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I'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 get

I'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 ago
Having 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 ago
  SE Asia is the same. Literally in the culture. The mind boggles.
  - raincom 3y ago
    Well, 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 ago
      Saigon 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
        I have worked with people who grew up in Central America and just drop garbage on the ground when done with something. Even if the trash is 20 feet away. It's hard to shake natural habits from your youth, especially if you don't even care that much.
        latchkey 3y ago
        My experience is that it isn't about not caring. It is that people who have very little (or come from very little) care about different things, like putting food on the table, today. It is survival instinct only. Quality of education goes a long way too. Do they teach sustainability in schools there? Even if they did, how many generations of kids do we have to go through before they teach these things to their kids? There is no concept of a week or a month or 10 years from now. When you're lacking that, you have no care for the future or how your actions today, will affect things down the road. It really was eye opening taking myself out of my nurture and actually living in a place like SE Asia.
  - aussieguy1234 3y ago
    I have personally witnessed people in the Philippines who live next to the ocean quite literally taking out the trash from their bins, then tossing it directly into the ocean current to be taken away. No functioning garbage collection service there either.
- Octokiddie 3y ago
  Any insights into what makes this culturally acceptable?
  - readthenotes1 3y ago
    No Ladybird Johnson like figure driving public policy in the 1960s, melding the hippies and government together? The TV was inundated with public service announcements shaming trash throwers in the USA for maybe 15 years. It made a difference. Having seen similar "just throw it on the ground" behavior in India and china, I think that it may be a natural response in a rural culture that needs to be changed once it is in a city and non degrading packaging is used
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      Even “Don’t mess with Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign in the mid-80’s into the 90’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas
      - selimthegrim 3y ago
        The "Walker told me I have litter" mashup/reboot of this is waiting to happen
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        "Individual responsibility" anti-littering campaigns, most notoriously the 1971 "crying indian" advert, were strongly driven by industries associated with single-use packaging and products which overwhelmingly constituted such pollution. By putting the onus on individual "consumers", the producers were off the hook for responsibility. Create an economy in which there is nothing to throw away, or in which costs of recovery and recycling are built in to the products themselves and effectively incentivise round-trip material flows, and the problem largely solves itself. Market dynamics tend strongly away from such mechanisms. Free-market advocates like to point to the general success of anti-pollution, clean air, clean water, safety, and other similar measures in rich Western countries, without acceding in the least that overwhelmingly such progress has come through courts, legal processes, and social advocacy, rather than market mechanisms. Wealth overwhelmingly has shown that it is self-serving power, as Adam Smith noted nearly 250 years ago. There's a 1967 interview of Ralph Nader by Studs Terkel I've recently run across, and which describes very much what's happening now as it did the circumstances of nearly 60 years ago, though the industries addressed have shifted somewhat. I cannot recommend this highly enough. <https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-his-book-unsafe-any-speed https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...> Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.mp3 https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)
euroderf 3y ago
Narrowing their focus to rivers makes it easier to name & shame, & trace to source.
navane 3y ago
Ironically this is what people said when they were focusing on cleaning the ocean: "they should focus on rivers, that's how most trash gets into the ocean".
- woleium 3y ago
  i read that a lot of ocean plastic comes from the fishing industry
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    Well, if you watch their videos most of what is caught is from the fishing industry, but it's probably a difference in durability. Plastic from rivers etc. are going to fairly quickly break down into (polluting) microplastics because the plastic is pretty thin, so it's best to stop that at the rivers, while a lot of what they are catching in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry because it's all made of thicker plastic and would take a lot longer to break down.
sidewndr46 3y ago
To me it seems like this would potentially encourage more of the behavior that lead to all this trash in the river, since now people may know it is not going to the ocean.
- cdrini 3y ago
  That's a potential risk, but I think working on both is ok. Organisations like the ocean conservancy deal with trying to change more upstream things like legislation. Even when we do fix the source of the problem we'll have A LOT of ocean plastic to clean up, so starting now seems reasonable. Again, so long as people are also working on the source further upstream, which they are!
cdrini 3y ago
This organisation is more specifically focused on river/ocean plastic removal right now. The ocean conservancy is another organisation that, amongst a wide variety of ocean-related efforts, also deals with trying to improve legislation/etc further upstream (pun intended :P). Both do pretty impressive work! I personally find The Ocean Cleanup's more narrow focus at times useful, since it makes them a bit more defensible. Meanwhile finding exactly what the ocean conservancy is even doing is a little difficult because they touch a ton of ocean related things.
aunty_helen 3y ago
Here’s how it works in Colombia, we separate our rubbish and recycling, put the bags out for the garbage truck in the morning. Homeless “recyclers” come around and pick through your trash looking for plastics they can sell to fund their crack addiction. Sometimes they just take the whole bag down to the river bank, cut it open and sort through the stuff they want discarding the rest on the bank. Next time it rains the plastic gets washed into the river and here we are. The western mind can’t comprehend the level of stratification in society that leads to problems like this. It’s not a case of bumper stickers and catchy slogans for school kids, it’s people trying to survive at a level below any societal cohesion. The root cause as I see it, plastic. Everything is plastic wrapped in plastic as there’s cleanliness and trust issues in society. Want a bag of lollies? Plastic bag, individually wrapped lollies with an inner plastic wrap as well. Swapping to trash that’s going to break down in the river is a much easier solution. Some places have started to do this in the last couple years, but it’s mostly virtue signaling fast food places that want to give a western feel to charge higher prices. So you get two layers of plastic on your vegetables but your McDonald’s straw dissolves in your coke.
- mathgradthrow 3y ago
  >The western mind cannot comprehend... Haha, don't most of the users here live in the bay?
- amatecha 3y ago
  The western mind can definitely comprehend it. When it's garbage pickup day in my city, sometimes people are going by on bicycles rooting through trash bins (or recycling bins if it's recycling pickup day) and taking anything they can turn in for a recycling deposit. This is in Vancouver, Canada. It's probably not nearly as prevalent as in Colombia, but yeah... And yes, for sure, the root cause is the creation of plastic and its inclusion in nearly all commercial products. It's everywhere, and it's not the fault of you and I. We didn't choose it. I completely agree that having discard that is biodegradable (and perhaps can directly contribute to a compost pile) is a very worthwhile goal. Oh yeah, a bunch of cities here banned plastic takeout bags, but it's implemented in such a poor way that it's now just a great profit center for fast food restaurants: they are _legally required_ to charge $0.25 for a bag, even if it's a paper bag. I'm sure McDonalds absolutely loves this new policy. They already gave out paper bags with takeout, but now they cost the customer $0.25! It's especially funny because now all the restaurants give you these thick "plastic fabric" bags (and charge you for them) which you'll get more use out of, but are not any better for the environment. I still get one every single time I get takeout from any sushi place. Now instead of a bag full of thin plastic bags in my closet, I have a bag full of just as many super-thick plastic/cloth bags in my closet! Good stuff. Some are recyclable, I have a huge stack of these from takeout: https://lppackaging.ca/collections/biodegradable-bags/products/cloth-bags https://lppackaging.ca/collections/biodegradable-bags/produc... ... I wonder if I can just tell them I don't want a bag, and arrive with my own...
stevage 3y ago
Uninformed guess here but collecting at the river end feels much more efficient than creating culture change in thousands of third world villages...
darylteo 3y ago
Ocean Cleanup is also trying to tackle this From 4 days ago! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGY4rpOnbhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGY4rpOnbhw (that is a depressing and amazing amount of trash, I can't imagine the big one in the ocean)

