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US Should Create Strategy by End of '22 to Reduce Increasing Ocean Plastic Waste

128 points by infodocket 5y ago

tfehring 5y ago
Relevant: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-straws https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-... TL;DR: The bulk of plastic entering the oceans comes from China, India, and Southeast Asia; it's still somewhat the US's fault since we dispose of a lot of plastic per capita and send much of our recycled plastic there; accordingly, the author claims, Americans should generally throw plastic in the garbage instead of recycling it.
- RobertRoberts 5y ago
  Relevant quote from that page: > And zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    And I’m not even in an area that drains into the Pacific Ocean. Last i checked there wasn’t much of a problem at all of plastics flowing down the Mississippi, but I still have to drink out of godawful paper straws.
- sa1 5y ago
  This is only looking at river waste. The major contributor to plastic waste in the ocean is fishing gear. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
  - tfehring 5y ago
    That's a good point, but "the major contributor" seems like a stretch. That article claims 640,000 tonnes/year of fishing equipment end up in the ocean, which is ~8% of the 8 million tonnes/year of overall plastic waste that end up in the ocean according to https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/paddling-in-plastic-meet-the-man-swimming-the-pacific-garbage-patch https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/paddling-in-...
    - sa1 5y ago
      This might be true, but it seems commonly described as the major contributor because it's 40-70% of floating plastic and macroplastics. On the other hand, microplastics sink to the ocean bed. https://hillnotes.ca/2020/01/30/ghost-fishing-gear-a-major-source-of-marine-plastic-pollution/ https://hillnotes.ca/2020/01/30/ghost-fishing-gear-a-major-s... I'm not sure which has more environmental impact.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        Plastics that do actually sink to the ocean bed are actually carbon sinks, a good thing as long as they don’t do so much damage to the ecology on the way down. The two major carbon sinks which really matter are building up global living biomass (i.e. replanting forests) and getting carbon locked in sediment on the ocean floor (by building up living ocean biomass that rains down on seafloor areas which are actively building up sediment.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Yep... but politicians ban plastic straws and then brag how they're saving the planet, while those guys can do whatever they want.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - azinman2 5y ago
      It was meant to be just a starting point of removing one use plastics that are in the background of daily life. The trend ought to continue.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        Or it’s a meaningless gesture meant to appear to be doing something because it’s visible but only annoying people and building opposition for something otherwise quite important. It makes you feel good if you already like it, but really builds an easy win for opposition by demonstrably doing nothing of substance while making life a little more unpleasant. In other words it serves only to be divisive and give an opportunity for people to have strong opinions about something irrelevant; which is actually the point of much of politics, cement your support base by getting people riled up about inconsequential and thus risk free issues.
        mitigating 5y ago
        "builds an easy win for opposition by demonstrably doing nothing of substance " It has some effect and if you want a big change sometimes it's better to start small. For example, if you wanted to get in shape you start by running a small distance. "In other words it serves only to be divisive and give an opportunity for people to have strong opinions about something irrelevant; which is actually the point of much of politics, cement your support base by getting people riled up about inconsequential and thus risk free issues." This is even more disturbing; you think that people on the left (and yes I'm just going to name the sides here) want to help the environment solely to anger the right? I have never met anyone who cares about the environment admitting to me their only and true motive is to anger the opposition. Is the reason you think this because that's your motive? For example "owning the libs". It is because you can't possibility be wrong about environmental policies that the other side must have another motive? Do pickup truck owners roll coal on cyclists because they think cyclists are out there riding just to shove that fact in their face? That they are putting all that physical effort as virtue signaling?
- latchkey 5y ago
  I spent 4 years living in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It is literally in the culture to just throw shit into the ocean, rivers, everywhere. It is painful to watch how bad it is.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    The US was just like that before the environmental movement made it unacceptable a few decades back.
