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Our biggest ever river catch?
- denton-scratch 3y agoI got a choice of "Settings" and "Accept all cookies". I closed the tab.
- etiennebausson 3y agoThe choices in settings were "Required" and "Optimal", with optimal being added tracking and adtech. Not sure if or why a NGO would need either of those.
- jonasdegendt 3y agoFrom their cookie policy: > "The Foundation may also place tracking/marketing cookies, such as from Google Ads, LinkedIn, Bing, and Facebook. These cookies are placed once you give consent in the website cookie bar on your first website visit. The purpose of these cookies is to better assess the performance should we run ad campaigns and to include or exclude specific segments of people from seeing those ads depending on their interactions with the website. So fund raising.
- denton-scratch 3y agoIn the EU, opting out must be as easy as opting in. Apparently "The Ocean Cleanup" is based in the Netherlands, which is in the EU. So they're breaking the law. In fact, I found opting out to be as easy as it would have been to click "Accept"; but that prevented me reading the article.
- joebob42 3y agoThis got me to donate. Seems like such a high-impact way to prevent / reduce pollution.
- songeater 3y agodoes anyone have a view of Ocean CleanUp as a charity to donate to?
- IshKebab 3y agoThey're clearly doing something concrete and good and less ephemeral than most charities, so I say go for it. I did for ages and they never spammed me. Only stopped because my payment details changed and I never quite got around to updating them. My only complaint is their use of kg instead of tonnes to let them use big sounding numbers. You don't need to do that guys. It's lame. We can see the photos. It's clearly worthwhile even if it is only a small part of global waste.
- cdrini 3y agoI like the work they're doing, they seem well managed, the guy who founded the project, Boyan Slat, I follow on twitter and he seems very competent. I did some research into this and various other orgs when YouTube focused on Ocean cleanup a few years ago, and was impressed by ocean cleanup. Donations are also tax deductible in a few countries. https://theoceancleanup.com/faq/are-donations-to-the-ocean-cleanup-tax-deductible/ https://theoceancleanup.com/faq/are-donations-to-the-ocean-c...
- nickburns 3y agoi'm curious about the split between capital versus philanthropic funding for an operation like this. i feel certain that this relatively new (sub?)industry—waterway/ocean waste management—is here to stay for a very long time. but i struggle to see how it could ever turn a profit, unless and until they're able to generate revenue/s from the waste they're retrieving. it all feels like a fascinatingly super long play.
- BizarroLand 3y agoI imagine that it is not onerously expensive to run, and it's a good way for larger companies to look like they care by throwing a few nickels their way. Further, I imagine that for some cities, the potential increase in tourism from having clean waters might be worth the investment.
- dang 3y agoSorry for the offtopicness - would you mind putting an email address in your profile so we can send you repost invites? I was able to re-up* the current thread but it was right on the cusp of being too old for that system to work; in which case I would have tried (but failed) to email you a repost link! (Btw the email field in user profiles is only seen by admins.) * System described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 and links back from there
- cdrini 3y agoThis isn't meant to be an industry; the founder, Boyan Slat, has said a few times that the goal of this organisation is to no longer be needed in the future, iirc. But at the same time: there's a lot of plastic in the ocean! It's a non profit org, although they did have an effort a few years ago where they created fancy sunglasses from the plastic they removed, and raised more money from there. The Wikipedia page lists a number of big donation campaigns/big partners who provide funding.
- bastawhiz 3y agoI'm curious how much effort is being put into avoiding this trash ending up in the rivers in the first place. Obviously it's important to catch it before it gets in the ocean, but if people are just dumping directly into the river far upstream, this feels like a Sisyphian task
- snielson 3y agoHaving been to Guatemala, the culture is to throw most trash on the ground. The trash is then washed into the rivers during heavy rains. It's sad to see. The country has a lot of natural beauty, but there is trash everywhere.
- latchkey 3y agoSE Asia is the same. Literally in the culture. The mind boggles.
- raincom 3y agoWell, lack of "garbage collection infrastructure" better explains what's going on in SE Asia, India. When there is no such infrastructure, where else people dump?
- latchkey 3y agoSaigon is a massive city and has garbage collection infrastructure, yet people still dump trash into the rivers that run through the cities. It is actual culture to just toss trash onto the streets, into the gutters and into the rivers. I used to live alongside Truong Sa river and watched people dump their trash into it all day long. There is even a govt run group that goes up and down the river all day long picking up trash. I've been following this group for a while now... they do cleanups all the time... https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/ https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/
- Workaccount2 3y ago
- nine_zeros 3y agoThis is the kind of effort that money should be directed towards. Not the ad infested crap on eyeballs. The ROI is literally cleaner environment. If there was only a way to tax proportional to emissions producers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dylan604 3y ago> The ROI is literally cleaner environment. You can see exactly why this would not impress people concerned with ROI, right?
