Fish are eating lots of plastic | Hacker News Reader

Fish are eating lots of plastic

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181 pointspetethomas114 comments

I really wish plastics were recycled/reused a lot more, because they are such ideal materials --- being rather unreactive, flexible, resilient, and (in the case of thermoplastics, which make up the bulk of this waste) easily reprocessed. Although the throwaway culture and low cost means that a lot of it doesn't, I wonder if in the future, if the prices go up in following petroleum trends, "mining" for plastics would start becoming profitable and recycling increase significantly.

I also see some parallels with CFCs --- another substance with some great properties, but which became so common and cheap that we started to use them too carelessly and caused a lot of environmental damage in the process. Hopefully, this time we'll collectively realise, and plastics won't get banned like that.

I'm sort of banking on that. I expect our landfills will be mined by junkers. There is a lot of rare earth elements, metals, and plastics that won't biodegrade very quickly. Little snake bots tunneling through could pick them all up. It's all a matter of need, we'll deplete the finite resources soon.

They don't biodegrade quickly, but they quickly become brittle and turn into a bunch of flakes mixed with dirt and everything else in the junk pile.

Also, "mined by junkers" isn't a very sustainable approach. There are only so many junkers and that number is reducing as society standards increase and they have better ways of making a living than hauling bottles to recycling centers.

> There are only so many junkers and that number is reducing as society standards increase and they have better ways of making a living than hauling bottles to recycling centers.

I think that the parent commenter meant Mining Companies when saying junkers. So large industrial mineral extraction operation from landfills and dumps, as opposed to 3rd world style picking through rubbish.

I'd imagine that a ton of landfill waste would be comparable to relatively rich ore, and that harvesting it is perhaps less destructive/invasive than opening a new mine.

> we'll deplete the finite resources soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus#Later_li...

I mean, I get that you're not talking about food, but neither was Malthus per se. I just feel I might point out that the guy died in 1834, at the ripe old age of 68. We have still not run out of even one of the resources he predicted were going to run out "soon".

Likewise you could probably make similar predictions about life and nature itself 3.6 billion years ago ... and that too has not yet happened, and most agree (why the prediction is different for humans vs nature I don't understand ... nature replicates exponentially and far faster than humans and uses anything and everything easily available to it just like we accuse ourselves of. But somehow nature can do no wrong. Or perhaps the reasoning is that it will adapt ... and apparently we will not ?) that it's unlikely to happen in the next 9 or so billion years. Ironically, it is now suspected that life on this planet will die from crushing overabundance of energy rather than from a shortage of some critical resource.

In fact it seems that Say's law is correct, and this is not a serious point of contention among modern-day economists. It essentially says that one of two things is true: the price mechanism means that either we will simply never run out of a particular resource, or we will replace it, probably with something better and cheaper, and never run out of that. We have in fact run out of plenty of individual resources in the time since Malthus, so there have been plenty of test cases for Say's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law

Life has carried out Say's law almost to perfection. With only a few rare exceptions the concentration of atoms in cells, and therefore in most plants and animals is an almost perfect reflection of how they occur in the dead matter surrounding them. Why couldn't we do the same, given enough time, with our technology ? I mean, we don't know how at the moment, but we're getting closer all the time. I would even say that plastic is one such innovation: it is far closer in concentration to the natural environment than the mostly steel and various metals it replaced, far more abundant than the wood it replaced, and generally got us (a lot) closer to having our technology made up of the atoms surrounding us.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that there is no shortage of asteroids, some with literally mountains of rare earths, that we could either mine in orbit or, if small enough or cut up, crash into the Earth.

Finally, as animal bodies illustrate, it is perfectly possible to construct very advanced and well-working pieces of technology with zero access to rare earths. We just don't know how ... yet. We even know perfectly well how to get closer to that goal, it just isn't cheaper at this point in time.

> I'm sort of banking on that. I expect our landfills will be mined by junkers.

I'm sorry, but all you're doing in reality (whether you realize it or not) is finding some vague resemblance of a justification for our irresponsible culture. I would either try to do something to address the problem or just avoid trying to keep up hopes like this. It only makes people feel better about not helping without actually solving anything.

