3rd party, is it actually recycled or just dumped? Plastic bags are very difficult to recycle and only a few facilities in the country are able to process them properly. Are they somehow shipped to these facilities?
I'm normally hesistant whenever there are new regulations. However, I totally support the mandated purchase of plastic bags. Someone can prove me wrong but I feel that environmental conservation tends to be better controlled and encouraged by pricing instead of just marketing.
You wash your clothes. Any clothing that is mostly synthetic (eg, fleeces[1]) will shed fibres into the water system. In some places those fibres end up in the oceans.
But also I think a lot of it is industrial.
[1] A bit frustrating that these were sometimes sold as eco-friendly way to recycle PET bottles.
> Multiple studies have shown synthetic fibers to make up the lion’s share of microplastics found in oceans, rivers and lakes, and clothes made from synthetics (polyester, nylon, and so on) are widely implicated as the source of that pollution. Microfibers, as the name implies, are tiny, so they can easily move through sewage treatment plants. Unlike natural fibers, such as cotton or wool, synthetic fibers do not biodegrade, and tend to bind with molecules of harmful chemical pollutants found in wastewater, such as pesticides or flame retardants. Studies have shown health problems among plankton and other small organisms that eat microfibers, which then make their way up the food chain. Researchers have found high numbers of fibers inside fish and shellfish sold at markets.
> Synthetic fibers are one of the forms in which microplastics can be found. They derive presumably from synthetic clothing or macroplastics. Different pathways are thought to be an important source of fibrous microplastics in the aquatic environment. It has been shown that laundry washing machines discharge large amounts of microplastics into waste-waters reaching 1900 fibers in one wash (Browne et al., 2011)). During wastewater treatment, synthetic fibers are known to contaminate sewage sludge (Habib et al., 1998; Zubris and Richards, 2005). The sources and fate of microplastics in the various compartments of the urban environment are poorly documented (Dris et al., 2015a); this paper focuses on the atmospheric compartment and investigates the contribution of the atmospheric fallout as a potential vector of plastic pollution
> ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) ... Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.
There's no reason to assume that what goes in a landfill, stays in a landfill. There's the stuff that washes away or blows away during years before the landfill is completely covered up, and then there's the stuff that gradually enters the local water supply afterward.
Are you sure about that?
They've included a lot of plastics in places you wouldn't think. For instance, in your toothpaste, and in soaps. Lots of people don't even realize that they're sending microplastics right into the water system because crest wanted their toothpaste to look "better".
The other day I noticed someone had deposited a disposable coffee cup in the compost bin. The top was a plastic lid. This plastic lid will wind up in an industrial composter, and degrade into a few largish chunks of plastic. This compost (with the plastic remains) will then be dumped on a farm field somewhere. It will then rain, and those plastic fragments will then wind up washing in to the ocean. The point of this story: if you genuinely care about having clean water and a clean food chain, put the right materials in the right waste bins.
Any system that can be so easily defeated by user mistakes is a terrible system.
That’s self evident in a software development context, but I feel like people lose track of that in the real world.
Asking people to correctly sort their trash in to more and more specific categories manually seems like a system set up to fail. People aren’t necessarily that trainable or malleable or conscientious.
Yelling at people to be more careful is only going to get us so far. We need robust systems that can tolerate at least a certain threshold of abuse by the user. The ideal system would require no thought on the part of the user, it would be impossible to break it through misuse.
Don't they float the plastic out? Our composter is starting to accept plastic bags and I think while reading about the process, I saw the plastic gets skimmed of somehow.
our recycling allows/encourages coffee cups, lids and sleeves all together.
plastic bags/wrap are really hard to recycle and some jurisdictions have stopped collecting them all together
glass jars are probably the worst though - the energy to transport, sort and reclaim is far greater than making new jars. Some of the most committed recyclers throw them away rather than burden the system.
I was vacationing in Thailand a year ago, and was snorkeling in this beautiful, emerald green lagoon in koh phi phi. I suddenly felt something brush up against me from behind... and it was a small pile of floating plastic trash. Really upset me that someone would disrespect such a uniquely beautiful place. Other tour boats were just dumping their plastic waste in the ocean, because it was easy, the ocean is big, and there were no repercussions to them.
It's just a small example of a much larger problem... that very few people think about what happens to their plastic waste, or the amount of it that they throw away each year. It doesn't decompose, so we're filling huge landfills with it, and at least some of it ends up in the ocean (through bad actors, natural disasters, or polluting water that feeds into the ocean). Eventually we'll do something about the problem, but by that point we'll have an ocean full of 200 year old plastic. It seems like global tragedy of the commons problems are among the hardest to solve.
