The Ocean Cleanup's Machine Is About to Set Sail | Hacker News Reader

The Ocean Cleanup's Machine Is About to Set Sail

fastcompany.com

312 pointsCraneWorm125 comments

The article slips in a link to a fact which i think is not well known, but rather imporant - the punchline is in the URL slug:

http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-f...

> It turns out that about 90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order).

> These rivers have a few key things in common. All of them run through areas where a lot of people live — hundreds of millions of people in some cases. But what's more important is that these areas don't have adequate waste collection or recycling infrastructure. There is also little public awareness that plastic trash is a problem at all, so a lot of garbage, gets thrown into the river and conveniently disappears downstream.

The biggest thing we can do to fix the ocean plastic pollution problem isn't visionary technology like Slat's cleanup machine (don't get me wrong - we should cheer that project on!), or virtuous self-flagellation like using reusable drinking straws, it's good old fashioned hard work: hire more bin men, and put up more information posters.

EDIT: Here's another paper, applying related methods and coming to a broadly similar, although fatter-tailed, conclusion - "The top 20 polluting rivers, mostly located in Asia, account for 67% of the global total":

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611

One of the authors on that paper is Boyan Slat!

SECOND EDIT: The latter paper includes a couple of sentences i struggle to reconcile:

"We estimate that between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic waste currently enters the ocean every year from rivers" ... "It has been estimated that between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes of plastic enters the ocean every year from coastal populations worldwide".

I'm not sure if they're quoting the 4.8 - 12.7 figure to endorse it (coastal populations significantly outweigh rivers) or criticise it (ie it's rivers, not coastal populations).

The Ocean Cleanup project is obviously needed since the plastic is already out there. However, I wonder if there are any projects that look to clean up the plastic output by these rivers at the transition between river and ocean? The mouth of the Yangtze is only a 1km wide at terminal points. Although heavy in boat traffic, I wonder how much affect removing the plastic here would have.

Anything that could filter the plastic at scale would likely block fish migrations and have lots of unintended consequences (not to mention that the bulk of it is probably transported during floods, which are going to be hard to filter).

It's easier and more effective to combat this on the ground than in the water. That's not to say that it's an easy problem to combat on the ground, either, just that it's damned hard to get plastic out of the rivers once it's in them.

Something like this might help: http://baltimorewaterfront.com/healthy-harbor/water-wheel/

Not sure if it has any effect on migrations, though.

Surely the same technology being used in the Ocean Cleanup Machine would work. That is, it's not a net. Also boats could drive around it, it just needs to be in the flow of the river.

Check out the Plastic Bank run by David Katz - https://www.ted.com/talks/david_katz_the_surprising_solution...

Another recent study found that most of the plastic in the ocean was lost fishing gear ... this would indicate that cleaning it up at the source doesn't involve consumer training as much as industry training.

I've also read that. But i've also read several sources saying only 10 - 20% is from oceanic sources like fishing gear. I haven't been able to find an original source addressing this directly, unfortunately. The Wikipedia talk page has some references which might be useful if i could read them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Plastic_pollution#Ocean/l...

On the consumer side we could stop eating seafood.

If nothing else, I think that might be a good idea for our own health's sake. Especially fish that is at the top of the food chain (tuna) is more likely to have high concentrations of whatever toxins are now in the ocean thanks to us.

On the other hand, pushing people to choose fish over beef/pork/corn starch would cause healthier populations, and might be easier than convincing people to become vegetarians (especially people in food deserts that subsist primarily on fast food).

Then again I'm probably just contributing to first world decision locking here lol

I could not find what "decision locking" meant. Did you maybe mean "decision lock-in"?

Oh shit, maybe it's a made up term my friend group and I use?

It's the idea that there are too many decisions to make, so you can't decide. It can happen when too many people play devil's advocate during a meeting and we don't know what's real anymore.

This is sometimes referred to as "analysis paralysis."

Contamination is everywhere, including on land. How about plants grown using heavy amounts of fertilizers? is that safer in the long run? We have very poor visibility of risks related to the food we eat.

The problem is that seafood is really healthy. Finland has special permission from EU to keep Baltic fish that exceeds permitted dioxin and PCB levels on the market, because even with the pollutants, people who eat the fish live on average longer than people who eat no fish.

https://thl.fi/web/environmental-health/environmental-pollut...

