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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

> 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.

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)

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!

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