Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench

Because the Chinese do an inadequate job of disposing of the waste of Western countries, so their costs are less, so this Western waste winds-up in the oceans with stops in China and the folks in charge in the Western nations more or less let this happen.

But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was entirely at fault. A bit reflection should show the reader this isn't the case.

still seems like the west is responsible.

Here in Switzerland most non recyclable trash is burned in special clean burning power plants to produce heat for most of the cities.

1 Bag of trash is the equivalent of 1,7 Liter of heating oil.

[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/ted/de/index/entsorgung_recycli... (German)

If you go to a beach e.g. in Phuket, Thailand, you'll find a mountain of rubbish just off the part where the tourists sit. Plastic bags and bottles, old car parts, tin cans, all sorts of shit. Same in Rarotonga, or many of what you might label third world countries that tourists go to. Right next to where people live and work, blowing around.

In some cultures, rubbish is just ignored. You'd think if you worked next to the beach, you'd at least clean up the little patch next to your stall when you had some downtime, but this just doesn't seem part of the mindset. I don't know if its some kind of "tragedy of the commons" type thinking or what it is.

Another may consider population, the western world massively exporting trash, having decades of head start on polluting the oceans with plastic (micro plastic needs time) and totally fails to develop exportable clean consumer products or to build or sell the machines needed to produce them.

I don't like plastic in sea food, but it's probably to late with or without China. Pointing now at countries copy pasting our lifestyle is just ridiculous, they didn't invent plastic bags.

Energy intensive processes used for example to create wind turbines can in the future be replaced by greener alternatives; just because the current solution doesn't immediately improve things in one respect, it can lay the foundations for future improvement. Think of it as rebasing a company's business logic from an old COBOL monolith to a bunch of modern, independent services that someone in 5 years from now has a chance of understanding (just replace "5" years with "50", which brings to mind the nuclear power plants designed in the 60s peppering the western world).

I think the argument for renewable energy would still be valid even if turbines and solar panels were much more expensive to build than traditional varieties, because they are tapping in to renewable energy supplies that make us less dependent on the whims of middle eastern dictatorships. The thing that sells the concept to governments isn't how much energy they require to produce, it's the renewable energy sources they tap into and the diversification of grid supply from monolithic, sparse power plants (and the geopolitics they couple) to local, maintainable facilities.

JUST imposed. If you follow any municipal news (Australia, Canada, who knows where else) you'll know that the RECENT ban is causing huge issues.

Yes, we did. That ban does not invalidate that it was occurring, on a massive scale, up to that point. Right now several nations are amassing a stockpile of materials with no viable destination for it.

>ignoring facts such as the energy intensiveness to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels

First off, energy intensiveness becomes less of an issue as more of the energy supply moves over to renewables. There's more to be concerned about around use of rare/harmful materials and harmful byproducts in the manufacture of panels. Second, I don't see that those issues are being ignored, rather that most people will (reasonably) make the determination that between the tradeoffs available, this option is a good choice. Third, there is a bit of a myth of a 'pure environmentalist' you're conjuring here which I'm sceptical exists in significant numbers. Most people that consider themselves environmentalists are probably fine with 'better' in lieu of 'perfect'.

>conveniently ignore the fact that without the plastics industry, the average quality of life for the average human would be far lower than it is now.

That implies a binary choice where we either have all the plastic products and the extent of modern usage, or we have no plastic products. Again that polarized view is not useful or realistic, most will take a more nuanced view where a world with less plastic use but not no plastic use is preferable. Wanting to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics for things like shopping bags and packaging does not have to also imply that beneficial uses of plastics should be verboten.

>Top it all off, imagine the resources that would get used if the world stopped using plastic and went back to 100% paper, cotton, and glass.

As above, I'm not convinced that the majority of 'environmentalists' are quite as hardline as you imagine, but I'll indulge the idea for a moment:

>That's a lot of trees, plant material and sand. The first two would lead to an increase in fertilizers, which would lead to an increase in chemical runoff.