I find the closing remarks around the banning of single-use plastic bags troubling - surely there are much more beneficial areas to target to reduce our overall use of plastic? Within each of these plastic bags full of supermarket groceries is likely anywhere from 5-20 other items caked in plastic packaging. How much of an impact is banning single use plastic bags, even globally, going to make really? Not saying that I'm against the banning of them, but shouldn't bans be extending much further across other products. The single-use plastic bag seems like such a low-hanging fruit, easy-win, that in my mind will make a negligible difference
Actually everything I’ve read indicates you’re right. Plastic bags are literally the least of our trash problem. They are arguably the least resource consuming way to carry groceries, and contribute the most minuscule amount to global garbage accumulation.
This is one of those situations where something that seems intuitively bad “look at all those plastics bags!” is in no way the real problem.
> The total number used fell from over seven billion a year to less than half a billion in the first six months of the policy, saving 40,801 tons of plastic, which is the equivalent weight of roughly 300 blue whales.
There probably are beneficial areas to reduce grocery plastic, but some of that plastic packaging is how/why food stays fresh on shelves longer. Cutting that back means increasing preservatives, throwing stuff out more often, shopping more often, etc.
Getting rid of plastic bags and other low hanging fruit (like straws) might not make a huge difference. On the other hand part of the battle is changing human behavior so starting with low hanging fruit is a good way to get people used to looking for plastic alternatives.
They could always start with the non food related products. Why does every piece of tech seem to come in a ton of plastic packaging anyway? Not so much the computers, but mice, printers, cartridges, etc...
Reduce or ban plastic from being used to package tech products, toys, media and random non food consumables and you'd probably cut down on a lot of plastic usage now.
I don't recall the exact figure it was significant, but the majority of human garbage is single use plastic (e.g., water bottles, plastic forks, etc.).
The problem isn't plastic. It's human nature. We're lazy and default to convenience over respect for Mother Nature.
Your post made me recall an old acquaintance of mine. Being environmentally conscious, he'd bring utensils with him everywhere so that if he ever ate out, he could use those instead of using plastic utensils.
I think the change in the publics’ perception on the harm of plastic will happen in stages. This will just be a first step. In the U.S. I don’t think people are ready for major changes due to the politicization of environmental issues.
And plastic grocery bags are commonly reused. To replace plastic bags, we are talking about shipping around much more expensive reusable bags, and having people buy more bags for trash, pet waste, etc.
I hope all of our needless plastic bottles, food packaging, and trinkets bring us joy greater than the centuries of destruction they bring.
Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for hundreds of thousands of years.
Regulation and pollution taxes can help, but right here right now we can each cut our plastic consumption by 90% without changing our lives at all beyond saving money.
EDIT: Thanks barrad0s for pointing out the picture is a "representation," which I find counterproductive, though it doesn't change the situation or images in the other link.
That's not a real picture. Kinda screws up the article a bit in my opinion, no need for that.
Says right below the pic "A Greenpeace Philippines representation of a dead whale from ingestion of plastic. The representation is increasingly becoming a reality."
> Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for hundreds of thousands of years.
This kind of moral excoriation is not persuasive. You're claiming the moral authority to dictate which things people need, or whether an activity is permissible. You don't have that authority, none of us do, and that you feel passionately about the subject doesn't grant it to you.
Many people, especially artists, engineers, etc. work quite hard at producing such "trinkets" or their livelihoods depend on them. You're not going to persuade them by denigrating them or their work as mere consumerism.
If everyone stopped buying plastic crap today, those people would find other jobs.
Effort != value.
Personally, I try to buy as little physical stuff as possible, and I try to use what I buy for as long as possible, fixing things instead of throwing them out when they break.
Seeing this made me sick: the things we do to the environment and to the animals that live in it sucks sometimes. My family has moved to reusable plastic grocery bags and we try to recycle everything. Living in Germany they take trash and recycling very seriously
"and to the animals that live in it sucks sometimes"
We humans are also animals that live in it. I think a first step towards fixing the problem is remembering that there is no meaningful "us versus them" issue regarding the environment.
I don't disagree with you but, generally, we have a very hard time with "us versus them" even within our own species to have little/no hope that we could remember such a thing when we look at other species.
