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Comment by ajay-d | Hacker News Reader

60 minutes had a segment last night on plastic reaching the most remotes parts of the ocean. Incredibly disheartening.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-great-pacific-garbage-patch...

Are you personally dumping your used plastic in the ocean?

Trash from just 10 rivers is responsible for 90 percent of ocean plastic pollution: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

Those 10 rivers are all in the developing world and China: the Hai, Nile, Meghna, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Pearl, Amur, Niger, Mekong, Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze. In terms of countries that's: China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Nigeria.

What about trash we send to them to recycle but ends up in the ocean?

Seems like a crazy good opportunity for a few NGOs to show incredibly high environmental benefits for a few bucks.... put up barriers, nets, or filters in the 10 sources, capture and dispose before it reaches the ocean.

And as the 60 Minutes documentary talks about, the US ships a huge amount of recycled plastics across the ocean to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and until recently, China.

So the plastic you throw in the recycling bin in the US might very well end up in one of those 10 polluted rivers and in the ocean.

>Trash from just 10 rivers is responsible for 90 percent of ocean plastic pollution

Is this still being misquoted? If you read the article you will see that it say 90% of plastic pollution from rivers are from those 10 rivers, not 90% of plastic pollution. A large part of the plastic pollution is not coming through rivers. It is also not much of a surprise that the rivers with most pollution is large rivers going through areas where many peoples live. Have anyone calculated how much is is per person living next to the rivers?

I'm not saying that it isn't important to clean up those rivers, but that it still is important what each of us do

One important thing that often gets overlooked though, before people start feeling super guilty about using plastic bottles and those can holders: most plastic in the ocean flows down the rivers in Asia, not so much Europe / the US. Probably because we have a good trash management infrastructure. Landfills and incinerators are pretty bad, but I think especially landfills are preferable about just tossing it wherever and having it flow into rivers / the sea.

TL;DR: Pay your taxes so the government can employ people to manage trash. Also, don't litter.

Until recently most of the plastic recycling from the US was shipped to China. So it's possible that the plastic flowing down the rivers in Asia was actually American plastic.

But recycling good!

But we repented and served our penance by banning plastic straws.

> Probably because we have a good trash management infrastructure.

Part of our trash management infrastructure consists of gathering it all up, and shipping it to Asia, where it gets dumped in the rivers.

It is, in a way, pollution laundering.

I think that is the reality people are coming to about most plastics. While metal, glass, and paper are quite recyclable, plastic is not nearly as recyclable as the general public is led to believe.

The pragmatic reality is that most plastics, for the time being, are likely better off going into landfills as opposed to entering a long inefficient global supply chain which leaks a non trivial amount of that plastic into the surrounding environment. While at the same time providing minimal utility as base material for new products.

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