    - Isamu 5y ago
      When I was a wee lad the soda cans were not yet engineered to retain the opener ring, and at every national park or scenic view there would be thousands of soda can rings, in addition of course to the millions of cigarette butts.
      - Isamu 5y ago
        [edit in response to the almost random downvote that I seem to get at first] Point is that soda can engineering responded to the embarrassment of the ubiquitous littering and made a product that took care of it. The evolution of the soda can in my lifetime is very interesting, starting with steel cans, then aluminum, the retained opener, the elimination of the separate bottom, and finally the ever reducing top diameter and wall thickness to reduce the material use. Cheers!
  - siruncledrew 5y ago
    That’s spot on, it’s like seeing a scene of deja vu from the 1960s where people didn’t give a second-thought about throwing garbage anywhere until the EPA and Clean Water Act entered the scene. People get used to it being “a thing” in their lives, and just don’t have the awareness or infrastructure for better disposal.
  - theptip 5y ago
    Right - and the thing most folks don’t realize is that when you “recycle” your plastic it gets shipped to those countries. (Used to get shipped to China until they blocked exports of low-quality recycling stock). I’m increasingly persuaded by the thought that putting plastic in a landfill domestically would be much better for the environment than our current recycling program.
- cik2e 5y ago
  Agreed on throwing plastic away. It's safer in a landfill than having it sold to a SE Asian country where it may be dumped in the ocean or burned out in the open. Plastics can safely wait in our landfills until the day comes when it makes economic sense to dig them up and use them in one way or another.
- Railsify 5y ago
  I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste, just as each individual should take responsibility for their own actions. If we all do that and stop looking to our neighbors to clean up our messes, the world will be a better place. When Americans recycle, we certainly don't understand it gets shipped to Asia and dumped in the ocean. Let's not indoctrinate our citizens to believe it's their fault that Asian countries dump crap in the ocean, you're not doing the Americans who look to the media for training on what to think any good.
  - rp1 5y ago
    I agree with the first part of what you said: individuals should take responsibilities for their actions. You don't just get to claim ignorance that your actions are having negative consequences. Therefore, it's irresponsible to recycle plastic in the US and you should throw it away.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spats1990 5y ago
    >I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste, Only one country is home to the Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest producer of plastic waste.
    - nradov 5y ago
      The plastic bottles for Coca-Cola are manufactured all around the world. They don't ship much bottled Coke from the US to other countries.
      - spats1990 5y ago
        The franchises follow policy set by Coca-Cola headquarters, right? You're splitting hairs here.
        nradov 5y ago
- siruncledrew 5y ago
  It’s a good thing many Americans now have more willingness or emotional drive to care more about the environment, but the US really needs to rip the band-aid off on the recycling falsehoods passed down from the 1980s. It creates a false image that “it’s ok to consume as much as you want, as long as you recycle!” - as if all those Coke and Deer Park bottles go straight from the blue bin right back to the beverage factory, meanwhile they get packed on a giant polluting ship and sent halfway around the world to a poor country then get dumped into the ocean. Out of sight, out of mind. Unfortunately in this case - what goes around, comes around. We should use our collective ecological motivation to create systems that actually address the biggest polluters, which means not just letting them pass the issue on or give a shrug like there’s nothing they can do.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Just the bottled water craze alone is terrible. Drinking water should come from the tap, and if what comes from your tap is not drinkable you should fix that rather than to pay 100 fold what it should cost per liter of potable water to the likes of Coca Cola.
dnautics 5y ago
this is a third derivative. - strategy by (= / delta-t == 1yr) - reduce increasing (d/dt^2)
lettergram 5y ago
I'm just going to leave this here... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270819/ocean-plastic-pollution-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270819/ocean-plastic-po... The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans (it's something like >30th on the list). It's effectively 80+% from Asian countries. https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  > Taking a leadership role in preventing plastic pollution would position the U.S. to shape and influence global plastic production, design, and innovation — and possibly create new economic opportunities, the report says.