Yep that culture of "let's create more problems so we can sell more solutions" is despicable...

If mining for plastics were ever to become profitable without emissions trading, artificial subsidies, or some sort of a carbon tax, it would essentially mean the end of civilization had already occurred.

It would just mean that manufacturers were expected to account for the entire lifecycle of their product. Currently you can flood the world with cheap, disposable junk, profit handsomely, and leave everyone else with the waste disposal problem. If use of new plastics vs recycled plastic were penalized or taxed it could have this effect, as a result of a more rigidly regulated civilization, rather than a collapse.

Why manufacturers? If waste disposal had to be paid for, people would start adjusting the retail price by adding the disposal price.

Not sure where you live but in my town I pay 7€ per bin container (approx 50l) for non-recyclable waste but the recyclable stuff is free (which is probably still too cheap)

How do they deal with public trash bins on sidewalks, etc.? Are there none? If there are any, what's to prevent people dumping their garbage there and avoiding the fee? And what about homeless or otherwise poor people who don't have the means to pay?

OK, I'll bite. Suppose I wanted to avoid that. I could carry my trash out on the street, walk past three buildings and dump it in the bin near the bus stop instead of in the container behind the house. What is to stop me?

The bus stop is that close because people live densely here. Which means that there are many people per building, who collectively decide what size of garbage container to get and pay for it. I'd have to persuade a majority of the other flat owners to do the same in order to save actual money, otherwise I'd just have to pay for the container I don't use.

There aren't very many homeless people, so that problem is small. It exists but it's small. As for poor people, the garbage container is effectively included in the rent (it's a separate line item, not a separate invoice) and is cheap compared to the other line items, so that problem doesn't really exist.

I don't understand. If this 7€ per bin is something effectively included with rent, and something you're paying for anyway, then how would it discourage landfill waste? I thought the entire point was to add a cost to trash vs. recyclables.

You don't have to put recyclables into the container that costs anything (more depending on size). Depending on the economics, the garbage company will also give you other containers, free of charge, such as "paper only" and "compostable stuff only". Separate well enough and you end up with a small and cheap container after a little while.

To be fair, this can be an issue. Where I live, you put your garbage in a bag (it's about €4 a bag) on the street on Monday mornings. This means if I have a bunch of faeces-soaked stuff to get rid of on Tuesday I have to let it sit around my apartment for 6 days (I have a three week old child). I am not above tossing it in one of the neighborhood bins.

As far as the homeless, I'd much rather they use the bins than leave stuff lying around the street, even if I pay more in taxes. I definitely would prefer they would put the aluminium foil and lighters in the bin to the current approach of letting it pile up in any handy alcove.

There are trash bins but now the person doing it to save 7 € is now committing an administrative offence so now you have a few legal instances of a problem instead of many instances of an ecological problem.

This is not to say that consumers paying for their trash solves all problems.

It does, however, provide an incentive to avoid "bad" trash in the first place. "Taxing" manufacturers doesn't (because those taxes apply equally to every manufacturer)

EDIT: To be clear, taxing the manufacturer works via contributions of ecological people in facor of the unecological ones. It's the opposite of what you'd want.

I think most places in the US do pay for trash disposal. I pay ~$17 per month for trash and recycling (recycling sadly isn't free, but I opt to pay extra for it). That is probably less than you are paying, but it is a profitable business for the company that does it.

I really wish there was a return to cafeteria-style plates and cutlery for food courts. I know that sounds weird but I feel immensely guilty throwing away plastic and styrofoam every day just to have a bit of lunch, but it's not like you can show up to a restaurant and say "here, use my tupperware for my to go order."

There's no middle ground in America between bringing lunch from home every day so it's in reusable containers and throw away packaging for anything that's not immediately consumed on premises. I would gladly pay another dollar or two for someone to give me tiffin-style lunch packed in a reusable container.

> I know that sounds weird but I feel immensely guilty throwing away plastic and styrofoam every day just to have a bit of lunch,

That doesn't sound weird at all. Seems perfectly normal to me.

