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It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up after, so that's where the focus should be. It's not a matter of the damage "already

by gizmo 7y ago

It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up after, so that's where the focus should be. It's not a matter of the damage "already been done". All additional plastic that ends up in the ocean is still bad. Estimates are that 10% of all plastics produced annually ends up in the ocean, about 10 million tonnes annually. That's a staggering amount. The great pacific garbage patch -- as mentioned in the article -- is twice the size of Texas, but the garbage density is low: only 4 parts per m3. And only 5% of the garbage is at the surface (10 meters deep or so). That's what makes the cleanup fiendishly difficult. So let's focus on the low hanging fruit first.

titzer 7y ago
> so that's where the focus should be. See this a lot. You are using your own limited attention span to argue that others shouldn't be doing the work they are doing because you can only think about one problem at a time. There are 7.7 billion people on this Earth damn it, we can and should work on multiple different parts of a problem at once. The garbage which is in the oceans needs to extracted (and extracted now, before it gets ground into microplastics), and as others have mentioned, other people are working on catching runoff waste at river sources. I never really understood people who shout from the sidelines that people who are actually working their asses off on the problem are doing it wrong. Have a little more respect.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  Not to mention that there are other projects focus on stopping garbage creation at the source of consumers with creating garbage collection and processing programs in these 3rd world areas.
- throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
  I don’t really have any stats to support either view but the key point is this, if accurate > It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up We may have 7.7 billion people but less than 0.1% are free and down to work on climate clean up so that doesn’t matter. If one activity is relatively inefficient then it probably shouldn’t be done. The argument here is that you can bail water with a teaspoon or you can plug the hole in the boat. Detractors are saying don’t waste your time with the tea spoon, and you’re saying “well at least it helps!” Similar arguments apply to whether we should burn garbage or not depending on the price of natural gas, or whether or not we should use energy to pull carbon from the sky. Again I don’t know if the detractors are correct but I wouldn’t be shocked if true.
ehnto 7y ago
I'm not saying Ocean Cleanup is good at what they're doing. I'm just saying we have no choice but to get good at cleaning up the plastic that is there, because it's not going away on it's own and no amount of prevention will reverse time. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I also have no confidence that all nations involved in polluting will stop and I suspect we'll still be putting plastic into the ocean for decades to come. Being better at cleaning the ocean may actually be the low-hanging fruit.
- aeternum 7y ago
  Microbes are probably the best answer. There is already evidence that they are eating a large proportion of the plastics and oil that is dumped / spilled into the ocean. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/these-tiny-microbes-are-munching-away-plastic-waste-ocean https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/these-tiny-microbes-...
manigandham 7y ago
As many other commenters have pointed out, they are already doing river cleanup with fully deployed systems in many rivers. If anything, they don't need to focus on one thing because they've shown to be perfectly capable of attacking both challenges effectively.
- gizmo 7y ago
  A quick calculation suggests they would need 10,000 of their river Interceptors, assuming each interceptor can fill a garbage truck worth of plastic daily. That would reduce the amount of plastic dumped in the sea by the 1000 most polluted rivers by about half. Building, maintaining, and operating 10,000 Interceptors is a huge undertaking, and it requires their full effort and attention. To my knowledge they currently only have a few prototype Interceptors that don't work very well. They're certainly nowhere near the point where they can build river trash interceptors at scale. Prototypes are relatively easy. Building big machines that work all day every day without breaking down is super hard.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    There's only 10 rivers that are the 90% of trash: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... And sure, if they want to launch across 1000 rivers it's going to be a big project. So what? Nobody said it was easy. It seems like your argument is that... they can't do it because it's hard? If they fail then nothing changes. But they've already started and have the designs finished with the version 2 interceptors working well. Something is better than nothing.
mcv 7y ago
Absolutely. Cleanup is not the whole solution, but part of the solution. We still need to cut down on our plastic use. And by "we" I don't mean just Europe and the US, though we are definitely culprits too, but I recently learned that about a third of the plastic in the Pacific comes from a single river in China. Filtering it there, or making Chinese more aware of the problem of plastic waste, is absolutely vital. Still, the cleanup is a great idea.

