The first source of oceans plastic is fishing nets. Ground based sources of oceanic plastic are coastal cities. Rivers in developed countries carry very little plastic to the sea. Actually a fistful of rivers in poor population basin account for most of the inland sources of oceanic plastic.
Your own trash is very unlikely to end up in the ocean.
> Our model is calibrated against measurements available in the literature. We estimate that between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic waste currently enters the ocean every year from rivers, with over 74% of emissions occurring between May and October. The top 20 polluting rivers, mostly located in Asia, account for 67% of the global total. The findings of this study provide baseline data for ocean plastic mass balance exercises, and assist in prioritizing future plastic debris monitoring and mitigation strategies.
The likelihood of your trash ending up in the ocean depends entirely on where you live and how your trash gets processed.
The only part of your statement that's somewhat correct is that rivers in developed countries carry less plastics to the oceans compared to developing countries. But "very little" is creating a false impression of the problem.
Processing disposable plastic waste is a problem that can be avoided by... not using disposable plastics at all. This is first and foremost a moral choice: whether or not we want to put the health of the ecosystem of which we are part above our own personal short-term convenience.
Thailand banned the use of disposable plastic bags this month:
Don't make bold statement, exactly like I used to do a few months ago about this very subject :-)
I got pointed to more recent studies by an oceanographer. Here is a Nature (2018) paper stating that the amount of fishing nets were underestimated in previous studies
> Our model, calibrated with data from multi-vessel and aircraft surveys, predicted at least 79 (45–129) thousand tonnes of ocean plastic are floating inside an area of 1.6 million km2; a figure four to sixteen times higher than previously reported. We explain this difference through the use of more robust methods to quantify larger debris. Over three-quarters of the GPGP mass was carried by debris larger than 5 cm and at least 46% was comprised of fishing nets. Microplastics accounted for 8% of the total mass
Wait, that's comparing very different things here. That's a study on the Great Plastic Garbage Patch in the Pacific ocean specifically. The study I referred to is about the yearly emission of plastics through rivers globally.
His first assertion isn't based on any actual numbers or research either:
> The first source of oceans plastic is fishing nets.
Whereas the research shows:
> We estimate that between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic waste currently enters the ocean every year from rivers
So, that leaves only two conclusions if you connect both statements: the vast majority of what is disposed by rivers is fishnets, or there's millions of tonnes of fishnets in the oceans next to what's disposed by rivers.
> The U.S. Census Bureau recently published complete 2018 export data for shipments of plastic waste (officially called “waste, paring and scrap”) generated in the U.S. and sent to other countries. As shown in Figure 1, 78% (0.83 million metric tonnes) of the 2018 U.S. plastic waste exports were sent to countries with waste “mismanagement rates” greater than 5%. That means about 157,000 large 20-ft (TEU) shipping containers (429 per day) of U.S. plastic waste were sent in 2018 to countries that are now known to be overwhelmed with plastic waste and major sources of plastic pollution to the ocean. The actual amount of U.S. plastic waste that ends in countries with poor waste management may be even higher than 78% since countries like Canada and South Korea may reexport U.S. plastic waste. The data also indicates that the U.S. continued to export about as much plastic waste to countries with poor waste management as we recycle domestically [1].
> The EPA’s Facts and Figures Report states the U.S. in 2015 recycled 9.1 percent of the plastic generated, down from 9.5 percent during the previous year.
Then there's this:
The U.S. used to export waste to China. Until China decided to ban importing waste, leaving the U.S. waste disposal industries with a problem:
And another factor should be put into consideration is that wasted plastics in developed country actually can be recycled. But low quality plastic produced in developing country using those recycled plastics are very unlikely to be recycled again due to high cost.
Anyway exporting, burning and landfills are not real solutions. The highly developed countries published some so called models for the purpose of blaming poor countries for those messes.
The pointing fingers kind of behaves like those are not good strategies to let everyone work together and fix things. But only to make someone feels better about himself and do nothing.
Why? Anti-ecologism is not really a thing in most of the world. It is a far-right thing in a few countries like Brazil and US, but a lot of nations don't consider "fick the environment, I want to save one cent on packaging" to be edgy.
Well its good that you are doing the things you think its correct but please stop with the gratuitous generalization. We don't love pollution as much as you think here in Brazil.
National policies aren't people. If anything the current state of things prove that Brazilians have no say over their own government through elections wathever side you pick. Please don't be a bigot towards an entire country.