> but it's not like you can show up to a restaurant and say "here, use my tupperware for my to go order."

Have you ever tried it? You might be surprised, especially for a to go order. It works at coffee shops. If they don't want to do it they might throw some health-code BS at you and you can add it to your list of places to boycott, if you wish.

> There's no middle ground in America between bringing lunch from home every day so it's in reusable containers and throw away packaging for anything that's not immediately consumed on premises.

My office's lunch room also has plastic spoons and forks. On the rare occasion that I haven't been able to track down metal silverware I've washed and reused the plastic multiple times.

>Have you ever tried it? You might be surprised, especially for a to go order. It works at coffee shops. If they don't want to do it they might throw some health-code BS at you and you can add it to your list of places to boycott, if you wish.

Actually I'm with them that there's no guarantee my tupperware has been properly sanitized, nor do I trust the general public to sanitize theirs when you have so many people who will gladly double dip into communal foods.

That's fair but their serving utensils don't need to make any contact with your tupperware. As long as it looks clean enough to sit on their counter while they convey the food into it, that should be sufficient right?

EDIT: The "health-code BS" bit is from my experience once, requesting a restaurant to refill my water bottle when I was leaving. Unless they're dipping a water hose into my bottle to fill it, thus bringing water in my bottle into contact with their hose, I fail to see the health issue.

There is a lot of plastic waste your not allowed to put in the recycle bin, such as plastic wrappers for food.

That depends on where you live. I can put plastic wrappers in the recycling bin just fine.

Without food having touched them, I'm assuming, right?

I'm pretty sure I've heard they just can't deal with grease from food in the recycling. (Not that they don't try to address a bit of it, but that any significant amount ruins their batches or something.)

You're supposed to wash things, but they're washed again at the recycling plant because few people do it sufficiently thoroughly.

Oh, I wasn't aware. Two follow-ups then:

(1) Is it actually worth the water? Especially in somewhere with a water crisis, like (say) California?

(2) Can they actually wash these though? On a large scale, how could they possibly wash plastic wrappers that can cling to themselves so as to remove all the grease?

We buy lots of cheap plastic made of carbon oil co2 emissions. Then we throw the plastic waste into the oceans. Plastic has weak estrogen hormone disturbance in them from BPA. Then we humans eat the fish and thus gets the estrogen from BPA. This is bound to have human reproduction issues down the line.

http://www.breastcancer.org/risk/factors/plastic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A

Children of Men/Fish

Bioaccumulation is a serious thing. I suspect increase of plastic in fish might be related to the reduction in sperm count in men.[0][1]

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bpa-semen-quality...

[1] http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plasti...

Per capita fish consumption is not radically different between East Asian and Europe/USA [0], while sperm count is.

https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/st1/fus/fus99/per_capita99.pdf

Eating lower in the food chain is a practical and accessible solution.

yeah. that's certainly been the approach for reducing exposure to mercury.

but, with plastics, i wonder how significant the exposure reduction is for, say, consuming sardines, given that the plastic particles themselves may be mistaken for plankton.

in other words, what percentage of a low food chain fish's or mollusk's diet is pure plastic?

Lean meats are also preferable to fatty, and animals that grow fast are preferable those that grow slowly.

Pigs and chickens are fairly safe, and perfectly ethical if you source responsibly.

You have a trailing * leading to a 404 on the second citation. Try this: http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/10/a-story-about-fish-plasti...

Thanks, I was having trouble with italicizing things :)

'farmed' fish might also be a good option while we (as a species) work out our waste issues.

Do people really eat that much fish? I thought fish is mostly raised as fishmeal for cows. Making an even worse bioaccumulation chain.

I am honestly stunned by this comment.

yes, people do. Not all the countries are pure meat eaters...

You know that fish is a type of meat, right?

Lots of cultures don't class fish in with most meats. In traditional Catholicism the rule against meat on Fridays didn't apply to fish and likewise with Japanese Buddhist rules against meat eating. It's sort of like how most people consider tomatoes to be vegetables even though they aren't, scientifically.

Yeah, in 21st century English fish is a meat but it's non-centrally meat so the meaning is clear when you apply Gricean norms.