You've made several leaps here that are not implied by the premise. First, paper and cotton are renewable resources, the renewal of which does not require increased use of fertilizers (in any form, artificial or natural e.g. intervention composting). Allocation of more land mass, yes, plus 'sustainable forests' has been a thing for decades. Even mainstream political views are light years ahead of the naïve position you've put forward here, see the current UK plans to re-forest almost the entire north of England, coast to coast, as a great example. Second, the amounts of materials you're imagining needed to replace plastics, and the single-use behaviours that go along with them are entirely up for debate. This is intrinsically linked to my first point, because what happens when a paper or cotton item is no longer useful and is discarded, even littered in the wilderness? Oh yeah, it decomposes. Becoming.... compost.

>I'm just saying that the green movement is rife with bias and hypocrisy

I don't disagree, but will point out that it's a fallacy to call someone living in a system while also advocating to change that system a hypocrite.

>and the situation is far more complicated than anyone give it credit for.

I do disagree with that assertion. Many people are giving this lots of headspace. Overwhelmingly, the output of those considered positions is messages to the effect that we need to make gradual, incremental improvements in whatever areas we can identify, and that we should do this even when those improvements are less than optimal. The alternative, decision paralysis, cannot be allowed as various windows of opportunity draw to a close.

Throwing shade at any effort to improve simply because it is not entirely 'pure' doesn't advance the discussion and the point is not as novel to proponents as you might imagine.

The immediate environmental action priorities should surely be:

  - Taking waste out of habitat 
    ( collection and filtration )
  - Reducing waste going into habitat 
    ( biodegradable material use, 
      design re-usability and reliability, 
      affordable recycling )
  - Study and assist heavily disrupted natural systems.

I believe advanced landfill as a long term waste curing and storage ability should be considered a big part of urgent clean industry and not characterised as a major problem in itself.

They're far stronger and more reliable (even with the overall poorer quality control, which I believe causes the occasional breaks you refer too, easily remedied by conservatively under-filling) than even the best paper bags they're replacing. The handles on those paper bags require such delicate, special handling, and if there's any wetness, well, I'd better have a cart, because I'm not making it to my car no matter how closer I parked.

The case of 1000 takes up very little space in the trunk, lasts me essentially forever, costs way less than the mandatory 10 cents per bag the stores are now required to charge, and, more importantly, is far more sanitary than reusable bags.

It is enough of a challenge to shop for fresh, relatively healthy food and having it last a worthwhile length of time, without worrying about cross-contamination from the last shopping trip.

I'm so glad that we're seeing a shift to reusable bags and, hopefully, a culture of reusability.

My personal reasoning is that there are lots of other (more significant) ways to combat climate change, but there's no other way to stop whales from choking to death on plastic. Then again, I could just be more emotionally affected by the tangible images of plastic pollution than by the more abstract notion of carbon footprint.

And even with recycling, you have to account for costs including not only energy but also chemical pollution caused by manufacturing process.

And then there's the question of which items get re-used. The reusable bags haven't proven to be much of a win because not only do they cost more in energy, materials, and pollution to create, people still forget them at home and buy new ones each time.

You have to take more care with paper (people are lazy) and it costs more from sustainable sources (people are miserly).

If you give me 10 trucks per day of mixed soda cans and newspapers, I can build a factory the size of a small building that separates and processes them into bales of crushed steel cans, bales of crushed aluminium cans, and bales of newspaper, all three have recycling markets and I can sell them.

If we add "some plastic bags" to those truckloads my machine is now a nightmare. The bags will tangle with anything, and they might more or less at random "hop" over or fall into holes sized to match objects, the machine that sorts alumium cans can't handle them, the machine that bales newspapers can't handle them, everywhere is now "also plastic bags", and all my customers don't want plastic bags, their specifications are clear, a little bit of Pepsi or Budweiser in the bale of steel cans is tolerable, a plastic bag is not; One cardboard loo roll mixed in with the newspaper is tolerable, a plastic bag is not; And so on.

