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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.