snielson 3y ago

Having 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 ago
SE Asia is the same. Literally in the culture. The mind boggles.
- raincom 3y ago
  Well, 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 ago
    Saigon 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
      I have worked with people who grew up in Central America and just drop garbage on the ground when done with something. Even if the trash is 20 feet away. It's hard to shake natural habits from your youth, especially if you don't even care that much.
      - latchkey 3y ago
        My experience is that it isn't about not caring. It is that people who have very little (or come from very little) care about different things, like putting food on the table, today. It is survival instinct only. Quality of education goes a long way too. Do they teach sustainability in schools there? Even if they did, how many generations of kids do we have to go through before they teach these things to their kids? There is no concept of a week or a month or 10 years from now. When you're lacking that, you have no care for the future or how your actions today, will affect things down the road. It really was eye opening taking myself out of my nurture and actually living in a place like SE Asia.
- aussieguy1234 3y ago
  I have personally witnessed people in the Philippines who live next to the ocean quite literally taking out the trash from their bins, then tossing it directly into the ocean current to be taken away. No functioning garbage collection service there either.
Octokiddie 3y ago
Any insights into what makes this culturally acceptable?
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  No Ladybird Johnson like figure driving public policy in the 1960s, melding the hippies and government together? The TV was inundated with public service announcements shaming trash throwers in the USA for maybe 15 years. It made a difference. Having seen similar "just throw it on the ground" behavior in India and china, I think that it may be a natural response in a rural culture that needs to be changed once it is in a city and non degrading packaging is used
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    Even “Don’t mess with Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign in the mid-80’s into the 90’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas
    - selimthegrim 3y ago
      The "Walker told me I have litter" mashup/reboot of this is waiting to happen
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      "Individual responsibility" anti-littering campaigns, most notoriously the 1971 "crying indian" advert, were strongly driven by industries associated with single-use packaging and products which overwhelmingly constituted such pollution. By putting the onus on individual "consumers", the producers were off the hook for responsibility. Create an economy in which there is nothing to throw away, or in which costs of recovery and recycling are built in to the products themselves and effectively incentivise round-trip material flows, and the problem largely solves itself. Market dynamics tend strongly away from such mechanisms. Free-market advocates like to point to the general success of anti-pollution, clean air, clean water, safety, and other similar measures in rich Western countries, without acceding in the least that overwhelmingly such progress has come through courts, legal processes, and social advocacy, rather than market mechanisms. Wealth overwhelmingly has shown that it is self-serving power, as Adam Smith noted nearly 250 years ago. There's a 1967 interview of Ralph Nader by Studs Terkel I've recently run across, and which describes very much what's happening now as it did the circumstances of nearly 60 years ago, though the industries addressed have shifted somewhat. I cannot recommend this highly enough. <https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-his-book-unsafe-any-speed https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...> Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.mp3 https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)

euroderf 3y ago

Narrowing their focus to rivers makes it easier to name & shame, & trace to source.