  - lettergram 5y ago
    The U.S. dictating to the poor backwards nations of the asian pacific will go over well. More likely, a company setup by the family member of several U.S. politicians will receive funds from the U.S. government to aid in "transitioning" these economies to a post-plastics world. None of which will be effective and largely be like the Clinton Foundation in Haiti. The reality is that reducing crude oil to gasoline production will remove the ability to produce plastics. As plastics become more expensive, different materials will be utilized.
    - BostonEnginerd 5y ago
      I believe that the feedstock for most plastics is natural gas.
      - jcampbell1 5y ago
        This is correct, the two biggest plastics are polyethylene and polypropylene, which natural gas is the feedstock.
    - 8note 5y ago
ConanRus 5y ago
Didn't find words "China" and "India" in the article, well done. The whole program should have: #1 make Asia to stop polluting the ocean
makerofspoons 5y ago
We could stimulate the domestic textile industry to mass produce clothing without plastic fibers while phasing out fabrics that are depositing microplastics in the oceans: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....
mkskm 5y ago
Proposed initiatives / advocacy orgs https://www.beyondplastics.org https://www.beyondplastics.org https://www.plasticfreepresident.org https://www.plasticfreepresident.org https://camustlead.org https://camustlead.org https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5845 https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5845
dinnison 5y ago
Plastic only becomes waste and ends up in the ocean if it is not collected properly. We're solving this problem at Replenysh. How we think about circularity: https://replenysh.com/blog/an-opportunity-to-evolve https://replenysh.com/blog/an-opportunity-to-evolve
gennarro 5y ago
Can’t have high seas fisheries with plastic at this level https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26321/ https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26321/ It’s really troubling to see space trash get more concern than ocean trash given our reliance on the oceans (not to downplay the problem of near-earth collisions)
- tacocataco 5y ago
  Am I crazy or did we not use hemp ropes for fishing before we invented plastics? Put fish tariffs on any country who doesn't use hemp rope for fishing.
hereforphone 5y ago
Provocative comment that is definitely not Reddit-friendly: Make sure China and India create one too. The bulk of the blame lies on them.
drbojingle 5y ago
Reduce increasing. Progress.
savant_penguin 5y ago
Let's just ban plastic forks and pat ourselves in the back
grouphugs 5y ago
end or bust
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
> to reduce increasing e.g. not to stop it but to make it increase less but still increase? what we need is a total ban on any plastics. I get free plastic bags doing groceries in Rome, Italy and it's 2021. All of this is going too slow. The whole recycling industry even in Germany, Switzerland and Austria is literal garbage and I hope that instead of talking a big game and making people think we make a difference with 5 different colors of containers we can solve this where it needs to be solved? The price of using plastic needs to be taxed into oblivion so that it is no longer economically feasible to destroy the planet with this shit. edit: unlike most of you I have seen many beaches in South-East Asia when I was really young, ... these places were free of plastics/garbage and full of marine life and animals that thrived along the coastline. These romantic lone islands ... they are garbage dumps now with fresh new garbage floating in every morning. None of you will ever experience them the same way as I had the opportunity to unless you're looking forward to go snorkeling in a garbage dump. My generation is the one that deserves the blame and I hope they get held accountable and has been robbed of the opportunity to see these things that my generation had.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. The alternatives are often energetically quite a lot worse. Most plastics recycling is nonsense outside of a few developing technologies that actually produce Virgin quality precursors. Plastic should be burned in power plants when it is no longer needed and people shouldn’t litter. When reasonable other polymers should be replaced with PLA which does not have the endocrine disrupting qualities of other things and doesn’t last centuries in the environment (and is just lactic acid which is everywhere in biology). The plastic most people use absolutely does not destroy the environment or end up in the ocean. This is a littering problem mostly in Asian countries, not a materials problem.
  - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