Woah woah woah, hold up there. Scientifically speaking, a vegetable is the edible part of a plant. Tomatos are vegetables and fruits scientifically. This is like arguing that a square isn't a rectangle! Okay, carry on <3

> In traditional Catholicism the rule against meat on Fridays didn't apply to fish

Beaver meat is also a-ok! https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/once-...

> Yeah, in 21st century English fish is a meat

Having spent the best part of the last 17 years speaking 21st century English, this is a surprisingly strong assertion to me.

From http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/115517:

> The flesh of animals used as food, esp. excluding fish...

Likewise chicken is often not considered 'meat' despite clearly being the flesh of an animal. It's kind of weird, but not as weird as the people who think "a little bit of ham" in a salad doesn't count as meat.

When I was visiting Brazil I met a bunch of people that called themselves vegetarians who would eat chicken and bacon. Turns out "vegetarian" means not eating beef. It led to some pretty funny misunderstandings.

Judism also doesn't consider fish meat for the purposes of Kosher-ness.

I've found that "meat" is sometimes used in casual English as "Animal muscle/meat, but not fish"

I think there's a slight conceptual divide on both the hard-carnivore-against-fish and pescatarian groups.

Old world traditions tend to distinguish them separately as well.

> I've found that "meat" is sometimes used in casual English as "Animal muscle/meat, but not fish"

But also often monophylectically as "mammal muscle/meat".

True, but it's just stupid, fish are animals.

I know you're being flippant, but we'd lose a lot of what makes language beautiful if we beat the looseness and poetry out of conversational exchanges. Pendatic assertions often miss the fact that words drift in an ever-shifting consensus.

No it's more than that; perhaps you haven't discussed with some people, but a great many people actually do believe fish are not animals. It's not mere semantics, they don't actually consider them animals at all, as if animal, plant, and fish are all different categories. Don't dismiss as pedantry what is actually a very interesting topic.

Point generally taken, but that's a conceptual leap to make when talking about what "meat" means in a casual conversation. As an aside, I don't think I've encountered anyone who thinks fish aren't animals (but of course they exist)

Catholics don't consider fish meat. I'm not sure what they think it is, maybe some sort of creepily mobile mushroom?

And some Buddhist and Hindu sects consider mushrooms to be meat.

Ironically enough, fungi and animals separated later in the tree of life than plants. So, while certainly not correct, there is a kernel of truth there.

Not as meat. For some Hindus anyway mushrooms and leeks are prohibited just like meat.

> Not all the countries are pure meat eaters...

lmao... fish is meat.

well, I should have said "animal flesh". In my mother tongue (Spanish) fish (pescado) is different than meat (carne).

Sounds like a bug in Spanish (chill, I'm Spanish). However, fish is also animal flesh so that wouldn't have made the statement any better. Fish are animals. Fish muscles are meat in the same way any other meat is meat.

Downvoted for facts, gotta love it.

From the HN guidelines:

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I wish they would have provide a quantitative measure of something about how much fish and how much plastic has been found to have been eaten by marine life. Maybe it's in the link they give to "enormous quantities of plastic trash", but it would be nice to have a scale to the problem.

Here is some research: https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/bitstreams/11700/retrieve

Page 93 has some specifics on recorded incidence of plastic ingestion among certain species.

Hardly a word about reducing production and consumption.

There's no mystery where the plastic is coming from -- us. We can live without it, certainly with a lot less of it.

While we wait for legislation, at least on a personal level we can take responsibility for our externalities and reduce our personal consumption.

The submission title makes the article appear less exciting than it actually is.

It's not news that fish are eating plastics. The news is that now we know they do it because apparently plastics smells good.

Can we add "Even worse, they may like it" to the submission title?

How much plastic in fish flesh compared to say leaching into a bottle of water or dust from plastic clothing? Which fish are worst, where is tuna on this list? By what mechanism is fish liver function effected and will this translate to humans?

It goes without saying we should avoid dumping plastic in the sea, but we have no information how harmful fish twice per week is really.

