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Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
- pulse7 8y agoMost probably created in China, used on the West then dumped in the sea...
- mc32 8y agoMost of that garbage is usually from locales which lack a recyling infrastructure as well as a recycling culture. If you read the article they mention locals use beaches and streams as personal dumping grounds. So if by west you mean from the local west indies, you’re right.
- justinator 8y agoPlastic recycling isn't. It's just a scheme to move the waste somewhere else (China) and make Westerners feel good about not having to change their wasteful lifestyles. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17368168
- mc32 8y agoThat explains some but not the nile or ganges, mekong, etc. China is “good” about dumping compared to others outside NE Asia.
- justinator 8y agoI don't disagree that the recycling infrastructure isn't there, just that it doesn't do anything, except ship plastic from landfills in the west, to landfills in the east. Since the infrastructure isn't there for these developing countries, it goes not into landfills anywhere, but into the oceans.
- deepvibrations 8y agoIt says in the article it's from the Ozama river which is a local river that runs into the sea nearby.
- ramy_d 8y agoI read that in the article, then i checked it on google maps https://goo.gl/maps/pVJeXBUE4Ck https://goo.gl/maps/pVJeXBUE4Ck . It's still hard to believe so much trash can wind up on a beach through that river. Wait, what does the river look like? Should they just install a shallow net? It's crazy
- wavesounds 8y agoThey should stop dumping trash in the river
- ramy_d 8y agoI mean... yeah!
- jandrese 8y agoEasier said than done. First you have to develop the infrastructure (garbage trucks, dumps, entire departments in local government, etc...). Then you have to convince the villagers to change their way of life through littering fines that everybody will hate. I don't think anybody is happy with the situation, but practical alternatives are in short supply. Worse, you have to apply the situation throughout the whole country or the people who follow the law but still get smothered in garbage from upstream will be angry and disincentiveized to continue trying to clean up.
- toast_coder 8y agoIn the 'west' or more specifically in the United States dump trash in rivers or in the ocean is hight legal and hight risky. You would very likely be caught if you did it with any frequency. It gets old blaming America for problems America doesnt cause, and diminishes all of your future blame America comments. Also, read the article...
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- Chromozon 8y agoThe West seems to do a decent job of managing plastic waste instead of just dumping into the oceans. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/the-journey-of-plastic-around-the-globe/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/the-jour...
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- dsabanin 8y agoI'm curious. Quotes from the article: -- “It happens pretty much all the time if there is a strong rainfall or a storm,” The phenomenon is not confined to the Dominican Republic, he said, and can be seen in many developing nations with a coastline. “Everybody uses the rivers and the beaches as dump sites.” -- So we're being told that ocean's plastic garbage patch is somehow made out of the contents of landfills around the globe (and western countries) making it into the ocean with rain water. To anyone who has seen a landfill in real life that looks wildly improbable, except for a very minuscule amount of material. I feel like developing countries using ocean as a waste dump is much more likely to be the true cause of the garbage patch.
- steveadoo 8y ago86% of the oceans plastic comes from Asia[1]. [1] https://www.theoceancleanup.com/sources/ https://www.theoceancleanup.com/sources/
- sattoshi 8y agoThis statistic shows that as NA or EU residents, what we do basically does not matter. The plastic waste of Asia will only grow. What we can do is focus on the cleanliness of our local communities as that is the only place where we can have an effect. But on the global scale, unless if we manage to strongarm Asia into behaving, it's borderline meaningless.
- kaybe 8y agoWhat would help is to develop a material that is just as good as plastic (or better), degrades easily and is cheaper as well, and then wait for them to copy. Germany basically did this for solar energy.
- t3po7re5 8y agoI think the issue is no matter what policies are adapted outside of Asia, the current status of ocean plastics will remain until Asian countries modify their internal policies.
- Confiks 8y agoThe article title and introduction is pretty misleading, as only halfway the article it is revealed that "the plastic waste washing onto Montesinos Beach comes from the Ozama River". So while this is obviously an example of plastic reaching the ocean to form a garbage patch, the article's examples of beaches filled with plastic are not a result of the patches reaching the shore again.