The recent piece I saw on HN estimated that fishing lines and nets made up ~45% of the waste in the Pacific.

Edit: link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16654524

After a recent trip to Hawaii where I saw plastic on many beaches, I would say that by weight, fishing nets make up the majority, but land-sourced trash is by far more numerous. There were some big tangles of nets in piles 2 feet high, but then there would be thousands of bottle caps, bottles, and random plastic trash. Some of it was identifiable, such as a plastic umbrella handle, others were just jagged pieces of white plastic. I also found a few pieces of melted plastic, which makes me wonder if incinerator slag is being dumped, maybe from ships.

>it's good old fashioned hard work: hire more bin men, and put up more information posters

I don't think that's the primary problem either. "Bin men" must be paid and they are going to be too expensive, and "information posters" irrelevant, until the populations surrounding these rivers can reach a standard of living that gives them sufficient resources to pay bin men, and to care about what materials they need to put into which brightly colored bin.

In other words: fix GDP of these countries by improving global economic growth, and you will cut off the flow of plastic at its source.

So that sounds like you're suggesting we just wait until they become mature / developed economies... so just sit on our hands for a 2 or 3 decades maybe.

Time does its job faster to solve problems that our best solutions do, though. Not suggesting for inaction, but we should not overstimate our capability to change behaviors either.

Time, meaning other people working?

"consume more so that we can consume more responsibly"

> In other words: fix GDP of these countries by improving global economic growth, and you will cut off the flow of plastic at its source.

And Pearl River, 7th on the list, is in which third world country?

* Never mind. It's Zhujiang/Canton River. China.

If 90% of the plastic comes from 10 rivers... wouldn't it make the most sense to build giant filters at the estuary of each river, and stop the plastic from reaching the Ocean with 10 giant recycling plants?

I'd also apply tariffs to those countries equal to the cost of cleaning up the plastic.

Sounds like we need a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Rivers" :)

Rivers pass through multiple countries. In my country, which is fairly narrow, many of the rivers that end up on our shores don't begin inside our territory, and we've had conflicts with our neighbors over the levels of pollution of the water entering the country.

River flows through n countries. Tariff each country (cost of cleanup)/n. Or apportion it by the number of miles the river flows through each country. It's not a terribly difficult concept.

No, just quite unfair. What makes you think each country is responsible on similar parts for the total?

If the country knows it is unfair, then they must have done an assay. If the assays exist, then the tariff cost can be apportioned fairly.

I'm baffled why you think these sorts of accommodations are not what would routinely be done if such a tariff scheme were implemented.

Sure they have done an analysis. Which no other country will accept. You're essentially asking to create some sort of river-pollution version of the IAEA, plus all the diplomatic costs that come with enforcing this. It's probably cheaper to just pay for the cleanup.

> Which no other country will accept.

The whole idea of tariffs is you impose them on other countries without their assent.

Someone else pointed out that it might be hard to come up with an effective filter that also doesn't negatively impact the marine life.

Presumably a large fraction of the plastic would float at the surface. It would surprise me if some clever device to filter the top 1-2 feet of a large river couldn’t be built without impacting marine life too severely.

Or maybe I’m wrong about a majority floating.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16916317

There's not a huge amount of marine life in some of those rivers. For others, like the Mekong, they are expansive delta regions rather than simple rivermouths which would prohibit the approach.

Every single news organization has read the original study wrong or parroted another article about the 90% figure. The full quote from the study [1] is "the top-ten rivers with the highest loads contribute ~90% of the total river-driven plastic inputs into the sea."

The top 10 rivers contribute 90% to RIVER-DRIVEN plastic input, not TOTAL input. It is still a large problem, but a vast amount of ocean trash is dumped by coastal cities in Asia.

[1] https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/149396_EGU_2017_Schmidt.pdf

The two sentences do not contradict each other. The first estimate is theirs. The other estimate comes from other researchers.

When you read the article, the second sentence comes at the start of a paragraph explaining a variety of reasons why their estimate is lower than previous ones. For example, their model only includes plastic that floats, so they are missing plastic that sinks into the ocean. Their model misses plastics that were too small to fall into their nets. And so on.