    > This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. my fist job leaving my home country was working as a PADI diving instructor. We set up a small company in Colombo, Sri Lanka called "Adventure Sports Lanka" and hired a local fisherman in Unawatuna just outside Galle. We (dumb Brits) had no idea what we got ourselves into but because a civil war was also raging (another story) this guy who drove our boat supported his whole family with the salary that he made from acting as the "captain" of our diving boat. He took me and my students nearly every day out on his boat and waited patiently for us to get back to the surface and into the boat. Once I took out a student to teach them in an Advanced course about project A.W.A.R.E which is basically about how not to have impact on the environment as a diver, never leave anything behind etc. The student was a German girl who was very keen. When we got back from our dive our captain decided to throw an empty water (plastic) bottle back into the sea. I was incredibly embarrassed because he was on my payroll and I was just finishing a whole day of telling her (who was 100% a supporter of the Green party and much onboard with the whole program in this cursed course) about how well we take care about the environment as PADI divers. Getting back onto the boat I confronted the captain who just shrugged his shoulders and said: "but you know sometimes a bird comes. and they sit on the bottle. they are tired and they sit"- I had no words for him because I realized how far his reality was from mine. In a similar way I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you. peace.
colechristensen 5y ago
Strategy: support media efforts in Asian countries making littering a moral issue citing natural beauty and putting sad music over dirty rivers, etc. That’s how we did it in the US which did have a big littering problem until the mid 20th century. Or just install a few of those silly water wheel garbage skimmers at the mouths of a few major rivers around the world.
- spats1990 5y ago
  >littering Coca Cola and others are largely responsible for the notion that it is the individual's responsibility not to "litter" single-use products that are extremely profitable for corporations: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-campaigns/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-li...
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Given that it's individuals who transported those single-use items to the location where they were consumed, it makes perfect sense that those same individuals should transport them back to trash handling facilities. How else are you going to bring drinks to a picnic, if not in some sort of container, that you are then responsible for regardless of how many times that container can be used or what it's made of?
    - spats1990 5y ago
      If you read my link, it's not even about "trash handling facilities", but about the profitability of single-use bottles vs refillable ones for manufacturers. There are lots of things in what we call civilised society that act as gentle guidance mechanisms to encourage compliance toward some end that is desirable for everybody. Without some incentive to transport single use items to an appropriate receptacle some people will always just throw them on the ground, as it costs them nothing to do so. The makers of single use drink bottles have thus privatised profit and socialised the negative externalities of their product. The money goes in their pockets, and the bottles go in the ocean.
  - 5y ago
xyzzy21 5y ago
Make littering a 5 year minimum jail sentence.
1270018080 5y ago
Let's ban fishing?
willmadden 5y ago
Why? It all comes from third world countries with no garbage collection. Rivers of plastic garbage flowing into the ocean. The only strategy that will work is a culture change in those country AND implementing garbage collection. What will end up happening is a lot of taxpayer money handouts to politically connected contractors who won't focus on the problem and pocket the money, kicking back some to the politicians.
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
A few observation points from living in SE Asia for the past 13 years: - Singapore incinerates most of its plastic - In places like Indonesia, there aren't great waste collection systems/processes in place. When rainy season comes along, months worth of accumulated garbage/plastic gets washed out to sea. In Bali, Jimbaran beach accumulates literal mounds of plastic waste (google for pictures). - Again in Indo, even if plastic is collected and sent to the trash dump (read: not a land fill), it gets washed out to sea when it rains.
planetsprite 5y ago
>should make >a strategy >reduce Anyone who's dealt with iffy deadlines and mediocre management knows that without clear progress metrics and negative consequences for failure, nothing will happen.
diveanon 5y ago
Plastic tax is the only way, force corporations to pay for the plastic they produce and it’s cleanup costs.
beervirus 5y ago
Yes, the US really needs to step in and solve this OVERWHELMINGLY ASIAN problem. https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/countries-that-pollute-most-ocean-plastics https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/countries-that-pollute...
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Standardize glass packaging. Deal with this fake recycling issue. Invest in research for better tires

