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Currently we are doing nothing to clean the oceans. Floating plastic is very very bad, it get churned up against rocks and cliffs to become tiny bits that end u
by monk_e_boy 11y ago
Currently we are doing nothing to clean the oceans. Floating plastic is very very bad, it get churned up against rocks and cliffs to become tiny bits that end up in the food chain.
Go to any beach and look along the shoreline to see tonnes of broken plastic.
There was a TV programme they showed last month where a scientist said that they had not found a single fish that didn't have plastic in its gut. They had examined thousands.
- pizza234 11y agoAccording to what I've gathered from previous HN discussions on the same subject, oceans are self-cleaning - garbage will slowly wash ashore, so if theoretically nobody would throw garbage in the seas anymore, the oceans would be clean in some years [1]. This raises the doubt that instead of focusing on directly cleaning the waters, effort should be put into not polluting the seas in first place (cleaning shores would be consequential). But focusing on the cause rather than the symptoms is not exactly a forte of human behavior. [1] http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-plastic-with-a-floating-ocean-cleanup-array/ http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-pl...
- andrewflnr 11y agoI see no reason not to attack the problem from both ends at once.
- riffraff 11y agothat would make sense given unlimited/non-competing resources, but if the resources (money, people, awareness, legislative effort) available to solve the problem are limited, it is wasteful to use them for something which doesn't work rather than something that would. (I do not know if the specific thing works or not, just pointing out that "why not both" is not always a good approach)
- amelius 11y agoEspecially if a beach covered in plastic is the best possible advertisement for a solid, well-informed approach to helping the environment :)