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I know that it's a natural reaction to try to think of a technical solution to a massive problem like this, but to be completely and brutally honest I think hum
by titzer 9y ago
I know that it's a natural reaction to try to think of a technical solution to a massive problem like this, but to be completely and brutally honest I think humans, as a race, are now obligated to get off our fat asses and pick up some trash. Hands and knees, trash bags, buckets, shovels. A single person can easily pick up 10kg of trash an hour. The 8 million metric tons that will likely end up in the ocean this year, if it were instead collected by people (on land, before it gets in the ocean) at 10kg/hr, 2000hrs/yr, that's 400,000 people. That's really not many when spread across dozens of countries. Also, it's way easier and cheaper to just put garbage in the garbage bin. So in reality it could be far less than this number that are all that is needed to keep the planet free of trash.
Also, robots. But mostly we just need to get off our asses and pick up some trash!
- creep 9y agoOkay, you first.
- curun1r 9y agoI'm not sure that's the answer. I got an eye-opening view of the problem when I took a trip to Southeast Asia a couple years ago. Being in the third world, there's very few recycling plants to process plastic waste. The next best option, as you've implied, is landfills to sequester plastic waste...sacrifice that land to keep the rest of our planet clean(er). But even that's hard in many places. On many of the islands I visited, people did make a conscientious effort to throw their plastic garbage in bins and do the right thing. And that worked great, up until one of the massive deluges of rain that the area gets would come. And since they had no landfill area that was far enough from the water, the rains would wash the entire landfills out to sea in a massive river of plastic waste. It was one of the most depressing sights I've ever seen. On one of the scuba dives I went on, we found ourselves surfacing in a debris field that had washed out to sea and it was astonishing to see the magnitude of it. Collecting everything together, as in your suggestion, just led to a massive batch dump into the ocean and it didn't do anything to keep the waste out of the ocean. What we really need is a way to simply produce less plastic products. Increased use of glass, increased emphasis on reusing what plastic we do have and, yes, new technology to replace plastics with materials that break down faster so that when they do end up in the oceans, which in much of the world is inevitable from the moment of creation, they don't cause the amount of damage that plastics do.
- titzer 9y agoAbsolutely +1 to producing less plastic waste. There is some reason to hope that high temperature plasma incinerators can burn plastic waste and generate power with little residual pollution. That might be an option for areas without recycling and landfill capacity.