128 points by infodocket 5y ago

Relevant: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-straws https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-... TL;DR: The bulk of plastic entering the oceans comes from China, India, and Southeast Asia; it's still somewhat the US's fault since we dispose of a lot of plastic per capita and send much of our recycled plastic there; accordingly, the author claims, Americans should generally throw plastic in the garbage instead of recycling it.

RobertRoberts 5y ago
Relevant quote from that page: > And zero plastic thrown in a garbage can in the United States enters the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  And I’m not even in an area that drains into the Pacific Ocean. Last i checked there wasn’t much of a problem at all of plastics flowing down the Mississippi, but I still have to drink out of godawful paper straws.
sa1 5y ago
This is only looking at river waste. The major contributor to plastic waste in the ocean is fishing gear. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-fishing-gear-is-biggest-plastic-polluter-in-ocean-finds-report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...
- tfehring 5y ago
  That's a good point, but "the major contributor" seems like a stretch. That article claims 640,000 tonnes/year of fishing equipment end up in the ocean, which is ~8% of the 8 million tonnes/year of overall plastic waste that end up in the ocean according to https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/paddling-in-plastic-meet-the-man-swimming-the-pacific-garbage-patch https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/30/paddling-in-...
  - sa1 5y ago
    This might be true, but it seems commonly described as the major contributor because it's 40-70% of floating plastic and macroplastics. On the other hand, microplastics sink to the ocean bed. https://hillnotes.ca/2020/01/30/ghost-fishing-gear-a-major-source-of-marine-plastic-pollution/ https://hillnotes.ca/2020/01/30/ghost-fishing-gear-a-major-s... I'm not sure which has more environmental impact.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Plastics that do actually sink to the ocean bed are actually carbon sinks, a good thing as long as they don’t do so much damage to the ecology on the way down. The two major carbon sinks which really matter are building up global living biomass (i.e. replanting forests) and getting carbon locked in sediment on the ocean floor (by building up living ocean biomass that rains down on seafloor areas which are actively building up sediment.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yep... but politicians ban plastic straws and then brag how they're saving the planet, while those guys can do whatever they want.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - azinman2 5y ago
    It was meant to be just a starting point of removing one use plastics that are in the background of daily life. The trend ought to continue.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Or it’s a meaningless gesture meant to appear to be doing something because it’s visible but only annoying people and building opposition for something otherwise quite important. It makes you feel good if you already like it, but really builds an easy win for opposition by demonstrably doing nothing of substance while making life a little more unpleasant. In other words it serves only to be divisive and give an opportunity for people to have strong opinions about something irrelevant; which is actually the point of much of politics, cement your support base by getting people riled up about inconsequential and thus risk free issues.
      - mitigating 5y ago
        "builds an easy win for opposition by demonstrably doing nothing of substance " It has some effect and if you want a big change sometimes it's better to start small. For example, if you wanted to get in shape you start by running a small distance. "In other words it serves only to be divisive and give an opportunity for people to have strong opinions about something irrelevant; which is actually the point of much of politics, cement your support base by getting people riled up about inconsequential and thus risk free issues." This is even more disturbing; you think that people on the left (and yes I'm just going to name the sides here) want to help the environment solely to anger the right? I have never met anyone who cares about the environment admitting to me their only and true motive is to anger the opposition. Is the reason you think this because that's your motive? For example "owning the libs". It is because you can't possibility be wrong about environmental policies that the other side must have another motive? Do pickup truck owners roll coal on cyclists because they think cyclists are out there riding just to shove that fact in their face? That they are putting all that physical effort as virtue signaling?
