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8 MILLION tonns of plastic waste EVERY YEAR are dropped in the OCEAN! man this is scary

chrismjelde 6y ago
Yes, and that's barely 2.5% of the 300 million tonnes of plastic we now produce every year - half of which is single-use, and less than 1/10th of which is recycled at the end of its useful life.
ars 6y ago
Most of it is trash from undeveloped countries with poor trash service. People just dump the trash and local rivers wash it downstream. This can be solved not by changing how plastic is used but simply by pressuring those governments to implement trash collection.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > This can be solved not by changing how plastic is used but simply by pressuring those governments to implement trash collection. Or both.
xamuel 6y ago
The weight of the world's oceans is about 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons, so at 8 million tons per year it would take about 18 million years for that plastic to add up to 1/10000th of the ocean's mass, assuming all that plastic is completely non-biodegradable over an 18 million year period.
- pixl97 6y ago
  The problem with that take is assuming even distribution. Nothing in the ocean is. Almost all ocean life is in the top 50 meters. And the vast majority of that is close to a shore, the same shores where the majority of plastics are introduced to the ocean.
  - xamuel 6y ago
    True, the actual magnitude of the problem is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. The point of my comment was to battle an increasingly often-used fallacy where people spout numbers that look large out-of-context and then scream about the sky falling based on those large numbers. You could say something like, "Ten MILLION planets get sucked into blackholes every YEAR! This is terrifying!" (I just made those numbers up for illustrative purposes), without looking at what those numbers are relative to this just creates unnecessary panic and motivates people to mis-allocate precious resources that could be spent on more urgent problems.

Yes, and that's barely 2.5% of the 300 million tonnes of plastic we now produce every year - half of which is single-use, and less than 1/10th of which is recycled at the end of its useful life.

ars 6y ago

Most of it is trash from undeveloped countries with poor trash service. People just dump the trash and local rivers wash it downstream. This can be solved not by changing how plastic is used but simply by pressuring those governments to implement trash collection.

catalogia 6y ago
> This can be solved not by changing how plastic is used but simply by pressuring those governments to implement trash collection. Or both.

xamuel 6y ago

The weight of the world's oceans is about 1,450,000,000,000,000,000 tons, so at 8 million tons per year it would take about 18 million years for that plastic to add up to 1/10000th of the ocean's mass, assuming all that plastic is completely non-biodegradable over an 18 million year period.

pixl97 6y ago
The problem with that take is assuming even distribution. Nothing in the ocean is. Almost all ocean life is in the top 50 meters. And the vast majority of that is close to a shore, the same shores where the majority of plastics are introduced to the ocean.
- xamuel 6y ago
  True, the actual magnitude of the problem is probably somewhere in between the two extremes. The point of my comment was to battle an increasingly often-used fallacy where people spout numbers that look large out-of-context and then scream about the sky falling based on those large numbers. You could say something like, "Ten MILLION planets get sucked into blackholes every YEAR! This is terrifying!" (I just made those numbers up for illustrative purposes), without looking at what those numbers are relative to this just creates unnecessary panic and motivates people to mis-allocate precious resources that could be spent on more urgent problems.