The country and nation are synonyms. You mean to say "don't be a bigot toward a people". Trying to fractionate the discussion between the innumerable number of differing outlooks when speaking about a nation, is not practical or constructive. A nation is a reflection of the people within it, even if it doesn't reflect exactly what an individual or set of the people believe. The enlightenment laid this out. Sort out your administration, you can proselytize about simpler topics, like environmentalism and expect to be understood clearly. Until then, Brazil as a nation, sucks in too many ways to mention.
> The first source of oceans plastic is fishing nets
So apply what I wrote and you get: eat less fish.
Since this is HN, people will talk about pros and cons of eating fish, but there's only one reason people create fishing nets. If people consume less of things that damage the environment, we will produce less of it and therefore damage less of it. If some populations have to eat it, most can still eat less. I last ate fish in 1990.
An aside: why do those advocating for ways to improve the environment continue to land themselves in a place where their final answer to a problem is "simple: people should just do X instead of Y." These are not solutions, unless you explain how you are going to shift the behavior of billions of people to a point where it makes a real, sustainable difference. Nearly any other approach is more feasible to solving problems. If you are going to say such a thing, to be taken seriously you must articulate how you can re-align incentives to cause such a behavior change to happen at a large scale enough to move the needle. Your own experience doing so also does not move that argument forward in any way.
A system where people still consume as much fish as they please, and our technological and governmental structures lead to downstream processes that mitigate the environmental impact of that situation may not be a globally maximal solution compared to a world where we end fish consumption. But it does have one nice attribute: it may actually be possible to achieve. Personally, I do hold out hope for an even better solution, where we get to consume the foods we love but they are created without the need for animals to live and die to give it to us.
Many people misinterpret to think I'm saying this strategy will solve everything by itself.
Note that at the root, it's helping people live by their values. Polluting less doesn't create a worse life, however much people who haven't seriously tried fear it will. Nearly all of my guests who act report preferring acting, saving time and money, improving relationships, self-awareness, etc.
Your strategy still suffers from the unattractive aspect of behavior constraint. Human civilisation serves to enable us, not to constrain us. Regulation on the management of fishing nets is far more preferable to me than just advocating people constrain themselves by eating less fish.
The fetish of constraint seems to be popular among environmentalists, but it's certainly not the only way or even most preferable path forward.
It’s also as old as the dawn of technological civilization: there is always an imminent, existential crisis, and the only solution proposed by the least imaginative and most cynical of us is to give up on progress and start rolling back our modern lifestyle and all of its gifts, such as health, longevity, and less scarcity on nearly all fronts.
And yet, every single time, now for hundreds of years, the crisis is solved not through a culture change but through a mixture of regulation and technological progress.
Civilization is equally about regulating behavior that hurts others. Traffic lights, food labeling, laws against murder and theft, building codes, and so on all constrain us. You can punch the air as much as you want. My idea of civilization constrains you from punching someone in the face and you probably value the constraint on others to punch you in the face or steal your stuff.
Pollution hurts other people. Do you want no constraints on dioxin, PCBs, and mercury emissions?
> These are not solutions, unless you explain how you are going to shift the behavior of billions of people to a point where it makes a real, sustainable difference. Nearly any other approach is more feasible to solving problems. If you are going to say such a thing, to be taken seriously you must articulate how you can re-align incentives to cause such a behavior change to happen at a large scale enough to move the needle.
It’s not complicated. Tax the behaviors you want to discourage. Subsidize the behaviors you want to encourage.
You can’t solve all problems that way, because of black markets and other “non-linear” effects, but in this case it is a perfectly reasonable approach.
There's at least one way to get people to eat less meat/fish:
Make plant based alternatives cheaper than the real thing. I would definitely buy impossible meat if it were cheaper than real beef. As it stands it is several times more expensive than real beef. Same for impossible fish (if such a thing were to exist).
If impossible fish sticks taste nearly identical to real fish sticks, but it's cheaper and plant-based, why wouldn't your average consumer buy impossible fish sticks for their kids?
We already eat too much fish as it is and stocks all over the world in dire state, plastic or no plastic. Millions depend on them for their survival, but many of us don't and could eat less.
This type of thinking essentially amounts to planning an economy, but the currency is pollution instead of effort. This doesn’t work. Money does it infinitely better, and that’s what we need to use here, too: tax pollution appropriately and the actual pollutants will automatically surface. Money works extremely well for this, but we need to apply it correctly. Polluting is too cheap.
