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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

My wife and I were traveling in Borneo a few years back. They have "water villages" there where all the houses are built on stilts in shallow water. You could not see the shore because it was completely covered in a layer of garbage. It was like living on top of a landfill. At first I thought it was garbage thrown out by the villagers, but it's not. It was garbage that washes in on the tide. Every now and then the villagers try to clean it up, only to be overwhelmed by a new batch. We were told that it only takes a few weeks for the garbage to completely cover the shore again. It was heartbreaking.

[UPDATE] Here's a photo: http://www.flownet.com/ron/trips/Borneo/Images/165.jpg

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I saw that on the Malaysian peninsula. Chinese fishing villages that still speak an old dialect of Cantonese. It's worse in what looks to be the dry season and low tide like you have there.

The other issue is that it's not important to them to clean it up - as it was explained to me. I talked to a local while there and she explained that growing up she never saw it, but years away and she doesn't like it now but knows no one is interesting in picking it up. Partly because they don't seem to care in her opinion partly because they don't have trash service there anyhow, a lot of the trash is put there by the people that live right above it. So it seems like double work to them. Why spent weeks cleaning it up when they're dumping their daily trash there and have been for a hundred years - before plastic it wasn't really a problem of course.

There is another issue that many of these little above water fishing villages do have running water - but no sewage. I've seen toilets and sinks that look right down into the water. You DO NOT want to go down there.

I think an important thing to note was of the trash I saw, none of it had American or Chinese labels, instead was bahas-malay writing, or local brands. So it's a little hard to say "oh how awful! I need to do something" when unfortunately, they're doing a lot of it it to themselves directly or their countrymen.

It is sad thought, totally agree. And Borneo was awesome, but don't tell anyone!

> You DO NOT want to go down there.

I don't actually know if this village had sewers or not (I suspect not) but we did see people swimming in the water.

That was more of a YOU don't want to go in there. They might be way more used to it in terms of built up resistance.

I live in Seattle, one of the most expensive cities in the US. Most of the houseboats on Lake Washington and Lake Union dumped their sewage straight into the lakes until the late 60s.

It was only this year that we passed an ordinance prohibiting dumping treated sewage from boats into Puget Sound and the lakes. That's a shudder-inducing thought when you consider that many of the delicious oysters we have here are directly under those boats, filtering everything they can out of the water.

Most of human history has involved treating bodies of water like magical devices that teleport waste away forever.

> Most of human history

Most of life, really. It's only recently (the last century) that we've hit upon such economies of scale, population and production capacity that our natural renewal processes can no longer handle the load.

That, and plastic material making up much of that load. Dumping large quantities of wood =/= dumping large quantities of styrofoam.

I thought federal regulations required the dumping of sewage 12-25 miles from coastline.

They do - this expands those regulations (which have exceptions for discharge of treated sewage) into a full-blown "no discharge zone" (NDZ), where even treated effluent can't be dumped.

As I understand it, the federal regulations reference distance from land - and the Puget Sound is really more of a sea than an open coastline. The previous regulation was something like being 3 miles away from land to dump untreated sewage.

https://www.marineinsight.com/tech/sewage-treatment-plant/

https://ecology.wa.gov/Water-Shorelines/Puget-Sound/No-disch...

Yes, like oasisbob says, the "treated" in my sentence is significant. Federal regulations prohibit dumping untreated sewage, but allow dumping it if it's treated (chemically broken down, I think roughly similar to what you'd do in a septic tank). Call me crazy, but I'm still not super keen on eating oysters that have had treated sewage raining down on them either.

Nope. I don’t eat oysters and if I see someone eat one I excuse myself before I vomit. Thanks dumpers.

But is there some inherent and real quality of biowaste that remains with the oysters after they filter-feed on it?

> Most of human history has involved treating bodies of water like magical devices that teleport waste away forever.

For much of human history, bodies of water effectively did magically dispose of any waste. If you're a small family group or a small tribe, you can pretty much dump anything down a river with no ill consequences.

It was only once extremely large populations gathered around bodies of water for many generations while creating much more and much more toxic waste did it become a problem.

Well it’s also recently we’ve come up with indispodable items like plastic.

150 years ago, the entire human population could poop into the ocean and I’m sure the ocean would be able to handle it (given it’s not all in the same place)

The ocean is huuuuuuge. However plastic can survive for a looooooooong time.