latchkey 5y ago
I spent 4 years living in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It is literally in the culture to just throw shit into the ocean, rivers, everywhere. It is painful to watch how bad it is.
- standardUser 5y ago
  The US was just like that before the environmental movement made it unacceptable a few decades back.
  - Isamu 5y ago
    When I was a wee lad the soda cans were not yet engineered to retain the opener ring, and at every national park or scenic view there would be thousands of soda can rings, in addition of course to the millions of cigarette butts.
    - Isamu 5y ago
      [edit in response to the almost random downvote that I seem to get at first] Point is that soda can engineering responded to the embarrassment of the ubiquitous littering and made a product that took care of it. The evolution of the soda can in my lifetime is very interesting, starting with steel cans, then aluminum, the retained opener, the elimination of the separate bottom, and finally the ever reducing top diameter and wall thickness to reduce the material use. Cheers!
- siruncledrew 5y ago
  That’s spot on, it’s like seeing a scene of deja vu from the 1960s where people didn’t give a second-thought about throwing garbage anywhere until the EPA and Clean Water Act entered the scene. People get used to it being “a thing” in their lives, and just don’t have the awareness or infrastructure for better disposal.
- theptip 5y ago
  Right - and the thing most folks don’t realize is that when you “recycle” your plastic it gets shipped to those countries. (Used to get shipped to China until they blocked exports of low-quality recycling stock). I’m increasingly persuaded by the thought that putting plastic in a landfill domestically would be much better for the environment than our current recycling program.
cik2e 5y ago
Agreed on throwing plastic away. It's safer in a landfill than having it sold to a SE Asian country where it may be dumped in the ocean or burned out in the open. Plastics can safely wait in our landfills until the day comes when it makes economic sense to dig them up and use them in one way or another.
Railsify 5y ago
I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste, just as each individual should take responsibility for their own actions. If we all do that and stop looking to our neighbors to clean up our messes, the world will be a better place. When Americans recycle, we certainly don't understand it gets shipped to Asia and dumped in the ocean. Let's not indoctrinate our citizens to believe it's their fault that Asian countries dump crap in the ocean, you're not doing the Americans who look to the media for training on what to think any good.
- rp1 5y ago
  I agree with the first part of what you said: individuals should take responsibilities for their actions. You don't just get to claim ignorance that your actions are having negative consequences. Therefore, it's irresponsible to recycle plastic in the US and you should throw it away.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spats1990 5y ago
  >I think each country should take responsibility for their own waste, Only one country is home to the Coca-Cola Company, the world's largest producer of plastic waste.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The plastic bottles for Coca-Cola are manufactured all around the world. They don't ship much bottled Coke from the US to other countries.
    - spats1990 5y ago
      The franchises follow policy set by Coca-Cola headquarters, right? You're splitting hairs here.
      - nradov 5y ago
siruncledrew 5y ago
It’s a good thing many Americans now have more willingness or emotional drive to care more about the environment, but the US really needs to rip the band-aid off on the recycling falsehoods passed down from the 1980s. It creates a false image that “it’s ok to consume as much as you want, as long as you recycle!” - as if all those Coke and Deer Park bottles go straight from the blue bin right back to the beverage factory, meanwhile they get packed on a giant polluting ship and sent halfway around the world to a poor country then get dumped into the ocean. Out of sight, out of mind. Unfortunately in this case - what goes around, comes around. We should use our collective ecological motivation to create systems that actually address the biggest polluters, which means not just letting them pass the issue on or give a shrug like there’s nothing they can do.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Just the bottled water craze alone is terrible. Drinking water should come from the tap, and if what comes from your tap is not drinkable you should fix that rather than to pay 100 fold what it should cost per liter of potable water to the likes of Coca Cola.