Case in point: farmed fish doesn’t require fishing nets.* Adjust it again, “don’t eat wild fish.” Until they release a new type of hemp net that is bio degradable, or a new type of fyke that doesn’t tear. Now you need to update it again. Meanwhile you’re always behind, and the real polluters will remain one step ahead. You’re playing a never ending game of whack-a-mole that money has been designed to solve.
* edit: Reading some sibling comments this comes with many caveats. Which, in a way, further proves the point.
Sustainable, low emission recirculating aquaculture comes at a price. It is not yet clear whether customers are willing to pay the premium for products from a good solution.
At the time fishmeal and fish oil are neccessary to supply certain nutrients, lysin and methionine for example, but suppliers have been successfully reducing the amount of fishmeal and oil in recent times.
The goal is to reduce it to a minimum.
Not all fishmeal is unsustainable. The slaughtering residue from wild catch and from aquaculture as well as the bycatch are ressources for fish feed that we should not waste.
Curiously, overfishing used to be a serious environmental problem before global warming and plastic took over public awareness. It's done far more harm to fish numbers than those other things are predicted to, but people still weren't convinced enough to eat less fish.
Or eat line&pole caught fish. It's much more expensive, especially the canned tuna, but I feel like if I can afford the more sustainable option then it's my responsibility
Searching for "pole and line caught tuna" will turn up a bunch. If you are in the US, Wild Planet probably has the best grocery store distribution. Raincoast seems bigger in Canada, but has some US distribution. American Tuna sells on Amazon and is great.
One of the other differences that most of the line caught tuna brands cook the raw tuna directly in the can, rather than cooking first and then canning. This results in much better texture. Other than price, it's a superior product in almost every way.
Don't forget that about half of world's fish and seafood come from aquaculture, it's a very doubtful advice.
In general, advices to reduce consumption of anything to solve environmental problems are missing the point. Goal is not to get back to the stone age and thus clear up the environment (even that won't work: stone age people destroyed environment even worse than us, they eradicated whole lot of species of big animals and destroyed the tundro-steppe by disturbing the nitrogen cycle - however destructive we are now we didn't manage to destroy a single whole biome, yet). Goal is to make more with less. Increase consumption of everything, while fixing environmental issues. This is what will happen anyway: majority of the world is still poor and they are catching up. It will be absolutely awful and elitist to say them: no you can't catch up pals, you will ruin the environment if you try! They want and they will catch up with the Western world. And the Western world also can't go back to their level: someone has to move technologies ahead...
Since I live next to the Baltic Sea and is regular reminded how fertilizer runoff from surrounding agricultural is causing environmental catastrophe, maybe people should consume less products that use fertilizers. If the current trend continue we will see the Baltic sea turning into the dead sea in just a few decades. Fishing has almost already ceased to exist here because there just aren't any living things left, and the dead zones are expanding fast every year from a lack of oxygen.
Getting the world population to start eat food which is not actively harming the environment is not going to easy.
If people consume less of things that damage the environment, we will produce less of it and therefore damage less of it.
Fish don't damage the environment. Fishing nets do, when thrown into the ocean by irresponsible fishermen. Eating less fish would punish all fishermen, including the environmentally-responsible ones. What we need instead is a better enforcement of existing laws against env. pollution.
Do discarded fishing nets really cause more harm to fish than actively used ones? The whole job of fishermen is to kill fish. How can you say they're environmentally responsible for not losing their nets? The environmental problems caused by fishing already exist and are far more severe than those caused by plastic which so far are mostly only theoretical or imaginary. The UN says that "half the world's fishing fleet could be scrapped with no change in catch." That's how much overfishing they're doing. It's not environmentally responsible.
Everything you consume in a non-sustainable society is going to damage environment. The pressure to find a solution is not solely on the consumer. It is on the producers as well.
Fishing does not require that fishing nets be abandonned in the sea. I suspect it would take not a lot of innovation nor a lot of costs to cut this pollution dramatically.
Not all coastal cities. Multiple studies have sourced most ocean plastic to Chinese rivers and coastal cities (90th percentile) followed by India and a few other places.
Why do we have to pretend that all coastal cities are equally at fault when this is clearly not true? Are people afraid its somehow racist? It has nothing to do with race but with certain governments that just don't care. It's become a pet peeve of mine when charges of racism is used to deflect political criticism of governments.
In the US dumping trash in rivers is a crime and will get you in serious trouble: large fines, seizure of trucks and equipment, maybe even criminal charges.