- riffic 3y agomore on its wikipedia page (there's one in Los Angeles too) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup
- xnx 3y agoCredit to this organization from pivoting (AFAIK) from their original plan to scrape the plastic out of the water on the open ocean ("System 001"). Intercepting plastic at river mouths seems much more practical and cost effective.
- buovjaga 3y agoThey're still working on open oceans: https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/ https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoThis river cleanup is brilliant and effective. Messing with the top meter of ocean water does its own kind of damage. So much of the life in the ocean surface layer is going to be involved with the floating trash, like it or not. Ocean surface sterilization seems incautious and worrisome. Never mind we don't like to see trash. Stripping the ocean surface water will have unforeseen consequences.
- laborcontract 3y agoAre you talking about sea life? According to the video on the site, the boats travel at less than 3km/h and they have live video feeds monitoring the nets. Am I missing anything here?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoAs most people do, you are considering only fish and such. Things we can see. Not the bulk of all ocean life, the tiny microscopic creatures that dominate the ecosystem. It's only the top surface, right? The ocean can be miles deep! But the density of life in the ocean decreases geometrically with depth. By mass, the top inches contain more life than the entire balance of it. Because, sunlight.
- NamTaf 3y ago
- doctorhandshake 3y agoInspiring stuff. I love to donate to orgs like this in lieu of giving gifts to people who have the resources and inclination to buy anything they want already.
- mirekrusin 3y agoHow is this funded?
- cdrini 3y agoThey're a non profit that appears to be funded by various types of donations. - initially funded via crowdfunding - individual donations - a few big partner/company donations - occasional fundraising campaigns for donations - occasional awards - a while back they made fancy sunglasses from the plastic they removed, and sold those. Not sure if that's still a thing though. Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup#Funding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup#Funding
- kibwen 3y agoRealizing that the oceans are the toilet of the world made it real easy to stop eating seafood.
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoToilet would be fine, we fertilized our food for millennia with that. It's the garbage dump, which is much worse.
- moqster 3y agoCant even deny cookies with ublock. Whos taking care of that kind of "trash"?
- hm-nah 3y agoThank god! An example of human ingenuity going to clean up our human impact on the natural world INSTEAD of YAStory of boiling the ocean to generate the perfect cat meme.
- linuxftw 3y agoThe 'plastic problem' seems like it could be easily solved with a weight-based deposit system. Start paying people $1/lb for plastic rubbish and you won't be able to find any laying around. Plastic isn't very dense, so you might need to up the price per lb, but paying people for their waste means municipalities don't have to send people around to collect it in the first place and you don't have to fund cleanup efforts.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoIn my state, the fee for plastic grocery bags comes out to a couple bucks per pound but anecdotally it hasn't made a huge difference in the amount of litter
- dav43 3y agoWhy can’t we just start charging producers of waste a direct cost. If we charged producers (McDonald’s, coke, Pepsi, supermarket, uniliver etc) $1 for every plastic bottle they used, we’d have a budget for clean up and a change in motivations. Suddenly glass reuse programs are suddenly cost comparable etc
- pratikel 3y agoCan you do this globally? Most ocean plastic is not from the US or EU.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justinator 3y agoBecause they would then trade those like carbon offsets or find away to ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage.
- bretthoerner 3y ago> Because they would then trade those like carbon offsets or find away to ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage. Isn't that the point? I'm not arguing (or not arguing) for this solution, but charging people the cost of cleanup and allowing them to "ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage" seems like an improvement on the status quo? Because the local government collecting the tax would now have funds to put toward the solution. This is classic internalizing of what were externalities.
- missedthecue 3y agoPlastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking. - It's a carbon sink, - it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions) - it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces - and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint. The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper disposal place. This isn't Coke's fault, people can just as easily dump a paper carton in the street. I think you'd get more dividends by ensuring the public has the motive (stick or carrot) to not dump their garbage into waterways, and in very poor countries, funding sanitation infrastructure.
- aspectmin 3y agoI LOVE this company. We need more of them. Innovative, Solving world problems. Aware of their impact. I am always encouraging people to donate. These are the kinds of projects that might save us. I wish YC, and it's kin, would fund companies like this.
- missedthecue 3y agoDoes it have a sustainable revenue stream or is it more of a charity?
- nick7376182 3y agoCharge the country for diverted trash, a la waste management companies would be a good place to start.
- shmeeed 3y agoIf they started charging for it, that would probably go a long way to end all cooperation with state authorities, very quickly. As in, have their right to deploy/maintain the retainers revoked, etc. If those countries had the political will and financial resources to deal with the waste, they wouldn't need for an NGO to do it in the first place.