We could put together a crowdfund to pay people in these developing nations for their plastic waste, create an economic incentive to not just chuck garbage into the river.

I doubt that would have the effect you're hoping for, consider the Cobra effect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect

Unfortunately your list of rivers means its largely China and India's problem. Not a lot we can do other than pressure them.

> virtuous self-flagellation like using reusable drinking straws

The worst thing is the push to ban plastic shopping bags, which (at least in my social circles) get reused as bin liners. Hurrah, now we have to stuff around with canvas bags (which need to be reused dozens or hundreds of times to actually be more efficient than plastic bags) AND we have to buy purpose-made bin liners (which are usually heavier duty and so use more resources and generate more waste than the original plastic bags). Net result: Just as many bags, heavier duty ones, plus canvas bags, plus inconvenience. Stupid virtue signalling.

Are you outside the US? Because in the US, in my experience, almost all plastic bags are super thin [1] and not at all reusable; they tear at the slightest perforation, which is why grocery stores double- and triple-bag them constantly. Nothing like the thick, sturdy, glossy, eminently reusable bags I'm used to from Europe. Sometimes I get a food delivery that has a real plastic bag, and I save these, whereas all the others go directly in the trash, because they're usually already falling to pieces when I get home.

[1] https://assets-nydailynews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1200/a...

To get an idea what US plastic shopping bags are like, watch "Home Alone" and pay close attention to the scene where Kevin is walking groceries back to his house.

Then consider that plastic shopping bags have generally become thinner and more fragile since that movie was released.

Scene in question: https://youtu.be/Y-V7ZxueazA?t=86. Good example.

It seems presumptuous to assume that because you reuse all your plastic shopping bags the rest of the population also behaves similarly. Can you cite a study that shows plastic bag bans increasing the total use of plastic or plastic waste like you claim? Everything I find says otherwise. Maybe a little bit of inconvenience is necessary to improve the environment.

I think it would be a good general rule (and I should do this more as well) to do a quick search for relevant papers rather than simply saying [citation needed]. It's a bit more effort but adds a lot of value to the response.

Bin liners are kind of pointless though. Just wash your bin occasionally

That depends a lot on your local trash collection infrastructure. Where I live, I take my household trash to a larger collection bin shared by the whole building (~20 apartments) which in turn gets emptied every few days into a garbage truck. Emptying my trash directly in the the communal container (rather than containing my trash in a plastic bag) would not be popular at all, and certainly attract rats in significantly larger quantities than we currently have. There's virtually no time when the communal container is free to be cleaned - definitely not often enough that it would be a sound strategy to put empty household trash directly into it.

And yes, we sort out compostables, but a little is bound to end up in the regular trash no matter how diligent you are.

Except of course that there has been a substantial measurable decrease in the amount of plastic bag waste in the seas around the UK since the plastic bag change was put in place. Not to mention there are hugely fewer numbers flapping around in the trees in the woods near me.

Not stupid virtue signalling, practical action.

This project is hugely problematic, both because there are some pretty fundamental flaws in how he characterizes plastic pollution and the lack of any responses from the Ocean Cleanup about the criticism from just about every ocean plastics expert out there. None of the major plastics pollution nonprofits endorse this work, not out of jealousy but frustration with an idea getting so much attention and funding purely because some charismatic kid has talked about it.

Assuming that it is engineered to survive storms (which is DEFINITELY not an easy feat given the design), anything like this will have an impact on marine life. Anything that floats like this will act like a FAD (fish aggregating device) and attract animals, and should be designed in a way to minimize impact or incidental catch. It seems like his discussion about what that includes has been pretty vague to date. This includes the small things in the ocean that will certainly be harmed by this device.

The dispersion of plastics in the ocean seems to follow a different profile than this device addresses. Contrary to what people imagine when they think of the “Pacific Garbage Patch,” the bulk of plastic in the oceans is not large pieces that are floating. Pretty much all plastic in the ocean has broken down into small pieces and sits through the entire water column following the mixed layer phenomenon. There’s been a lot of great research on that, including microplastics which are now found in practically every water body on Earth.