> Your own trash is very unlikely to end up in the ocean.
Except if you live in Asia or a developing country, which is a large percentage of the world population. After traveling through that region I can honestly say that I am not surprised to see so much plastic in the oceans. People dump trash in the water, throw plastic bottles on the ground, waste and recycling infrastructure is largely non-existent. Even in richer middle tier countries like China people just toss their plastic into the rivers.
when visiting some island resorts (like 2 hour boat ride out) in thailand i was shocked at how much plastic garbage was floating around those otherwise beautiful islands...
it’s my opinion these things need to become laws and business, not just individuals need to be fined heavily for jut dumping trash out
I was at the beach today (UK) and there was more net than I could carry. It was in about 100 bits that I tied together into a giant ball. There were around 60 plastic bottles, a few big plastic cans (oil) and lots of micro plastic.
> Your own trash is very unlikely to end up in the ocean.
Daily, I see people getting rid of the plastic wrapping around their new cigarette pack by throwing it out the car window or just dropping it straight to the ground. It's that type of plastic that makes its way to the city's runoff which makes its way to streams/rivers/lakes/oceans/etc. After any significant amount of rain, there's a few places I can drive by to see where the trash from throughout the city has washed into the grassy areas around bends in creaks/rivers. It's a good visual example of where the plastic pollution is originating.
Most people worry about the wrong thing. If you live in the West, you're not appreciably contributing to ocean plastic pollution (and no, you're almost certainly not doing so by "shipping your garbage to china" either). Smokers, definitely not contributing to plastic pollution.
Cellulose acetate aka cigarette butts, turns into dirt 4 months in the soil or a few years out in the open sunlight[1]. It's vastly more biodegradable than your hoodie, your socks, your Starbucks cup or even something like dried up egg yolk. I don't think people should throw it on the ground, because trash barrels and ash trays are there for a reason, but it's basically not an environmental problem at all. It's just unsightly litter.
> Others producing more doesn't reduce their pollution.
If you actually want to solve environmental problems, how about solving actual problems instead of picking on lower class cigarette smokers who aren't causing any issues? It sure seems like an awful lot of "environmentalism" is nothing more than a disgusting social class pose.
I'm really not so sure cigarette packing is cellophane [0]. Just because something is biodegradable doesn't mean it's cool to just chuck it out the window. While that cellophane is still intact (it's main use is to keep out moisture) is traveling along water ways/drains where it can clog up the works.
Strawman. There are many things that, like tossing biodegradable stuff out the window, aren't cool that don't appreciably contribute to ocean plastic pollution.
We pay other countries to take our garbage only because we prefer to imagine it is being recycled. It's not like we don't have enough landfill space here, if we were willing to treat it as the trash that it is.
Yea there was a great two part planet money series on recycling this year. And the economic take away is that the current state of recycling in the US is broken and we have more than enough landfill space for thousands of years. One idea was to just burn it which this mentioned is what some European countries are doing.
> Your own trash is very unlikely to end up in the ocean.
Except that the plastic waste of certain countries tends to get "exported" to these places and then dumped there - if it doesn't get dumped into the ocean before it can even get there.
The poorest places don't tend to generate so much plastic waste because it is mostly a by-product of "luxury goods" (read: trash) in developed countries bought by clueless consumers.
For instance I will never understand the people who buy plastic-wrapped pre-sliced "salami" that hardly resembles the real thing in anything but name. I recently saw croissants(!) getting sold off the shelf in a supermarket. How the hell do you even make that work? Of course they were wrapped in plastic. I don't even want to know how they them make them last long enough. No way they're still crisp outside if the whole thing hasn't turned into a rock.
I feel like some people will buy something not despite it being a plastic wrapped faint imitation of the real thing - but because it is.
I find it mind boggling that organic produce in Switzerland is often sold in plastic packaging. Of course some consumers seem to be focused on the promise of health benefits from avoiding pesticides themselves, but as far as I know reducing the impact of agricultural runoff was the primary reason the term was popularised in the first place. Wrapping the end product in plastic seems to completely defeat the purpose.
It can significantly reduce food waste. Better to have a little bit of plastic than to discard a larger percentage of the produce, because ecologically that would be even more expensive.
You're touching indirectly on a hugely fundamental thing here: the price of production and the price consumers pay for food.
Why does agriculture produce an excess that doesn't get sold? Because the less is produced, the more prohibitively expensive production becomes per unit due to power laws. Hence why it's far more cost effective to cultivate a large volume of livestock compared to sustenance farming.
