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Have you gone to a beach lately? I don't live in the US but it's certainly not a developing country. Beaches are absolutely covered in plastic waste and it's n

• crazygringo 5y ago
  I live in NYC, we actually have tons of beaches here in the metropolitan area, and they're certainly not covered in plastic waste. Nor are our forests -- the hiking trails around here are great. And I'm talking about the single most populated metropolitan area in the US. Sure there are a few strewn candy wrappers or something, but there really isn't any big problem. It's all quite nice. What country do you live in that your beaches are so bad?
  • 4r4r4r 5y ago
    Hong Kong. Beaches are littered with plastic garbage including bottles, bags, and wrappers for about 5 meters off shore. After that its microplastics. This is across the street from the Ferrari showroom.
  • morpheos137 5y ago
    Not GP but Maybe Somalia? Yeah the hysteria about environmental degradation in the USA is among some online people who don't even bother to go outside is absurd. Within 50 miles of NYC are pristine woods, mature second growth trees, deer and black bear. And yeah near the road side you may see a plastic bottle every couple hundred feet. The sky is not falling.
    • PhasmaFelis 5y ago
      As others have said, the fact that beaches and trails are kept tidy near one of the world's wealthiest cities proves nothing. There are plenty of American beaches that are filthy with plastic. Look outside your bubble.
  • msdrigg 5y ago
    Im on the east coast and Ive never seen more than a plastic bag or two on any beach. Even less in forests. Any plastic waste Ive seen outside of a city area is an isolated incident.
  • protoax 5y ago
    You also live in one of the richest cities in the US, so I think your experience may be slightly skewed.
  • trainsplanes 5y ago
    NYC probably has people actively cleaning trails and beaches. Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash. Going through Shizuoka, Aichi, and islands of Kagoshima, they're increasingly looking like dumps. Some are completely covered in pieces of trash, and most of it isn't Chinese. It's washed up laundry detergent bottles and toys and stuff all from here. Some places like Okinawa and Kamakura beach are generally cleaned, but having visited Kamakura 4 years ago and again a year ago, it's noticeably filthier. Major beaches are maintained and cleaned daily. Walk a few hundred meters beyond the crowds and there's a good chance you'll see trash everywhere. Two weeks ago I visited a beach I last went to a couple years back, and it was depressing seeing the state of it. The beach used to have crabs and isopods roaming the sands and crawling around the rocks. Now it's covered in shards of plastic and washed up tires and other things. Not a crab to be seen.
    • Retric 5y ago
      The outer banks of North Carolina has miles of beaches linked to nature reserves that don’t get cleaned or accumulate such trash. Japan is surrounded by a sea of trash due to the countries surrounding it. Litter ends up in streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. You can argue it’s an issue with plastics, but it’s equally an issue with trash.
      • trainsplanes 5y ago
        >Japan is surrounded by a sea of trash due to the countries surrounding it. I'm seeing mainly trash from Japanese companies that are Japanese products with Japanese labels. It's easy to recognize. Externalizing blame isn't the solution because it's not the problem. Currents likely help carry trash away from certain regions. Japan's east coast isn't really being affected by trash that would be coming from, say, China, because currents don't carry most of it to our beaches. It's stuff being washed out locally and brought back by waves here. Much more is likely being passed out into the middle of the ocean.
        • nitrogen 5y ago
  • latchkey 5y ago
    Vietnam. Cambodia. Laos. I spent 4 years living and traveling all over those countries by motorbike. Not just the beaches, but every single waterway, alley, forest, jungle. Literally everywhere. I have pictures of the waterways in Saigon at low tide and the ground is covered in plastic. At high tide, there are government run boats that go up and down some of the waterways to collect a fraction of the trash that people just dump in there. Every single little town/commune/village has a spot on the way in/out of town with mounds of trash (mostly plastic). Usually partially burning, smelly and covered in bugs. It is tragic.
    • Ayesh 5y ago
      Even worse in Indonesia. Cities like Jakarta and Malang are almost unlivable.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "By 2025, the ocean will contain around one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish" It washes up on beaches. Uninhabited islands thousands of miles from the nearest settlement are covered in plastic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/henderson-island-pitcairn-trash-plastic-pollution https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/henderson...
• acituan 5y ago
  > Beaches are absolutely covered in plastic waste and it's noticeably worse each time I go. No disrespect but I don’t think anyone can uniformly sample all the beaches. There might as well be prevailing currents that fill certain places disproportionately more, and leave others disproportionately pristine. This “making a global inference based on the beaches we’ve personally been to” is going to be deceptive in either direction of the argument.
  • titzer 5y ago
    > This “making a global inference based on the beaches we’ve personally been to” is going to be deceptive in either direction of the argument. I've been to beaches on four continents and every. single. one. The only place you do not see[1] trash is where someone has specifically picked up there, recently. That tends to be places around resorts and people's homes. Unless someone does it out of their own goodwill or is paid to, the trash just floats up and accumulates. There's a place for healthy skepticism, but not denial. [1] You don't see it, but microplastics are thoroughly distributed through the ocean by this point. There is literally no way of cleaning up microplastic pollution at this point. We can only improve the optics at our scale.