- cdrini 3y agoIt's donation driven. Not sure if you were implying this, but I wouldn't call that unsustainable. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, and many other nonprofits are donation driven and have been around for decades. Edit: I just watched their 2023 summary video, and it seems like they might also be doing more stuff with the plastic they extract that can be recycled/repurposed. That might be a potential revenue source, but not sure.
- klysm 3y agoWouldn’t make sense for YC - where’s their return?
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- pentae 3y agoA commendable operation but sadly, this is a very small fraction of a percentage of the 8-10 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year. The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats, and from living on a remote tropical island myself, at least 90% of the things you find washed up on the beach appear to be from Chinese fishing vessels. (there's usually Chinese characters on the bottles and plastic) Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN to require all fishing vessels to bring back their trash to port to be weighed and processed, their nets counted. They say theres about 10 rivers in the world that contribute the remainder of the ocean plastic, so if they can put these recovery systems on those next then we're half way towards solving the problem
- cdrini 3y agoThose percentages surprised me, so I did some research and it looks like the stat from their research is that 80% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing industry plastics. Not all ocean plastic, which is what the 8-10mil refer to. Ref: https://theoceancleanup.com/ocean-plastic/#other-sources-of-plastic-pollution https://theoceancleanup.com/ocean-plastic/#other-sources-of-... . Plastics from rivers gets caught in currents that bring it near ocean coastlines/beaches, and takes a long while to make it out to free sea/GPGP. These plastics are mostly non-fishing related. (note: this link is actually a great write-up of why their mission is what it is, and their research backing it). There are NGOs working on legislation/lobbying fixes to the problem; eg Ocean Conservancy. But those changes will take a looooong time to get through the system. And regardless, there's already plastic in the oceans that will have to be cleaned up regardless, causing damage right now. So starting on the cleanup at the same time seems reasonable to me. The ocean cleanup also funds various research initiatives -- like the numbers you mentioned -- which lobbyists can use to help change legislation.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y agoI’m glad I’m doing my part one straw at a time /s
- shuvuvt5 3y ago
- Areading314 3y agoGreat interview with Boyan Slat on AO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNWiqq0UxN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNWiqq0UxN0
- datascienced 3y agoWhats the economics of burning it as fuel on site to generate power. Sounds bad but might be better than landfilling it and letting off methane.
- scotty79 3y agoI don't think there's a lot of methane from plastic trash. They should burry it deep into the ground (in defunct mines?) basicslly returning the coal to the earth instead of putting it into the atmosphere.
- scotty79 3y agoIt looks like in the absence of functional trash hauling and landfill service people just use river for both. Looks terrible but if you catch the trash in the end and burn it or landfill it nearby it becomes a kind of replacement for network of diesel trucks running around each day collecting trash.
- starik36 3y agoPossibly dumb question. Where does all this collected trash go? I see on their FAQ that they try to recycle the plastics, but they catch a lot more than plastics.
- louissm_it 3y agoI don't understand why people (Greenpeace) are so against The Ocean Cleanup - complaining that we need to fix the problem at the root instead of cleaning up the mess afterwards. Why can't we do both?
- wasmitnetzen 3y agoProbably because of the Shopping Cart Tragedy: The thinking that you can leave your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot because it's someone's job to collect them. So people might throw trash into nature because they think that someone will collect it.
- louissm_it 3y agoI think we're at the point where the people who are going to throw trash are going to throw trash, and I don't believe something like the ocean cleanup will increase how much trash people throw into nature. You can make the same argument that you shouldn't clean your own house because that will just encourage others to make it dirty again. And thats obviously not how it works. Some people throw trash and some don't. We should clean it up anyways.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI wish it was as simple to solve as the Shopping Cart Tragedy. If you have an Aldi near you, you know that they never have problems with anyone leaving carts in the lot. A simple case of misaligned incentives that is easily solved with an effective solution. Shame that no other vendor in the States does it. For those not familiar with Aldi in the States, they have a very rudimentary analog system that locks the carts up, and you put a US quarter in the lock to unlock the cart. You shop, put your groceries away, and when you go to lock the cart back up you get your quarter back. A quarter is basically nothing in today's modern age, but the mental desire to get it back is apparently powerful enough to incentivize people to walk the cart the 10 meters or so back to where it belongs. I haven't been to the Aldi's in Germany but I assume they work the same way.
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- setgree 3y agoSee here for a 2019 New Yorker profile of the project and of Boyan: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/a-grand-plan-to-clean-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/a-grand-plan-t... Glad to see them still in action!
- throwaway984393 3y ago[dead]
- gcervantes 3y agoWe so need this in Peru.