I visited a plant in Central London that handles their area's recycling - very noisy, very interesting, they said if visitors took away just one single idea from their visit that idea should be "Don't put any fucking plastic bags in the general recycling".

Wasting is a first-world problem. The "culture shift of reusability" is a rich person's luxury, like those alarm clocks that shred money, except it is mandated for everyone. I hope you see the absurdity and arrogance of it all.

Also, I am not entirely sure this would raise the temperatures of something so massive. In any case it would probably become the "global mantel worming" debate.

What would also be neat would be something like an organization that operates these on beaches across a state / country. Even better: get the government to do it.

Even better than that: outlaw production of the kinds of junk that ends up on beaches. Start doing takeaway food in glass lock containers and bags that are actually reusable (not paper or thicker plastic or cotton) and charge deposits for them. Sure, it creates other problems, but those are usually better problems to be solving.

However, I still assert that to make changes on a huge scale you need to make the economic choices and desired outcomes align. Using plastic for packaging and single use containers is just so ridiculously inexpensive right now that its often the cheapest, most convenient option. If we change that equation then collective behavior will change.

How many tubes of toothpaste do you use per year? Sounds like you're using far, far more than necessary.

Though you can also just brush your teeth with baking soda and go tubeless if you wanted to.

I dig the absolutist approach you take to garbage. Have you thought about it's impact on your overall environmental footprint? For example, have you considered the trade off between energy efficiency and trash efficiency? You poke at canned tomatoes, but eating a canned tomato is probably more energy efficient than eating a fresh one. Another example, I have eliminated paper towels in favor of reusable cloth. I wonder if the paper was overall more environmentally friendly, given that I don't have to run the paper towels through the washer. Thoughts?

Who pays for it? Cambodia's per-capita GDP is just under UD$1300. A third of the country earns less than US$1.90 a day. Its a poor country. From a developed-word perspective it makes sense to collect the trash, but their perspective may be very different.

> Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.

I agree.

There's a great documentary on YouTube about the ship breaking industry in Sri Lanka. Rich nations selling old ships for scrap to a very poor nation who couldn't care less about the environment or workers rights. Much better to dump it there than in a western nation where asbestos must be mitigated and oily pipes can't be welded on the beach.

See also China. Especially a few years ago when their "smoggy cities" photos were making headlines. The west chides them on their pollution, yet where do all your consumer devices come from and why do they come from there and not your country ? Of course they're more polluted when they do most of the manufacturing for the world.

Not all cities in the US participate in recycling programs equally. The overall US plastic recycling rate is still only 31%. Many states (maybe most?) don't have a plastic bottle deposit program.

Most recycling centers bundle plastic up into barges and ship them overseas where they may end up being partially recycled and partially in the ocea. There's often too much contamination to properly recycle. China has also recently stopped taking in these plastic barges so many municipalities don't have anywhere to put this except the city dump.

Personally, my menstrual cycle has been 100% reusable since 2003, and I much prefer reusables to disposables on a comfort level. I mostly use cloth pads, but I use a cup sometimes also. I used to be the opposite - mostly cup, sometimes cloth pads.

I do think we have a responsibility as self-aware beings to pick up after ourselves, but at the same time the Earth will be fine long-term. You could even say it's fine now. Yes, species are going extinct at an alarming rate, but we came from the Earth too and are not the only contributing factors to Earth's various disasters. I'm not about to throw trash out the window because of that fact, it's just that I don't have so much anxiety about totally destroying the planet. Maybe we will destroy the planet inasmuch as we can't live on it anymore, but that's our own damn fault and it's almost nothing compared to the longevity of the Earth.

It would be almost impossible to calculate, but I would guess 98% of plastic reuse is an environmental net negative. Reduce and reuse. Then bury it. Maybe burning it for electricity generation would help if it would offset coal burning power plants.

2. the west is in the best position to start addressing this. Better educated, more prosperous, etc.

3. Much of the waste produced in other countries is for making things to ship to the western world

We should not be playing the victim.