All of these issues can be solved with pretty straightforward economics. If only there was an impartial, non-corrupt entity that could price externalities, which would then propagate to consumer product prices and therefore minimize this kind of thing.
Readit News
I'm admittedly not the biggest saint on the sustainable living front, but I also don't see how all of this is getting into the oceans? AFAIK, any plastic that comes into my house either ends up in the recycling (where it's presumably recycled or sent to the landfill if it can't be recycled), ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) or (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling. Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.
It's easy to blame others for this sort of stuff (and, as I already said, I admit I could do more on this stuff). But I can't help but think that first world countries with relatively advanced recycling/trash systems aren't contributing much to this and can't do much about it by implementing additional regulations...
Am I wrong about that?
"Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" [0] - The source is Deutsche Welle, which appears to be Germany's equivalent of the BBC. [1]
"It turns out that about 90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order).
These rivers have a few key things in common. All of them run through areas where a lot of people live — hundreds of millions of people in some cases. But what's more important is that these areas don't have adequate waste collection or recycling infrastructure. There is also little public awareness that plastic trash is a problem at all, so a lot of garbage, gets thrown into the river and conveniently disappears downstream."
Someone linked a great map of these 10 rivers in a past thread, but I can't seem to find it.
[0] http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle
[0] http://plastics.earthmind.net/files/ART_Hammer_2012.pdf
EDIT: It appears the 2017 paper is looking at microplastics.
Dead Comment
The only explanation is organized, industrial-scale dumping from coastal countries (particularly Indonesia and Southeast Asia) that lack landfill and reclamation infrastructure.
The vagueness of what happens at the recycler coupled with the fact that the packaging industry puts symbols on container that the average person thinks they mean they will be recycled, lead me to believe that a lot of this is done to make us feel better. I think we all should try to minimize the amount of packaging we use. Water bottles and plastic bags are completely unnecessary.
I'm certain a lot of the stuff I put in a recycling bin doesn't get recycled. But I would be flabbergasted if it's being dumped in an ocean...
Deleted Comment
Coastal regions are especially problematic in this regard, since all it takes is wind to carry uncontained litter out to sea.
Recycling bins get blown or knocked over distributing their contents on a frequent basis. People collect recyclables from bins in an attempt to earn income, the stuff collected is not reliably delivered to the recycling center. I've seen drunken idiots kick over recycling bins in SF on more than one occasion, from locations with line of sight to either the bay or the Pacific.
Vehicles transporting trash and recyclables are not 100% perfect. I've followed numerous "Recology" trucks in the SF bay area with trash flying out from under the mesh net they use to cover the trailer - it's unattached on the long edges.
Population centers are continuously adding uncontrolled trash to the environment. When they happen to be coastal, much of it goes to sea.
Recycling is most effective at giving people an impression of a 100% closed system and enabling them to continue purchasing individually packages plastic disposable^Wrecyclable goods. The actual implementation of recycling goes off a cliff the moment the bins move outside, but most people don't interact with it after that point, so the theatre is mostly effective.
This isn't even considering the fact that recycling companies are sometimes corrupt and simply dump the waste wherever is convenient rather than fulfilling their obligations.
1. How do we know that the stores actually recycle the items we give them? There are many accounts around the web that most of this stuff (plastic bags, plastic shipping material, batteries, bulbs, ...) is just emptied into a regular dumpster instead of being properly disposed. Have things changed? Do retailers have internal audits for this or is this just empty marketing?
2. Even if the plastic bags are picked up a 3rd party, is it actually recycled or just dumped? Plastic bags are very difficult to recycle and only a few facilities in the country are able to process them properly. Are they somehow shipped to these facilities?
I'm normally hesistant whenever there are new regulations. However, I totally support the mandated purchase of plastic bags. Someone can prove me wrong but I feel that environmental conservation tends to be better controlled and encouraged by pricing instead of just marketing.
But also I think a lot of it is industrial.
[1] A bit frustrating that these were sometimes sold as eco-friendly way to recycle PET bottles.
EDIT: this comment got downvotes. Here's a newspaper article talking about microfibre pollution: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jun/29...
> Multiple studies have shown synthetic fibers to make up the lion’s share of microplastics found in oceans, rivers and lakes, and clothes made from synthetics (polyester, nylon, and so on) are widely implicated as the source of that pollution. Microfibers, as the name implies, are tiny, so they can easily move through sewage treatment plants. Unlike natural fibers, such as cotton or wool, synthetic fibers do not biodegrade, and tend to bind with molecules of harmful chemical pollutants found in wastewater, such as pesticides or flame retardants. Studies have shown health problems among plankton and other small organisms that eat microfibers, which then make their way up the food chain. Researchers have found high numbers of fibers inside fish and shellfish sold at markets.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachid_Dris/publication...