dnautics 5y ago

this is a third derivative. - strategy by (= / delta-t == 1yr) - reduce increasing (d/dt^2)

lettergram 5y ago

I'm just going to leave this here... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270819/ocean-plastic-pollution-worldwide-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270819/ocean-plastic-po... The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans (it's something like >30th on the list). It's effectively 80+% from Asian countries. https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

oh_sigh 5y ago
> Taking a leadership role in preventing plastic pollution would position the U.S. to shape and influence global plastic production, design, and innovation — and possibly create new economic opportunities, the report says.
- lettergram 5y ago
  The U.S. dictating to the poor backwards nations of the asian pacific will go over well. More likely, a company setup by the family member of several U.S. politicians will receive funds from the U.S. government to aid in "transitioning" these economies to a post-plastics world. None of which will be effective and largely be like the Clinton Foundation in Haiti. The reality is that reducing crude oil to gasoline production will remove the ability to produce plastics. As plastics become more expensive, different materials will be utilized.
  - BostonEnginerd 5y ago
    I believe that the feedstock for most plastics is natural gas.
    - jcampbell1 5y ago
      This is correct, the two biggest plastics are polyethylene and polypropylene, which natural gas is the feedstock.
  - 8note 5y ago

ConanRus 5y ago

Didn't find words "China" and "India" in the article, well done. The whole program should have: #1 make Asia to stop polluting the ocean

makerofspoons 5y ago

We could stimulate the domestic textile industry to mass produce clothing without plastic fibers while phasing out fabrics that are depositing microplastics in the oceans: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution.html https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....

mkskm 5y ago

Proposed initiatives / advocacy orgs https://www.beyondplastics.org https://www.beyondplastics.org https://www.plasticfreepresident.org https://www.plasticfreepresident.org https://camustlead.org https://camustlead.org https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5845 https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5845

dinnison 5y ago

Plastic only becomes waste and ends up in the ocean if it is not collected properly. We're solving this problem at Replenysh. How we think about circularity: https://replenysh.com/blog/an-opportunity-to-evolve https://replenysh.com/blog/an-opportunity-to-evolve

gennarro 5y ago

Can’t have high seas fisheries with plastic at this level https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26321/ https://ofr.report/pi/2021-26321/ It’s really troubling to see space trash get more concern than ocean trash given our reliance on the oceans (not to downplay the problem of near-earth collisions)

tacocataco 5y ago
Am I crazy or did we not use hemp ropes for fishing before we invented plastics? Put fish tariffs on any country who doesn't use hemp rope for fishing.

hereforphone 5y ago

Provocative comment that is definitely not Reddit-friendly: Make sure China and India create one too. The bulk of the blame lies on them.

drbojingle 5y ago

Reduce increasing. Progress.

savant_penguin 5y ago

Let's just ban plastic forks and pat ourselves in the back

grouphugs 5y ago

end or bust

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

> to reduce increasing e.g. not to stop it but to make it increase less but still increase? what we need is a total ban on any plastics. I get free plastic bags doing groceries in Rome, Italy and it's 2021. All of this is going too slow. The whole recycling industry even in Germany, Switzerland and Austria is literal garbage and I hope that instead of talking a big game and making people think we make a difference with 5 different colors of containers we can solve this where it needs to be solved? The price of using plastic needs to be taxed into oblivion so that it is no longer economically feasible to destroy the planet with this shit. edit: unlike most of you I have seen many beaches in South-East Asia when I was really young, ... these places were free of plastics/garbage and full of marine life and animals that thrived along the coastline. These romantic lone islands ... they are garbage dumps now with fresh new garbage floating in every morning. None of you will ever experience them the same way as I had the opportunity to unless you're looking forward to go snorkeling in a garbage dump. My generation is the one that deserves the blame and I hope they get held accountable and has been robbed of the opportunity to see these things that my generation had.