    • morpheos137 5y ago
      There is a huge difference between seeing a piece of "trash" like a soda bottle or two every couple acres of sand and a beach "covered" in trash. In my life I have only seen one "beach" "covered" in trash in person and that was Race Point at Fishers Island New York. It is where much of the water exchange with the open ocean and the eastern end of long island sound occurs so it stands to reason that stuff would collect there. A mile away there is a pristine sand beach. At race point there was also a lot of drift wood when I visited including whole tree trunks that had washed up. Much of the human created waste was old, including metal debries like very old very rusted rifle bullet casings presumeably from soliders at the now abandoned pre world war two fort behind the beach. Who knows the beach may have been the fort's dump.
    • acituan 5y ago
      > There's a place for healthy skepticism, but not denial. I’m not saying I’m necessarily denying your premise, at least not wholesale, but what is the point of skepticism if it doesn’t include the possibility of rejecting a premise? It’s like saying “I’ll allow you to ask questions but ultimately you have to come my conclusion” We can be passionate and rational at the same time.
• Retric 5y ago
  The vast majority of plastic doesn’t last that long when exposed to the elements. Micro plastics are a significant concern but their extreme surface area to volume ratio is associated with a short individual lifespan. What’s going on is new plastics are introduced from littering and fishing nets which continuously replaces the plastic which is breaking down.
  • southeastern 5y ago
    >Micro plastics are a significant concern but their extreme surface area to volume ratio is associated with a short individual lifespan Isn't the whole issue that they DON'T break down? Yes they can wear into smaller pieces of plastic, but chemically they're still plastic. And when they get to a certain size, they become small enough to easily absorb into the body.
    • Retric 5y ago
      More that the don’t break down fast enough. Most individual plastic molecules on their own doesn’t last that long. Polyethylene the most common plastic is simply a very long chain of carbon and hydrogen it’s a ready food sources for many different kinds of bacteria and is broken down by sunlight etc. There are of course more and less chemically stable plastics, but they all last much longer in a landfill than the vastly more harsh aquatic environment.
• burlesona 5y ago
  As an American, one of the things that shocked me the most in visits to Europe was how much litter there is. I lived in Italy, and it was astonishing how there was just trash everywhere, even though Italy is a wealthy nation. I’ve traveled all over Western Europe and the only part that felt relatively “clean” to me was London - clean as in comparable to NYC or other major US urban centers in terms of litter level. By comparison, I’ve lived and traveled all over the US, cities and rural areas, beaches, forests, etc. Litter is rare. Where you will find it are freeway underpasses, neglected urban or near-urban waterways and railways: places where people aren’t really “supposed” to go, and are therefore loitered in and rarely cleaned. There are many areas where the US lags Europe, but in my experience when it comes to litter, we have far less of it.
  • Swizec 5y ago
    You must be going to different parts of Europe than I have. American cities (not suburbs, the actual cities) are absolutely filthy with trash and litter. European cities feel squeaky clean in comparison. And what's with all that trash on freeways? I've seen a whole couch casually waiting to biodegrade by the side of the freeway. Discarded bumpers and tyres aren't even worth mentioning anymore there's so many everywhere. Large debris like that gets cleaned up immediately in Europe because it's a hazard.
    • yissp 5y ago
      Evidently making blanket statements about two geographically huge and economically / culturally heterogenous areas is misguided.
  • edflsafoiewq 5y ago
    Don't know what you're talking about. You can walk down any highway I've ever seen in America and pick up trash for miles and miles.
    • throwawayboise 5y ago
      It's better than it used to be. The anti-littering "crying Indian" and "Give a Hoot" ad campaigns in the 1970s actually worked. Perhaps things are trending the other way lately. I do seem to notice more litter now than I did when I was younger. But there are more people now also.
• colechristensen 5y ago
  The US had problems with littering that were mostly quashed with some public efforts in the middle to later periods of the last century. Our beaches are mostly clean and our forests and wild places are too. Not pristine and littering still happens but so do efforts to cleaning it up like “adopt a highway”.
• carbine 5y ago
  I just learned that depending on what reusable bags are made of, they can be many orders of magnitude worse than plastic. Cotton bags need to be reused thousands of times to make up for the additional environmental impact it takes to produce them. Organic cotton, even moreso. https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotton-totes-might-be-worse-than-plastic/ https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto... This last bit is not directed at you but re: the issue in general: I get really frustrated with how distorted the notions of “right” and “wrong” behaviours are among many environmentalists — rather than being rooted in fact, they’re all about virtue signalling. My local grocers are all eliminating plastic and switching everything to paper, and I highly doubt that decision was informed by a thoughtful analysis of potential environmental impact.
• D13Fd 5y ago
  I’m posting this from an east coast (U.S) beach. I’ve walked up and down multiple beaches in the last two days, and I haven’t seen any plastic trash at all, although I did see someone find an old rusty fish hook today.
• rufus_foreman 5y ago
  >> Forests are steadily becoming filled with plastic that either gets tossed there or blown there The forests would be a lot nicer if we spent more time raking and cleaning them, like in Finland.
• zelphirkalt 5y ago
  True, and educating all people in a country to not leave their trash where it does not belong is a part of managing our trash as well, which is very neglected. It is just assumed, that everyone knows what to do with plastic bags and stuff, but the reality is, that many people do not have any sense of responsibility and throw stuff everywhere. Every week I see new heaps of trash in forests, which were definitely not there the week before. We need to start educating dumb/lazy/irresponsible people not to throw their trash everywhere, if needed by leveling up punishments and rewards. If anyone is caught throwing trash into the forest, there should be hefty fines for that. If anyone takes time, for example on their weekends, to clean the forest, there should be rewards.