The great Pacific garbage patch is largely abandoned fishing gear

We have been seeing massive fishing net globs come ashore for the past few years on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's getting worse. My boys and I personally dragged a large chunk ashore this past year. They are extremely heavy and take a lot of work to move and dispose of all the netting. Here's the image: https://imgur.com/12U4FXg

This is the latest, the largest tangle of net researchers have seen wash ashore. http://www.fox8live.com/story/37529263/its-huge-40-ton-mass-...

This is actually somewhat encouraging.

Plastic pollution clearly is an emergency now, but that this much of it comes from abandoned fishing gear means cutting the pollution at it's source should be a lot less complicated than trying to completely change the whole world's view on plastic production.

Obviously we still need to curb plastic production globally, but it's so commonplace that this will be almost impossible to realistically achieve with the world the way it is. I'd hope that over time we could introduce legislation to move to biodegradeable plastics, but really, we need to change our cultural view of consumption and waste entirely.

It's a task that makes solving climate change look trivial, so I'm struggling to hold out hope - although the one ray of light here is that it seems that the scale of the problem is bi-partisan acknowledged, for example, on the left:

Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/12/micropla...

CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-plas...

On the right:

Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5491469/Micro...

Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2018/03/16/93-percent-bott...

So at least some cause for optimism if the WHO can pressure the UN to take multilateral action, but it'll take pressure on the ground from people the world over.

I wonder if within 1,000 years they don’t develop nano robots that actually mine our current trash for the minerals? We toss out gold, silver, rare earth metals, petroleum, every day... the trick is it’s so very hard right now to extract those minerals, but perhaps our current landfills and garbage patches will become the “gold mines” of the future. It would be super easy to reach — landfills have trash just feet below the surface. No dangerous digging.

Just thinking optimistically here. I personally do what I can now to keep the earth clean. No sense peeing in your own pool.

It's interesting that (according to this article), while 20% of marine debris globally is fishing gear, 46% of this sample was from fishing sources. There is one source quoted as saying that the study is based on "limited surveys", but the study also apparently took 752 surface trawls (which, to my layman's ear, sounds like a lot). Would the concern be not about the number of samples, but the type of samples? Perhaps fishing gear is more inclined to float to the top where the trawls were taken, or more gear is abandoned in a location that is more likely to float to the patch?

key sentence:

> Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.

"only eight percent of the total tonnage"? We are talking about microplastics, that is still an incredible amount of plastic.

What's more interesting is I think this article shows how journalism about environmental destruction has some significant problems. It works as with most other human communication, we want narratives and images that evokes emotion (a kind of mythic/romantic understanding of things). That's why "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" works so well, we all mentally see an island of trash in our heads that needs "cleaning up" and along comes the hero, a young entreprenour. Other things that work well are pictures of dead birds on a beach with their stomach full of different colored plastics.

The problem is when our "romantic" idea of pollution hides/ignores the more destructive (and more complex) effects. Pictures of flooding being the poster images for climate change is an incredibly shallow view of the problem. And no part of the world is free of plastic, so basically the entire earth is a plastic garbage patch. Even worse, when an image that is built up doesn't fit what it started out as. You have basically made things worse by planting doubt about the problem in general by having an incomplete and shallow image of the problem..

Careful: Autoplays a video with sound for me. Muting the video and scrolling the page unmutes the video.

Firefox Nightly, Windows. My coworkers didn't like the music, I think.

Here's a video of micro plastic on my local beach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAojzv8V84

How the hell can you clean this up without a thousand people using tweezers?

You can't get a backhoe down to the beach. Every tide brings more of the stuff in. It's so overwhelming that it seems pointless even attempting to pick it up. There's f-ing miles and miles of it.

This isn't the title of the article, and the change is not only inaccurate (46% is not 'mostly') but it downplays the significance of the garbage patch.

Artificial proteins could reduce the need to trawl.

Cleaning it up doesn't fix the problem: we're producing disposable garbage.

We can stop buying disposable stuff -- plastic bags, coffee cups, stupid gifts people use for thirty seconds before throwing it away, etc.

How much stuff within your reach or eyesight will be used for under a month then never again that you could have not bought?

It's a start that will improve your life not to get the stuff. Yes we can do more, but let's at least start with what we immediately control.

It's worth noting that National Geographic is now owned by the same parent company as Fox News: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/national-geog...