This photo is surreal. I can't believe a trash filled planet is becoming a reality and we are doing little to nothing to stop it.

Human nature being what it is, it's inevitable. Making it about personal responsibility to recycle and dispose tidily is guaranteeing a tragedy of the commons. This frees manufacturers to create ever more packaging crap and chase an extra fraction of a cent.

Only way to stop it is to go back to packaging that decomposes or is inert like glass which soon loses the sharp edges.

We need to get back to paper/cardboard packaging. Trees can be and are farmed. You can use as much paper as you want and never run out of trees.

Also makes it a natural carbon sink (trees->paper packaging->landfills).

Isn't the paper decomposing in the landfill still part of the carbon cycle? Landfills break down, shrink, venting gases back into the atmosphere.

Yes, but at a reduced rate. And the methane at landfills is either burned off or used to generate electricity.

> And the methane at landfills is either burned off or used to generate electricity.

There's a retired landfill not far from my childhood home which was covered with grass and the area turned into a park. It had vent pipes dotting the large hill colloquially referred to as "mount trashmore", but nothing else was done to manage the vented gases.

Perhaps you meant "may be", rather than "is". Especially if we're talking about landfill practices across the globe.

As with everything, it’s nuanced. The EPA regulations requiring methane management are fairly recent, although some waste management orgs have been more progressive than others historically (and there’s money to be made in piping or burning that methane).

With that said, it’s entirely possible there are older landfills that are simply exhausting methane into the atmosphere. I expect their numbers to fall over time, as the EPA has a substantial budget (~$100MM) for landfill custodians who would like to remediate their methane disposal.

https://www.epa.gov/lmop

According to their fact sheet, the majority of active and recently close landfills aren't collecting methane.

It also implies that a modest majority of landfills where collection is economically viable are collecting, but there's apparently ~1400 landfills where it isn't gonna happen.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-08/documents...

No we do not. We need to do this instead:

1. Reduce 2. Re-use 3. Recycle

In that order.

Stop making crap that breaks. Stop buying crap we don't need.

Please, the Western world is doing a lot of work in keeping it out of water ways and oceans. The majority of trash is from China and other Asian countries. [1]

What can we do? Simple, this is where trade requirements include treating the environment right. We already have restrictions on seafood harvesting and protecting certain species like whales and dolphins. no reason we cannot hold trade to require proper handling of waste and pollution to include penalties and fees on offending nations

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-13/5-countries-dump-more...

To be fair, part of the way we "take care" of it is by shipping a bunch of it's trash to China [0].

[0] https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/why-china-isnt-taking-amer...

I mean, true in the most technical sense, but given the Chinese paid an estimated half billion dollars for it in 2016 [1], the implication that it's being dumped there is disingenuous.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-bans-foreig...

I think you are misleading yourself by recycling policies and waste management that takes the trash out to a place where you cannot see it, precisely the point of the article. The amount of trash a person generates in a country like the US is astounding. One person in the US generates in average 4.4 pounds of trash every day, and that makes Americans the top polluters in this sense.

Having lived in North America, South America and China, I can tell you the main difference is packaging. The trash can itself is huge in the US, while in South America people use something closer to a small paper bin. A lot of the trash is organic, but in general, waste management and wastewater treatment in Latin America is awful.

China on the other hand has a big wastewater treatment problem, especially in provinces like Sichuan from what I saw. One village I visited had its main creek contaminated in our generation by a nearby factory. waste generation is also low over there.

https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/trash-number...

For this reason I'm kinda glad stuff like this is happening, it will be a clear reminder of what we're doing to the planet. Kinda like when our rivers caught on fire in the 70s.

It's unfortunate that it's happening to someone, but people need visual reminders that there's a problem.

> You could not see the shore because it was completely covered in a layer of garbage. It was like living on top of a landfill.

I've seen the same thing in many different parts of the world. The coastlines are an absolute mess, but then again so is the interior. Garbage is just everywhere in the developing world, strewn about with no concern no matter where you are.

Part of the problem is development shock and part of it is externality. As the neighboring post says, before non-biodegradable stuff it might not have been as big a problem. It is plausible that if they had developed at their own pace, or that the relevant infrastructure and institutions were put in along with the commercial products, things might have been different.

As it is they are not capable of fixing this problem.

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