Meat is a great example. As the demand for cheap meat is high, agricultural enterprises have optimized their production of livestock in order to attain an optimum profit margin per individual unit. For instance, the financial upkeep of infrastructure remains the same whether you have one 1 cow or 10 cows. If you raise and sell 10 cows, the production cost per individual cow goes down. Then there's market demand and supply. The cheaper the price per unit, the more an enterprise needs to produce if it wants to stay competitive. Hence why mega-farms exist.
While the financial cost or production per unit of food has dropped exponentially in the 20th century, the carbon cost for that same unit has increased tremendously.
Harking back to your original statement about plastic. It's true that wrapping food in plastic allows for longer conservation per unit. But then this effect is largely negated because:
Producers will keep on producing excess volumes in order to drive financial production costs down and meet market prices. Retail chains will keep buying large bulk quantities to drive costs down and throw the unsold excess away. What you conserve in your fridge gets wasted elsewhere along the entire chain from cradle to consumer. The carbon costs, however, pretty much remain the same.
Production and processing of disposable plastic wrapping just adds to the carbon cost of excess production.
One conclusion you could draw from all of this is that we simply shifted the cost of food consumption from a financial to an ecological cost. If we want to reduce emissions created by industrialized farming, then there are few options ahead of us.
There's the technological road in which we look for ways of capturing excess emissions, but this might prove extremely hard and raises all kinds of ethical questions re: GMO's or how we treat animals. How much wiggle room do we have to implement solutions that keep the consumer price of food as they are?
The other road is... produce less, reduce production an order of magnitueds in order to reduce carbon emissions and pay the actual cost of food as a consumer. That is, increase the price of meat and other produce so it reflects the true cost of the impact on the environment.
When you start thinking about the true cost of food, then you may look at the past and at how we approach food. Our culinary culture around the world. With the advent of globalization and mass-consumption, something else happened: the gradual replacement of local cuisine - based on local produce and associated habits - by western diets which contains ingredients with a high carbon cost.
I recommend watching Michael Pollan's Cooked series on Netflix in order to get the idea of what cooking really means across the world and the impact of this evolution on our dietary choices. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epMAq5WYJk4).
Our habits and behaviour as consumers really is one of the big keys to this problem.
When you come to think of it, there's little reason why millions of people in Europe or America should be able to buy tiger prawns on a daily basis produced in the Mekong delta at discount prices worth pennies. If there is a high demand for tiger prawns, then that's likely a demand created because of their mere availability and low price in supermarket chains.
> For instance I will never understand the people who buy plastic-wrapped pre-sliced "salami"
Well, if I don't buy it presliced from the butcher I always buy packaged presliced milano salami, because it's nearly impossible to slice it thin enough with a knife. There is also not really a difference in quality. Both products are imported from Italy anyway.
I've had croissants individually wrapped (e.g. at airports and other grab and go type places) and wrapped as a group (supermarkets and warehouse stores), and while neither are as good as buying fresh from a bakery, they're surprisingly good. The ones from Costco can last a few days before they're too dry to be good. If you care more about convenience than utmost quality, plastic does a pretty good job.
In fact, I can't recall the last time I've had a croissant from a bakery, and I have definitely purchased dozens of packaged, off-the-shelf croissants in that time. Even though they're not as good as fresh, they're still good, to the point where it's not worth the time or extra money to go to the bakery.
This is true for many other products as well. My grocery store butcher packages everything in plastic wrap, even if you get it from the counter (I think they have paper upon request). My self-serve, bulk foods company (WinCo) requires you to use their plastic bags instead of bringing your own containers (simplifies checkout process). Nearly everything I could want to buy is more conveniently purchased wrapped in plastic.
People but plastic-wrapped products because of convenience, not because they prefer the packaging. I honestly prefer getting meat wrapped in paper because it's much easier to unwrap than plastic. I prefer getting bakery items in a paper bag than a clamshell or cellophane wrap, again, because it's easier to unpackage. However, to get those items packaged that way, I need to go out of my way, and specialty shops tend to have less reliable inventories because they're lower volume businesses.
I doubt anyone prefers wasteful, inconvenient packaging, people just prefer convenience, and wasteful, inconvenient packaging is more convenient for stores, so that's what gets used. If you want to change the world, make a more convenient, cost-effective way to package things than plastic.
Your own trash is very unlikely to end up in the ocean.