- lisper 8y agoMy wife and I were traveling in Borneo a few years back. They have "water villages" there where all the houses are built on stilts in shallow water. You could not see the shore because it was completely covered in a layer of garbage. It was like living on top of a landfill. At first I thought it was garbage thrown out by the villagers, but it's not. It was garbage that washes in on the tide. Every now and then the villagers try to clean it up, only to be overwhelmed by a new batch. We were told that it only takes a few weeks for the garbage to completely cover the shore again. It was heartbreaking. [UPDATE] Here's a photo: http://www.flownet.com/ron/trips/Borneo/Images/165.jpg http://www.flownet.com/ron/trips/Borneo/Images/165.jpg
- notadoc 8y ago> You could not see the shore because it was completely covered in a layer of garbage. It was like living on top of a landfill. I've seen the same thing in many different parts of the world. The coastlines are an absolute mess, but then again so is the interior. Garbage is just everywhere in the developing world, strewn about with no concern no matter where you are.
- pishpash 8y agoPart of the problem is development shock and part of it is externality. As the neighboring post says, before non-biodegradable stuff it might not have been as big a problem. It is plausible that if they had developed at their own pace, or that the relevant infrastructure and institutions were put in along with the commercial products, things might have been different. As it is they are not capable of fixing this problem.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoI saw that on the Malaysian peninsula. Chinese fishing villages that still speak an old dialect of Cantonese. It's worse in what looks to be the dry season and low tide like you have there. The other issue is that it's not important to them to clean it up - as it was explained to me. I talked to a local while there and she explained that growing up she never saw it, but years away and she doesn't like it now but knows no one is interesting in picking it up. Partly because they don't seem to care in her opinion partly because they don't have trash service there anyhow, a lot of the trash is put there by the people that live right above it. So it seems like double work to them. Why spent weeks cleaning it up when they're dumping their daily trash there and have been for a hundred years - before plastic it wasn't really a problem of course. There is another issue that many of these little above water fishing villages do have running water - but no sewage. I've seen toilets and sinks that look right down into the water. You DO NOT want to go down there. I think an important thing to note was of the trash I saw, none of it had American or Chinese labels, instead was bahas-malay writing, or local brands. So it's a little hard to say "oh how awful! I need to do something" when unfortunately, they're doing a lot of it it to themselves directly or their countrymen. It is sad thought, totally agree. And Borneo was awesome, but don't tell anyone!
- notadoc 8y agoAnd nearly every other beach in the world. The amount of trash on shorelines, floating around, embedded in reef, etc is staggering. The next time you're on vacation in the Caribbean, SE Asia, or South Pacific, wake up extra early and head out to the shoreline before any clean-up crews arrive to rake up the garbage (and seaweed). Or just visit an unmaintained beach away from resorts where tides work in favor of the garbage coming ashore and where the trash is never picked up. The oceans (and rivers which flow into them) are treated like a giant garbage dump in most of the world, and it shows.
- wavesounds 8y agoIn a number of poorer regions in developing countries I've been too people don't have the capability or perhaps knowledge to properly dispose of garbage so it ends up on the side of the road, which eventually makes its way into rivers and the ocean.
- 21 8y agoThe title makes you believe that this garbage comes from somewhere else, across the ocean, but it's actually coming from their own river into which everybody is dumping waste.
- beagledude 8y agoI'm assuming you don't know how oceans work. Eventually, we'll all be ingesting that.
- irrational 8y agoDo you mean people that eat seafood will be ingesting that, or are you thinking of some other means by which we will be ingesting it?
- pkaye 8y agoSame thing happened in Mumbai a week back. The monsoon rains pulled back all the trash. http://observers.france24.com/en/20180720-video-mumbai-ocean-rubbish-trash http://observers.france24.com/en/20180720-video-mumbai-ocean... Also the Dominican Republic is pretty developed country but in neighboring Haiti things are in pretty bad shape. I saw in a Youtube video by somebody who went there on an eco tour the piles on garbage on a river. He said the garbage was so bad you could walk across the river on the garbage. I can't locate the video clip anymore.
- bargl 8y agoI was in Haiti. This is true, mounds and mounds of styrafoam lunch disposal because there is NO place to put garbage. If it is collected it's burned. The people will burn it themselves because again there is no place to collect it.
- dajohnson89 8y agoDitto. Haiti's beaches near the city center were HORRIBLE. The only people on the beaches were poor folks trying to find scraps. Didn't help that they functioned as a de facto dump as well.
- sev 8y agoSo the fish we consume is most probably consuming garbage and plastic. Veganism to the rescue?
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThere are many good reasons to go vegan nowadays. I am beginning the transition.
- clircle 8y agoIt's precisely why my wife and I no longer eat meat.