I recently began bodybuilding and have been relying on canned tuna for protein. I eat other sources, but eat at least 1 to 2 cans daily.

Is the plastic worse than the mercury?

What would be a healthy, affordable, and easy to prepare (this is very important) alternative?

Also, is canned tuna a US thing? How often do you consume canned tuna?

Consider the humble sardine: rich in protein, omega-3s, and (with bones) calcium. They're much lower in the food chain than tuna, so there's less bioaccumulation of mercury, etc. And they taste good. I like the ones in harissa (pepper) paste.

http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+can+sardines

You should probably avoid eating that much tuna because of the mercury anyway. https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/mroussell5.htm

In addition to whey protein, brown rice protein, pea protein or hemp protein work great too.

Tuna populations are massively depleted. Consider switching to something else for environmental reasons.

Eggs are pretty easy to prepare. So are various dairy products.

Canned tuna is fairly common in the US but it certainly isn't seen as a luxury. I haven't consumed canned tuna in quite some time but as a kid I ate it weekly.

Have you considered whey protein instead?

Two cans of tuna a day is dangerous, did you google it?

Two relevant articles - one about the amount of plastic in the Ocean, and the other about plastic-eating caterpillars (seems like they don't eat that much to be of use).

1- https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/05/daily-...

2- https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/217213...

The irony of the first ad I'm shown being a coffee machine with unrecyclable pods to fill it makes me both amused and sad. Sort of sums up the whole problem really.

If it's Nespresso (or a compatible system) that you were shown an ad for, the "unrecyclable" line that seems to often get repeated is actually false.

The pods _are_ recyclable, but whether they actually _get_ recycled is a legitimate concern. In Switzerland and Germany, currently about 50% of used pods are recycled, and this is growing rapidly.

Additionally, Nestle claims that the proportion of recycled aluminium (from all sources, not just used pods) in all manufactured pods now approaches 80%.

Approaching 80% of recycled aluminum is great, but remember that aluminum recycling rates in general are very good (~70%)

coffee pods look a lot like those in seed starter kits. Startup idea?

> This article was originally published on [theconversation.com.](https://theconversation.com/bait-and-switch-anchovies-eat-pl...)

With only the info available in the article, It seems that there are some serious flaws with the design of this study. I didn't read the original article and I could be wrong but at this moment is not conclusive to me.

Ok, I found the link to the study. This is one of the things that I was looking for:

these behavioural responses were absent in clean plastic and control treatments.

Much better then. Some questions remaining still.

Anchovies are preys. Is aggregation a signal of food or are they just afraid of a strange odour?.

What's wrong with fish these days, They didn't do that when I was a kid.

That's because there wasn't as much plastic in the water for them to consume.

I have a plan, but it's taking me a bit longer than I'd hoped: http://phoenixbureau.github.io/ReGPGP/

> The only way to clean up such a huge mess is to create a system that mimics the way life would do it. Really, if something could eat plastic there wouldn't be quite such a bad problem. It is because no living creature can digest plastic that it stays around and accumulates. So the solution is to create a kind of artificial life that can eat the plastic. Robots that replicate themselves, with a little bit of manual assistance, and collect and convert the trash into forms that can be used by living creatures.

A little help?

You could probably get it off the ground a lot faster if you lost the self-replicating requirement. (Self-replication / self organization is super cool and a research field of mine, but still a ways away from production).

Just make a lot of them to start with and clean them up when/if they're done. Or make them biodegradable.

The swarm is self-replicating, not each individual bot. (Have you ever read Alan Dean Foster's "Sentenced to Prism" (sic)?) The system is more like an ant nest.

Self-replication is required to be able to make a lot of them in a reasonable amount of time.

Once the bulk of the plastic has been sequestered excess robots will be glued together to make a floating island.

There's no "done" state until/unless we stop throwing non-biodegradable matter into the Oceans.

That's called a bacterium.

Why not create an actual bacterium to break plastic down like everything else in the environment? It's not really that hard--high school students have done it before.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-plastic-eati...

Bonus points if you can make the bacterium specific to particular kinds of plastic.