by gizmo 7y ago

titzer 7y ago

> so that's where the focus should be. See this a lot. You are using your own limited attention span to argue that others shouldn't be doing the work they are doing because you can only think about one problem at a time. There are 7.7 billion people on this Earth damn it, we can and should work on multiple different parts of a problem at once. The garbage which is in the oceans needs to extracted (and extracted now, before it gets ground into microplastics), and as others have mentioned, other people are working on catching runoff waste at river sources. I never really understood people who shout from the sidelines that people who are actually working their asses off on the problem are doing it wrong. Have a little more respect.

hanniabu 7y ago
Not to mention that there are other projects focus on stopping garbage creation at the source of consumers with creating garbage collection and processing programs in these 3rd world areas.
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
I don’t really have any stats to support either view but the key point is this, if accurate > It's much cheaper to prevent plastic reaching the ocean than cleaning it up We may have 7.7 billion people but less than 0.1% are free and down to work on climate clean up so that doesn’t matter. If one activity is relatively inefficient then it probably shouldn’t be done. The argument here is that you can bail water with a teaspoon or you can plug the hole in the boat. Detractors are saying don’t waste your time with the tea spoon, and you’re saying “well at least it helps!” Similar arguments apply to whether we should burn garbage or not depending on the price of natural gas, or whether or not we should use energy to pull carbon from the sky. Again I don’t know if the detractors are correct but I wouldn’t be shocked if true.

ehnto 7y ago

I'm not saying Ocean Cleanup is good at what they're doing. I'm just saying we have no choice but to get good at cleaning up the plastic that is there, because it's not going away on it's own and no amount of prevention will reverse time. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I also have no confidence that all nations involved in polluting will stop and I suspect we'll still be putting plastic into the ocean for decades to come. Being better at cleaning the ocean may actually be the low-hanging fruit.

aeternum 7y ago
Microbes are probably the best answer. There is already evidence that they are eating a large proportion of the plastics and oil that is dumped / spilled into the ocean. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/these-tiny-microbes-are-munching-away-plastic-waste-ocean https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/these-tiny-microbes-...

manigandham 7y ago

As many other commenters have pointed out, they are already doing river cleanup with fully deployed systems in many rivers. If anything, they don't need to focus on one thing because they've shown to be perfectly capable of attacking both challenges effectively.

gizmo 7y ago
A quick calculation suggests they would need 10,000 of their river Interceptors, assuming each interceptor can fill a garbage truck worth of plastic daily. That would reduce the amount of plastic dumped in the sea by the 1000 most polluted rivers by about half. Building, maintaining, and operating 10,000 Interceptors is a huge undertaking, and it requires their full effort and attention. To my knowledge they currently only have a few prototype Interceptors that don't work very well. They're certainly nowhere near the point where they can build river trash interceptors at scale. Prototypes are relatively easy. Building big machines that work all day every day without breaking down is super hard.
- manigandham 7y ago
  There's only 10 rivers that are the 90% of trash: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti... And sure, if they want to launch across 1000 rivers it's going to be a big project. So what? Nobody said it was easy. It seems like your argument is that... they can't do it because it's hard? If they fail then nothing changes. But they've already started and have the designs finished with the version 2 interceptors working well. Something is better than nothing.

mcv 7y ago

Absolutely. Cleanup is not the whole solution, but part of the solution. We still need to cut down on our plastic use. And by "we" I don't mean just Europe and the US, though we are definitely culprits too, but I recently learned that about a third of the plastic in the Pacific comes from a single river in China. Filtering it there, or making Chinese more aware of the problem of plastic waste, is absolutely vital. Still, the cleanup is a great idea.