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Comment by smoyer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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

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...

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