- Alupis 8y agoI've wondered for a time, why we put so much energy into banning certain plastic items, instead of improving biodegradable plastic technologies in conjunction with efficient trash sorting at waste management plants. If we can replace most plastics with biodegradable forms, a large part of these issues go away completely within our lifetime; plastics decomposing in as little as 24 months![1] > According to a 2010 EPA report, 12.4%, or 31 million tons, of all municipal solid waste (MSW) is plastic. 8.2% of that, or 2.55 million tons, were recovered[1] A large part of our recycling problem is that it's entirely dependent on people doing the right thing and putting recyclable materials in the correct bin. Why not have machines that can sort recyclables from true decompostable trash? Plastics tend to float, glass tends to sink, tin and many other metals are magnetic... etc. Removing a dependence on people to remember what's recyclable and where to dispose of used items would be a huge win for the environment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradable_plastic
- bargl 8y agoI like this plan because if we make biodegradable plastic cheaper than regular plastic then it would even help in places like the DR and it's neighbor Haiti where there literally is no garbage collection infrastructure and it's easier to throw trash in the street thank to take it home and burn it.
- MikeKusold 8y agoThe problem with Biodegradable plastic is that it still requires a special process to break it down. You can’t just toss it in the ocean and have it magically break down. Compostable materials are the ideal.
- Alupis 8y ago> The problem with Biodegradable plastic is that it still requires a special process to break it down That's not true, actually. From the article: > A peer-reviewed report of the work shows 91% biodegradation in a soil environment within 24 months, when tested in accordance with ISO 17556 > Under proper conditions, some biodegradable plastics can degrade to the point where microorganisms can completely metabolise them to carbon dioxide (and water). For example, starch-based bioplastics produced from sustainable farming methods could be almost carbon neutral.
- alexirobbins 8y agoNatgeo recently published this great data visualization / article on the ocean’s plastic and where it comes from: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/the-journey-of-plastic-around-the-globe/?beta=true https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/the-jour...
- unfunco 8y agoI didn't realise how big of a problem it was until Blue Planet II last year, and then earlier this year I stayed in Unawatuna, and the hotel had a small private beach that is cleared of plastic daily, and it was covered again within hours. I didn't take any photos of the litter directly, but in the top-left of this photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg7qXxyH-2c/?taken-by=unfunco https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg7qXxyH-2c/?taken-by=unfunco it is somewhat visible. It's endless, it'll just keep washing up for the foreseeable future. In the UK you're now vilified if you ask for a plastic bag to carry your shopping home, and the pubs and bars near me no longer offer plastic straws, I'm fine with this, but our waste is an almost literal drop in the ocean compared to the waste being dumped in rivers and oceans by developing nations.
- njarboe 8y agoWhile plastic in the ocean is a big problem, this amount of pollution is a local problem. It could be completely fixed by local people with known methods. "The plastic waste washing onto Montesinos Beach comes from the Ozama River, which flows into the Caribbean nearby." Caribbean beaches and the Gulf coast in general do not have beach pollution like this.
- jcoffland 8y ago> Mr. Gutsch said that recycling was a short-term solution and amounted to only a bandage. Parley for the Oceans advocates phasing out single-use plastic altogether. This is the key. We must hold the companies producing single use plastics responsible for the massive amounts of toxic waste they dump on our planet. For too long, they have been allowed to pass the responsibility and blame on to the consumer. Recycling programs have not been sufficiently successful. It's time to stop the problem at the source.
- EGreg 8y agoI bet if this happened in major US or Chinese beaches they’d actually enact policies to curb this dumping.
- swerveonem 8y agoWhy can't they organize a weekly trash service and tell all people to stack the trash at the end of the road?
- LeifCarrotson 8y agoCulture, Money, and Infrastructure (the latter of which requires a combination of Money and Time).
- btbuildem 8y ago> The plastic waste washing onto Montesinos Beach comes from the Ozama River, which flows into the Caribbean nearby, one of those in charge of the cleanup, Gen. Rafael Antonio Carrasco, told Reuters. Maybe I misread this, but it sounds like the source of the garbage is relatively local. It's not the Great Garbage Patch or anything like that, it's the DR's own garbage they they throw in the Ozama River that's washing up ashore.
- zaroth 8y agoNice bit of auto playing video at the bottom of the article (picture worth a thousand words) or could have been an GIF. My first thought was it looks like a great problem for some robots — they need a small fleet of floating Rhombas.
- jpindar 8y agoThere are devices for scooping trash out of rivers, I don't know how well they could be adapted for the ocean. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-wheels-professor-trash-wheels-baltimore-harbor-ocean-trash-pickup/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-wheels-...
- SonnyWortzik 8y agoIt reminds me of George Carlin save the planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c