There was mention of this concept in Ringworld (Larry Niven, 1970). If I recall it was what destroyed the society in the books, because the bacteria got out of hand and started breaking down critical technology and infrastructure, and basically brought about a complete social collapse on the ring world..

Yah the bugs ate the superconductor.

A lot of sci-fi can be understood as scenario planning.

Yes.

One possible problem: if the bacteria also eat plastic in our useful devices, not yet garbadge.

You do realize that "plastic" encompasses a lot of very chemically different compounds?

Breaking down a "plastic" is going to be a very specific thing because it takes a LOT of energy to do so (plastics are really stable--that's why we use them).

In addition, if it's so evolutionarily advantageous to eat plastic, something would have evolved already. It's really not--plastic is very stable, and doesn't really give you anything useful when you break it down.

So, even if you created a plastic-eating grey goo, it will evolve to eat something that takes less energy very quickly.

Hm, interesting, thanks.

In this case we feed them in reward for collecting plastic. As flowers feed bees for spreading their pollen.

Yup, no more fish nets or buoys, no oceanographic devices or tsunami detection sensors, fiberglass falling apart in small ships, antifoul paint falling from quills and tunnels, no seafarms, seapipes, small submarines, 30 minutes to load a web page located in Dublin because the submarine cable is damaged again...

This 'the last of us' chapter is practically writing itself.

Well, you need to figure out an economically viable method of producing these bacteria in the quantities necessary and the perform research on the impact that these bacteria will have on the environment…

That's a far easier problem than producing a "nanorobot".

Releasing GMOs into the ambient environment would be grotesquely irresponsible.

But yeah, the design is kinda like a scaled-up distributed bacterium. Bio-mimetic FTW!

Just proves how dumb they are. Plastic doesn't have any calories or hedonistic value at all really.

And also cetaceans, sea-birds and turtles.

I was watching a documentary, that proposed Humans do as well, since we end up consuming some of the fish that eat that stuff.

That's exactly what article is talking about.

Prediction: evolution will solve what humans are incapable of. That means species of fish evolving that specializes in eating plastic. Kinda makes sense. While plastic isn't bio-degradeable in the normal sense, perhaps the digestive system of a specialized fish will succeed. After all there is an abundance.

Yes, the bigger worry is that evolution will solve humans, but thankfully nature is already working on a cure for plastics[0].

[0] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chow-down-plastic-e...

The evolutionary pressure to cause a mutated, plastic-eating fish to outcompete non-plastic-eating fish would suggest that there would be areas where plastic was more abundant that the other things (plankton, mostly) that fish normally feed on, i.e. other fish would be at a disadvantage because they couldn't process plastic. That's a pretty dire scenario for humans.

Not necessarily. A lot of the flora and fauna in the New World developed somewhat independently from that in the old one. So we might have these new species evolve in regions of the oceans where the plastic is more abundant.

There are some microbe that breaks down plastic. Maybe some sea life will form a symboitic relationship with with.

That's an interesting prediction. From what I can remember from a previous HN article, there is a bacterial that already eats plastics. How long would such a evolutionary step take place, I wonder?

Not really. Evolution doesn't stop. And living things adapt to new circumstances all the time.

Evolution was so last eon. We've got CRISPR now. :D

Maybe toxic fish could curb overfishing.

I've never felt better about having a lifelong dislike of fish.

Let's be honest about the plastic in the oceans: It is not first world countries causing most of the problem. Ships do drop their trash in the ocean, that needs to stop, and we're all guilty to some degree, but if you want to stop the worst of the pollution you have to go to the Far East, Latin America, and Africa.

Actually that's not correct. The first world consumer society demands and consumes a lot of products - products made with plastic, packed in plastic, handed out in plastic bags, bottled in plastic, etc.

We buy, then toss (trash bin, recycle bin, or on the ground) the packaging and even old/broken bits we no longer need.

Certainly the developing world needs some education and behavior changes to limit their impact, but we have much responsibility ourselves.

And our trash/recycling is often shipped to their lands - then stored, dumped, or otherwise "recycled" poorly. Weather events or just poor planning allow some of that waste to end up in water systems.

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