navane 3y ago

Ironically this is what people said when they were focusing on cleaning the ocean: "they should focus on rivers, that's how most trash gets into the ocean".

woleium 3y ago
i read that a lot of ocean plastic comes from the fishing industry
- stephen_g 3y ago
  Well, if you watch their videos most of what is caught is from the fishing industry, but it's probably a difference in durability. Plastic from rivers etc. are going to fairly quickly break down into (polluting) microplastics because the plastic is pretty thin, so it's best to stop that at the rivers, while a lot of what they are catching in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry because it's all made of thicker plastic and would take a lot longer to break down.

sidewndr46 3y ago

To me it seems like this would potentially encourage more of the behavior that lead to all this trash in the river, since now people may know it is not going to the ocean.

cdrini 3y ago
That's a potential risk, but I think working on both is ok. Organisations like the ocean conservancy deal with trying to change more upstream things like legislation. Even when we do fix the source of the problem we'll have A LOT of ocean plastic to clean up, so starting now seems reasonable. Again, so long as people are also working on the source further upstream, which they are!

cdrini 3y ago

This organisation is more specifically focused on river/ocean plastic removal right now. The ocean conservancy is another organisation that, amongst a wide variety of ocean-related efforts, also deals with trying to improve legislation/etc further upstream (pun intended :P). Both do pretty impressive work! I personally find The Ocean Cleanup's more narrow focus at times useful, since it makes them a bit more defensible. Meanwhile finding exactly what the ocean conservancy is even doing is a little difficult because they touch a ton of ocean related things.

aunty_helen 3y ago

Here’s how it works in Colombia, we separate our rubbish and recycling, put the bags out for the garbage truck in the morning. Homeless “recyclers” come around and pick through your trash looking for plastics they can sell to fund their crack addiction. Sometimes they just take the whole bag down to the river bank, cut it open and sort through the stuff they want discarding the rest on the bank. Next time it rains the plastic gets washed into the river and here we are. The western mind can’t comprehend the level of stratification in society that leads to problems like this. It’s not a case of bumper stickers and catchy slogans for school kids, it’s people trying to survive at a level below any societal cohesion. The root cause as I see it, plastic. Everything is plastic wrapped in plastic as there’s cleanliness and trust issues in society. Want a bag of lollies? Plastic bag, individually wrapped lollies with an inner plastic wrap as well. Swapping to trash that’s going to break down in the river is a much easier solution. Some places have started to do this in the last couple years, but it’s mostly virtue signaling fast food places that want to give a western feel to charge higher prices. So you get two layers of plastic on your vegetables but your McDonald’s straw dissolves in your coke.

mathgradthrow 3y ago
>The western mind cannot comprehend... Haha, don't most of the users here live in the bay?
amatecha 3y ago
The western mind can definitely comprehend it. When it's garbage pickup day in my city, sometimes people are going by on bicycles rooting through trash bins (or recycling bins if it's recycling pickup day) and taking anything they can turn in for a recycling deposit. This is in Vancouver, Canada. It's probably not nearly as prevalent as in Colombia, but yeah... And yes, for sure, the root cause is the creation of plastic and its inclusion in nearly all commercial products. It's everywhere, and it's not the fault of you and I. We didn't choose it. I completely agree that having discard that is biodegradable (and perhaps can directly contribute to a compost pile) is a very worthwhile goal. Oh yeah, a bunch of cities here banned plastic takeout bags, but it's implemented in such a poor way that it's now just a great profit center for fast food restaurants: they are _legally required_ to charge $0.25 for a bag, even if it's a paper bag. I'm sure McDonalds absolutely loves this new policy. They already gave out paper bags with takeout, but now they cost the customer $0.25! It's especially funny because now all the restaurants give you these thick "plastic fabric" bags (and charge you for them) which you'll get more use out of, but are not any better for the environment. I still get one every single time I get takeout from any sushi place. Now instead of a bag full of thin plastic bags in my closet, I have a bag full of just as many super-thick plastic/cloth bags in my closet! Good stuff. Some are recyclable, I have a huge stack of these from takeout: https://lppackaging.ca/collections/biodegradable-bags/products/cloth-bags https://lppackaging.ca/collections/biodegradable-bags/produc... ... I wonder if I can just tell them I don't want a bag, and arrive with my own...

stevage 3y ago

Uninformed guess here but collecting at the river end feels much more efficient than creating culture change in thousands of third world villages...

darylteo 3y ago

Ocean Cleanup is also trying to tackle this From 4 days ago! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGY4rpOnbhw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGY4rpOnbhw (that is a depressing and amazing amount of trash, I can't imagine the big one in the ocean)