colechristensen 5y ago
This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. The alternatives are often energetically quite a lot worse. Most plastics recycling is nonsense outside of a few developing technologies that actually produce Virgin quality precursors. Plastic should be burned in power plants when it is no longer needed and people shouldn’t litter. When reasonable other polymers should be replaced with PLA which does not have the endocrine disrupting qualities of other things and doesn’t last centuries in the environment (and is just lactic acid which is everywhere in biology). The plastic most people use absolutely does not destroy the environment or end up in the ocean. This is a littering problem mostly in Asian countries, not a materials problem.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  > This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. my fist job leaving my home country was working as a PADI diving instructor. We set up a small company in Colombo, Sri Lanka called "Adventure Sports Lanka" and hired a local fisherman in Unawatuna just outside Galle. We (dumb Brits) had no idea what we got ourselves into but because a civil war was also raging (another story) this guy who drove our boat supported his whole family with the salary that he made from acting as the "captain" of our diving boat. He took me and my students nearly every day out on his boat and waited patiently for us to get back to the surface and into the boat. Once I took out a student to teach them in an Advanced course about project A.W.A.R.E which is basically about how not to have impact on the environment as a diver, never leave anything behind etc. The student was a German girl who was very keen. When we got back from our dive our captain decided to throw an empty water (plastic) bottle back into the sea. I was incredibly embarrassed because he was on my payroll and I was just finishing a whole day of telling her (who was 100% a supporter of the Green party and much onboard with the whole program in this cursed course) about how well we take care about the environment as PADI divers. Getting back onto the boat I confronted the captain who just shrugged his shoulders and said: "but you know sometimes a bird comes. and they sit on the bottle. they are tired and they sit"- I had no words for him because I realized how far his reality was from mine. In a similar way I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you. peace.

colechristensen 5y ago

Strategy: support media efforts in Asian countries making littering a moral issue citing natural beauty and putting sad music over dirty rivers, etc. That’s how we did it in the US which did have a big littering problem until the mid 20th century. Or just install a few of those silly water wheel garbage skimmers at the mouths of a few major rivers around the world.

spats1990 5y ago
>littering Coca Cola and others are largely responsible for the notion that it is the individual's responsibility not to "litter" single-use products that are extremely profitable for corporations: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter-campaigns/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-li...
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Given that it's individuals who transported those single-use items to the location where they were consumed, it makes perfect sense that those same individuals should transport them back to trash handling facilities. How else are you going to bring drinks to a picnic, if not in some sort of container, that you are then responsible for regardless of how many times that container can be used or what it's made of?
  - spats1990 5y ago
    If you read my link, it's not even about "trash handling facilities", but about the profitability of single-use bottles vs refillable ones for manufacturers. There are lots of things in what we call civilised society that act as gentle guidance mechanisms to encourage compliance toward some end that is desirable for everybody. Without some incentive to transport single use items to an appropriate receptacle some people will always just throw them on the ground, as it costs them nothing to do so. The makers of single use drink bottles have thus privatised profit and socialised the negative externalities of their product. The money goes in their pockets, and the bottles go in the ocean.
- 5y ago

xyzzy21 5y ago

Make littering a 5 year minimum jail sentence.

1270018080 5y ago

Let's ban fishing?

willmadden 5y ago

Why? It all comes from third world countries with no garbage collection. Rivers of plastic garbage flowing into the ocean. The only strategy that will work is a culture change in those country AND implementing garbage collection. What will end up happening is a lot of taxpayer money handouts to politically connected contractors who won't focus on the problem and pocket the money, kicking back some to the politicians.

c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago

A few observation points from living in SE Asia for the past 13 years: - Singapore incinerates most of its plastic - In places like Indonesia, there aren't great waste collection systems/processes in place. When rainy season comes along, months worth of accumulated garbage/plastic gets washed out to sea. In Bali, Jimbaran beach accumulates literal mounds of plastic waste (google for pictures). - Again in Indo, even if plastic is collected and sent to the trash dump (read: not a land fill), it gets washed out to sea when it rains.

planetsprite 5y ago

>should make >a strategy >reduce Anyone who's dealt with iffy deadlines and mediocre management knows that without clear progress metrics and negative consequences for failure, nothing will happen.

diveanon 5y ago

Plastic tax is the only way, force corporations to pay for the plastic they produce and it’s cleanup costs.

beervirus 5y ago

Yes, the US really needs to step in and solve this OVERWHELMINGLY ASIAN problem. https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/countries-that-pollute-most-ocean-plastics https://www.reusethisbag.com/articles/countries-that-pollute...

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Standardize glass packaging. Deal with this fake recycling issue. Invest in research for better tires