Anyways, there are much smarter people than me who outlined the flaws. You can read More here: http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/07/the-ocean-cleanup-part-1-... http://www.deepseanews.com/2014/07/the-ocean-cleanup-part-2-... http://deepseanews.com/2013/03/the-ocean-cleanup-the-newest-... http://climateadaptation.tumblr.com/post/46515698066/this-in... http://inhabitat.com/the-fallacy-of-cleaning-the-gyres-of-pl...

Totally agree. As someone familiar with their scale model tests, I can attest to them knowing very little about what they are doing. I will/cannot not go into too much detail, but (1) not wanting to listen to any wave experts and (2) them expecting a failing(!) scale model test to magically work on full scale are laughable and major red flags.

The only reason the project has gotten so much funding is because it allows companies to buy an indulgence of sorts and clear their conscience. I am 100% certain it will not work, and will actually pollute the ocean more, for the "machine" itself will turn to waste.

First solar roadways, now this... I'm starting to get rather annoyed with junk science proposals hoovering up funding and attention that could be going to more scientifically sound endeavors.

Solar roadways is a great parallel to this. Ocean Cleanup has raised $40 million. Just think of the good work you can do with that.

Part of the flaws of this is Boyan’s unwillingness to listen to any experts on the matter. They’ve tried to help, and have largely been ignored as baseless skeptics (which is the furthest thing from the truth). Ocean scientists want to help solve the problems that the ocean faces and would definitely support ideas that do this. Unfortunately this one doesn’t.

I love that Fast Company is the linked article. FC ran the work of actual marine plastics researcher eight years ago: https://www.fastcompany.com/1680455/miriam-goldstein-north-p...

She's had a running criticism of Slat's project since it first got press, publicly on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MiriamGoldste/status/413093769714483200

https://twitter.com/MiriamGoldste/status/490196011219185664

And thanks for linking to DSN, which also ran this debunk on Slat's scale test: http://www.deepseanews.com/2017/01/what-did-the-boyan-slat-a...

FWIW, I think the big dust pan idea is kinda silly.

I keep expecting someone to come up with baleen whale inspired barges. Big gulping mouth that is somehow wave actuated. Wave action for propulsion. Clever filters that pull out just the plastics. Cook the debris in place with sunshine and bacteria.

As stupid simple as possible. Huge fleet. Set them loose and wait.

If this was sci-fi, the barges could reproduce and evolve, of course.

B-b-b-ut he dropped out of college to start a company to make the world better, so it must be good!

In one of their presentations they say that they trawled through the "patch" with about 33 boats and found that a large majority by volume actually is large objects.

Here is a nice summary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EyaTqezSzs

Key highlights:

* Mega expedition with 50 boats

* Aerial survey

* Hand counted 1.2m samples under a microscope

* 92% of mass is floating on the surface

Based on old evidence the project was clearly a waste of resources but of course the irony is that the lack of resources spent on researching the garbage patch lead to insufficient information about how feasable the project is in reality.

Your links say it well - being a naysayer is kinda pointless. Realistically the first iteration will never be perfect. You got to start somewhere and then keep iterating until you understand your challenges better and come up with better solutions. Boyan Slat seems to understand this very well.

Also it might be worth evaluating and comparing to how many things are harmed in the ocean in the absence of anyone trying such ambitious ideas.

Those articles you post are from 2013 and 2014. This is when the Ocean Cleanup Project started.

The project did a lot of research in the years that followed. And all there answers can be found in the FAQ section.

So I don't think your post is valid (anymore).

So your argument is essentially: "cleaning the ocean is hard, so we shouldn't attempt it"

Hardly any plastic can be found at the surface of the ocean (1%). It makes much more sense to clean up beaches that have a higher concentration by several magnitudes and a serveral times bigger total amount of plastic (5% of the ocean)

Numbers are from http://www.eunomia.co.uk/reports-tools/plastics-in-the-marin...

> and a serveral times bigger total amount of plastic (5% of the ocean)

Looking at your link, you mean "5x the ocean" not "5% the ocean". That link claims the beach plastic density is 2000 times larger, implying that by their definition "beaches" are 2.5km wide on average (since there are 361 M km^2 of ocean and 356,000 km of shoreline).

There’s still 94% of the plastic on the ocean floor which is not tackled at all.

I don’t get where you have your number of shoreline from. I find numbers threee times yours. Further the report states that the pollution of the ocean surface is less than 1%

First result on Google & CIA world Factbook are both about 350,000 km.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-of-coastline-are-there-...