> Synthetic fibers are one of the forms in which microplastics can be found. They derive presumably from synthetic clothing or macroplastics. Different pathways are thought to be an important source of fibrous microplastics in the aquatic environment. It has been shown that laundry washing machines discharge large amounts of microplastics into waste-waters reaching 1900 fibers in one wash (Browne et al., 2011)). During wastewater treatment, synthetic fibers are known to contaminate sewage sludge (Habib et al., 1998; Zubris and Richards, 2005). The sources and fate of microplastics in the various compartments of the urban environment are poorly documented (Dris et al., 2015a); this paper focuses on the atmospheric compartment and investigates the contribution of the atmospheric fallout as a potential vector of plastic pollution
Polyester fibers absolutely get washed off clothing and drained out into the ocean (they're too small to be filtered in most cases).
There's no reason to assume that what goes in a landfill, stays in a landfill. There's the stuff that washes away or blows away during years before the landfill is completely covered up, and then there's the stuff that gradually enters the local water supply afterward.
Deleted Comment
Details: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/06/600174922/an...
That’s self evident in a software development context, but I feel like people lose track of that in the real world.
Asking people to correctly sort their trash in to more and more specific categories manually seems like a system set up to fail. People aren’t necessarily that trainable or malleable or conscientious.
Yelling at people to be more careful is only going to get us so far. We need robust systems that can tolerate at least a certain threshold of abuse by the user. The ideal system would require no thought on the part of the user, it would be impossible to break it through misuse.
plastic bags/wrap are really hard to recycle and some jurisdictions have stopped collecting them all together
glass jars are probably the worst though - the energy to transport, sort and reclaim is far greater than making new jars. Some of the most committed recyclers throw them away rather than burden the system.
https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
It's just a small example of a much larger problem... that very few people think about what happens to their plastic waste, or the amount of it that they throw away each year. It doesn't decompose, so we're filling huge landfills with it, and at least some of it ends up in the ocean (through bad actors, natural disasters, or polluting water that feeds into the ocean). Eventually we'll do something about the problem, but by that point we'll have an ocean full of 200 year old plastic. It seems like global tragedy of the commons problems are among the hardest to solve.
This is one of those situations where something that seems intuitively bad “look at all those plastics bags!” is in no way the real problem.
> The total number used fell from over seven billion a year to less than half a billion in the first six months of the policy, saving 40,801 tons of plastic, which is the equivalent weight of roughly 300 blue whales.
Getting rid of plastic bags and other low hanging fruit (like straws) might not make a huge difference. On the other hand part of the battle is changing human behavior so starting with low hanging fruit is a good way to get people used to looking for plastic alternatives.
Reduce or ban plastic from being used to package tech products, toys, media and random non food consumables and you'd probably cut down on a lot of plastic usage now.
The problem isn't plastic. It's human nature. We're lazy and default to convenience over respect for Mother Nature.
I hope all of our needless plastic bottles, food packaging, and trinkets bring us joy greater than the centuries of destruction they bring.
Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for hundreds of thousands of years.
Regulation and pollution taxes can help, but right here right now we can each cut our plastic consumption by 90% without changing our lives at all beyond saving money.
EDIT: Thanks barrad0s for pointing out the picture is a "representation," which I find counterproductive, though it doesn't change the situation or images in the other link.
All it will do is support the people who say the problem is exaggerated.
I don't think this is a convincing argument. There are lots of things that we lived without (e.g. antibiotics) that we wouldn't now give up.
This kind of moral excoriation is not persuasive. You're claiming the moral authority to dictate which things people need, or whether an activity is permissible. You don't have that authority, none of us do, and that you feel passionately about the subject doesn't grant it to you.
Many people, especially artists, engineers, etc. work quite hard at producing such "trinkets" or their livelihoods depend on them. You're not going to persuade them by denigrating them or their work as mere consumerism.
Effort != value.
Personally, I try to buy as little physical stuff as possible, and I try to use what I buy for as long as possible, fixing things instead of throwing them out when they break.
We should all do the same, really.
[1] https://www.theoceancleanup.com/milestones/
We humans are also animals that live in it. I think a first step towards fixing the problem is remembering that there is no meaningful "us versus them" issue regarding the environment.