>356,000km of shoreline

At what feature size? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox

In this case, the appropriate size is of order 2.5 km.

So go clean the beaches in your spare time instead of telling the only person cleaning the ocean at scale that they're doing it wrong. At least they're doing something!

I think the point is that floating structures can be more easily designed and automated, whereas beaches and rocky coastlines require man-power and access. Plus nearly all trash on the beach/coast came from the ocean over time.

Doesn't that plastic have to cross the oceans surface in order to reach the beaches or degrade in the sunlight to sink? Wouldn't this be attempting to fix the problem upstream? (literally heh)

I wish them massive success. Glad to hear someone is at least trying for large scale cleanup. Also glad the article mentioned needing to attack the root cause as well — in some ways it’s harder because it’s a political/economical/cultural, not engineering problem.

> The system uses a giant floating tube–the first one will be 2,000 feet long–made of a durable plastic called HDPE, which can float in the water, flexible enough to bend with the waves, but rigid enough to form a U-shaped barrier to stop the plastic floating on the ocean’s surface.

What are the odds on a bad storm destroying this device and adding another big chunk of garbage plastic to the ocean?

I don't think that's enough plastic to make a dent in the amount of plastic already out there.

If that happens, at least we'll get valuable information on how to improve the system for next time.

If it's a big chunk, it won't get eaten by fish and it will be easy to clean up.

I'm wondering what are the chances a big storm disperses all the plastic it collected up until that point?

If this happens, would they not just redeploy and begin collecting again? It's not like dispersion is additive.

Yes but if a storm displaces the plastic from the trap every 30 days, seems like a waste of that resource.

> The money made from selling the plastic to manufacturers, who want the cachet of using ocean plastic, will theoretically fund the operation.

Ouch. Trying to reuse mixed plastic that is in little tiny pieces, and very highly contaminated? Maybe they'll catch some large nets.

Oddly enough, in this case a little greenwashing will help. Tell people it's "recycled ocean plastic", but actually use just a tiny bit and landfill the rest.

It's still a win because the plastic is no longer in the ocean.

A good conversation/interview on the Joe Rogan podcast with Boyan Slat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J145vnEZX6w

Adidas sold 1 million pairs of its shoes made from ocean plastic [1]. Wonder what the market for ocean plastic is like?

https://www.theinertia.com/environment/adidas-sold-1-million...

I suspect it will continue to be good at the expense of the markets for recycled plastic, which have already taken a nosedive.

Less effort should go into cleaning up, and more into killing the communities acceptance of the garbage manufacturing / packaging industry, which spews this stuff out at a virtually infinite rate.

Stop mopping up, turn off the tap.

Should start with a tax on bottled water, an absurd and unnecessary industry if there ever was one.

How about precisely standardised bottles that have return value, and a tax on manufacturers that use non standard sizes.

Is the plastic that is coming from these 10 rivers substantially from bottled water?

I visited a relatively remote part of the pacific ocean and walked around a tiny island and every ten feet there was a soft drink bottle.

I live in London. The water that comes out of the tap is totally undrinkable, unless you filter it a few times AND boil it. Ergo, we live on bottled water for cold drinks. We recycle every bottle we use.

IF the water came in returnable glass bottles, we'd switch to those in a heartbeat.

I live in London too. The water is perfectly drinkable straight out of the tap.

Your comment about needing to boil the water to make it drinkable is truly bizarre. I know of precisely zero people here who boil tap water before drinking it.

UK tap water is safer that bottled water because it is monitored much more closely. The responsible government body is the UK Drinking Water Inspectorate. You can read the reports on their website (a good overview is the annual summary letter to the government at [1]). In 2016, 99.96% of samples met the quality requirements of the EU Drinking Water Directive.

If you are particularly sensitive to residual chlorine, the DWI advises letting the water stand for a couple of hours [2]. No need to boil or filter. Of course, if you search online, you are more likely to see advice from makers of water filters saying you need to filter the water...

[1] http://www.dwi.gov.uk/about/annual-report/2016/letter-eng.pd...

[2] http://dwi.defra.gov.uk/consumers/advice-leaflets/chlorine.p...

A problem with using filtered water (and nearly all bottled waters are filtered) is the minerals are filtered out as well. Your body needs the minerals.

(I save a ton of money drinking tap water, and making my own drip coffee, which takes less time than ordering at Starbucks!)

London is a big place. All I can say, is that where I live (bottom edge of London) my water is nasty, and I don't like the taste, or that it comes out of the tap slightly cloudy.

With all of the ways that we hear the environment is being damaged by humans, it's nice to hear about a way we're trying to improve it.

This give me hope.

I’ll second that and fingers crossed that the publicity encourages a cascading effect of environmental kindnesses.

You reading these words right now can reduce your consumption of plastic and fossil fuels, probably by 90% without any decrease in your quality of life. More likely you'll improve it.

On a personal level, my commitment to avoid packaged food 3 years ago means I last had to empty my landfill garbage June 4. I've emptied my recycling I think twice since then. Now that feels like way too much.

The main result is that my diet is more delicious than ever, more varied, more convenient, and saves me money.

I'm in my third year of not flying too. I began by saying I would avoid flying for one year. It improved my life so much I kept going.

These two changes sounded scary and impossible when I committed to them but experience showed me that living by my values improves my life. It took a while to let go of mainstream values that I couldn't stomach but had lived by for decades. Once I did, things got better and better.

I'm not special. You can almost certainly cut your plastic use, fossil fuel use, pollution, and so on by a lot. I bet you'll find it improves your life.

Your experience reminds me of the book and movie "No Impact Man", which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and watching. Thanks for sharing! I feel more motivated to reduce my trash. Have you shared any of this on e.g. a blog?

I've shared a ton on my blog, Inc. column, and my podcast, Leadership and the Environment. At the risk of flooding you:

Avoiding food packaging: http://joshuaspodek.com/js_blogseries/avoiding-food-packagin... (the table of contents on the right is clickable)

Not flying: https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht...

Podcast: http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast or https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/leadership-and-the-envir...

Picking up garbage: https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/a-millennial-making-americ...

Plenty more if you click "related posts" at the bottom of blog posts and in my Inc. profile: http://www.inc.com/author/joshua-spodek.

I applaud your effort and results. However, how do you cop with a Significant other that doesn't share this view? I mean its great to do the things that you do, but if you're dating or married to someone that doesn't share your view or someone that loves to travel as often as they can, then it becomes difficult.

From being asked this question in various forms many times, I've found the answer is in the process, not my specific actions, which are tuned to my life and circumstances.

The answer is that you start with what you can. Do. Act. Experience. Iterate. Learn. Same as with entrepreneurial and business success. The worst thing to do is analyze, plan, and point out how your case is special without acting.

Listen to my podcast and you'll hear guest after guest taking on challenges, learning from the experience, and finding the next thing easier and more rewarding. You're not alone.

> then it becomes difficult

When did I say it was easy for me? I don't see why you would think it was. For all you know, your case is easier than mine. It probably is.

In any case, you get to the hard things by tackling the easy things, applying what you learned, and advancing. Feel the reward of getting something done and expect bigger reward for the next thing.

You can't do difficult when you're hung up on easy. If you don't do easy because you think it's not worth it, you'll never get anywhere.

Can you elaborate how and where you buy your food then? Sadly most of the stuff is wrapped in plastic one way or another and as much as I would like to buy non-plastic wrapped food it's mostly just not an option.

The world isn't so static that you have to accept things as they are. People are behind every decision and you can talk to those people. That's why my podcast is leadership first. Yes, it's hard to change a system and easier to go with the flow, but if you don't like where it leads, you either have to choose to live by your values or accept that your comfort and convenience comes at the cost and health of others. I chose the latter for most of my life and it ate me up inside. Now I act on my values and my life keeps getting better.

Maybe yours will get worse for living by your values, but I doubt it.

I'll share my answers with the caveat that they work for my life, not yours. If I lived in your situation I'd solve it differently, but I would solve it. Many people look for differences and conclude their case is impossible, which is hogwash. Mine looked impossible until I acted too.

I talk about my food in various times on my podcast http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast but the main thing are my CSAs (summer/fall: https://westvillagecsa.wixsite.com/wvcsa, winter/spring: http://www.washingtonsquarecsa.com/description), where I pick up vegetables from a drop-off point in my neighborhood (actually, I walk about a mile each way to the winter/spring one), and the farmers market when the CSA is.

There are many stores near me with the problem you describe. I stop going there in favor of places without the problem. Some shop owners know me as the guy who asks for things without packaging. A short conversation and they're happy to oblige. I bring bags and containers with me. If I forget to bring them, I buy less stuff that time.

One of my podcast guests took on the challenge of buying meat without packaging. I don't remember the details, but mainly she talked to the butcher and created a relationship. Same with a guy who stopped using disposable coffee cups. He developed relationships with the baristas.

Ok thanks for that. Unfortunately I live in a country where I don't speak the local language so the conversation part is not possible. Theres an organic store which has most items without plastic packagin and provide paper bags for vegetables etc. Its nice but the price is also double compared to the cheaper store :/

This is an awesome project, good luck to them!

Good on him, and ignoring the naysayers.

Why? The naysayers have some very good points (discussed elsewhere in the thread).

I would say a serious attempt at cleaning any amount of the ocean is better than no attempt.

...unless its doing more damage than good. The project uses screens which 'because they are not nets' will do no harm. Wha? How about to microscopic life, say, the size of plastic particles? Isn't it going to sterilize the surface of the ocean of all those animals? The vast bulk of life in the ocean is in the top meter - exactly where they're vacuuming up everything.

If your taking the 'protect wildlife' route, then it doesn't make sense to argue against taking trash out of the ocean which directly kills a god-awful lot of animals as it stands.

Is that even true? Does the Sargasso sea plastic particulate harm animals? To what degree?

Straining billions of sea creatures out of the top meter of water is an actual harm. It makes no sense to have to argue that's a net loss. Unless we're taking the 'save the large, cuddly animals first' route, which is so often part of eco-theatre.

Just for context, from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16654524 . (I'm still wondering if the "mass" of plastic is relevant, so clue me in.)

Why did he drop out of school? This sounds like a modern application of mechanical engineering. Do we believe so little in our education system that we wouldnt want this to be designed by a mechanical engineer?

edit: I just thought he was responsible for the mechanical innovation.

He thought the problem was too urgent to wait until he was done with school.

Surely there are engineers working on the project, even if he didn't finish school.

He didn't do it alone. Here's one job posting open at the moment: https://www.theoceancleanup.com/careers/senior-engineer/

I'm assuming he dropped out of school because he saw an opportunity, had momentum, and decided to ride it.

There's a ton of engineers on the 70+ team designing and working on this.

https://www.theoceancleanup.com/careers/

We should require companies to report how much packaging/garbage they create every year.

I think the irony that the the device to catch plastic is also made of plastic, seems to be lost on a lot people. More so that the project is unlikely to succeed, and if as some people are predicting, it's not storm proof, then it's very likely to just be adding [it's mass] to the problem.

The device is made from recyclable plastic.

It's still plastic. Being put into the ocean. Likely to be smashed to bits by a storm.

Geez, that thing is as big as a whale! I'd say it seats about 20.

We should pay fishing boats to haul in garbage.

Maybe Sunday we can get something like this attached to all oceangoing vessel’s of size that cross back-and-forth.

Sunday's probably too early. Monday perhaps. :-D

Jordan Peterson used this guy as an example of someone that is truly committed to environmentalism, as compared to the typical clueless feel-good armchair activist that achieves little.

Peterson has a force/action bias by his psychology, so the criticism (apart from being an apparent straw man which doesn't help matters, though it doesn't look like you're quoting him directly) needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that much of what Peterson himself does is take an armchair approach. That is fine, but it means he will tend to swing broadly between "critique" and "action" as two possible alternatives.

I think that might be a little unfair to most people that care about the environment. A lot of this is coming up with a feasible idea that you or someone you know can execute on. Would I or most people be able to come up with this idea? Myself definitely not and most people probably not. If I were to have the domain knowledge to be able to come up with this idea and understand how to execute upon it, then would I pursue it? Most likely. I think a lot of people want to do something, but coming up with the right ideas and knowledge to be useful is a totally different story.

Is the idea all that impressive? Is it not essentially just a big floating wall? To me, the impressive thing is that the young guy has actually put this in motion.

In business, we say ideas are worthless and it's all in execution. I think the same principle applies here.

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