Hacker News Reader

> NYC probably has people actively cleaning trails and beaches.

> Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash.

This is exactly my experience as well. Every place that I have been, if it is a remote site that no one is actively cleaning up, then it has weeks, months, years, or even decades of accumulated garbage. Popular destinations, like beaches around resorts, well-maintained hiking trails, private beaches; these all have people regularly picking up garbage.

Some of the most "pristine" beaches I've seen were on outer islands of Fiji. But they were pristine because they had resorts on them, or near them. Kayak over the other side of the island, where no one picks up, and it's trash city. The global ocean system deposits garbage everywhere, on every beach. Depending on where you are in the various gyres, that beach gets more or less washup. I've been to beaches in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Fiji, Africa, Europe, and both coasts of the US. The primary discriminating factor on how much garbage you see is how regular and thorough the pickup is.

Yes, agreed. I lived in Matsue a couple years ago and found a couple nice spots that were covered in ocean trash. Loads of plastic bottles both from Japan and other countries (there was a milk carton from Australia), styrofoam, polyester apparel, some random other stuff.

Pic: https://blog.qiqitori.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC0249...

Boring blog entry: https://blog.qiqitori.com/2017/08/beach-cleaning-in-matsue-j...

I found your blog entry very interesting, thanks!

The outer banks of North Carolina has miles of beaches linked to nature reserves that don’t get cleaned or accumulate such trash. Japan is surrounded by a sea of trash due to the countries surrounding it.

Litter ends up in streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. You can argue it’s an issue with plastics, but it’s equally an issue with trash.

>Japan is surrounded by a sea of trash due to the countries surrounding it.

I'm seeing mainly trash from Japanese companies that are Japanese products with Japanese labels. It's easy to recognize. Externalizing blame isn't the solution because it's not the problem.

Currents likely help carry trash away from certain regions. Japan's east coast isn't really being affected by trash that would be coming from, say, China, because currents don't carry most of it to our beaches. It's stuff being washed out locally and brought back by waves here. Much more is likely being passed out into the middle of the ocean.

The problem seems to be that the trash is getting into the water. Who is dumping laundry detergent bottles into rivers and oceans? Solve that problem. If the bottles switch to some other material, whoever is dumping them now will keep dumping them. Get trash into landfills and the water will be fine.

Ok, a little digging shows Japan has a much larger littering problem than I thought it did.

That said, Asia really does have a much larger issue here than the rest of the world. 90% of plastic pollution comes from “Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.”

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

The link in the very first post I made was about the US and EU literally shipping their plastic to other countries as part of their "waste management" program.

> Upon implementation of the policy in 2017, plastic imports to China plummeted by 99%.[9] This led to waste stream backlogs across Europe and North America.[9] When they could find buyers, most European plastic was diverted to Indonesia, Turkey, India, Malaysia, and Vietnam.[9]

Western governments are sending trash to these places knowing it's finding its way into rivers just so they don't have to spend money processing it themselves. These impoverished countries are overwhelmed with trash that isn't theirs. It's a problem because Western countries are selling trash that they claim is recyclable and a valuable resource, but is literally useless trash. The moment one country bans the system (such as China), the EU and US find another place to dump it instead of processing it on their own.

The import bit was: “When they could find buyers”

The US and EU have plenty of landfills, their exporting plastic which was actively separated from the waste stream for recycling which can be profitable. If nobody wants to pay for it then the default is to burn it domestically for energy.

The link mentioned that a lot of it was "contaminated" recyclables.

Contaminated recyclables are just garbage. Countries are getting fed up with the EU and US sending supposedly separated recyclables because it's pure garbage falsely labeled as usable plastic. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48444874

Contaminated recyclables isn’t the equivalent of garbage.

The issue is the degree of contamination. Different municipal waste streams all have their own internal systems a 98% plastic stream and a 99.9% plastic stream are very different economically.

Completely separate from that it’s a political issue as nobody wants their country to be thought of as a dumping ground. “Malaysia says up to 3,000 tonnes of rubbish will soon be returned to the UK, US, Japan, China, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Norway and France.” what’s not mentioned is this represents 1% of plastic sent to the country. The don’t want to ban the process because the other 99% is quite valuable domestically.

No, this is a sadly common misconception.

Trash in rivers in Asia is from local littering, pure and simple.

Trash that Western countries send over is simply buried or burned. It's not the source of plastic pollution in rivers. There's real concern with it being a source of air pollution when burned... but it's simply not turning into litter.

> I'm seeing mainly trash from Japanese companies that are Japanese products with Japanese labels.

My experience has been the exact opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025358

I was in North Carolina in 2019, in the outer banks. I did see plastic bags and such washing up on the shore, like I've seen everywhere else. They weren't "covered" in garbage, but it's there. It's a sliding scale, a spectrum, which has a lot to do with ocean currents. But yes, there are regular cleanup efforts for these beaches run by the parks service. They'd look much worse if it were not so.

Sitting at the bottom end of that scale you’re mostly seeing litter from tourists. North of Corolla is a long stretch of beach that lacks road access, it’s shockingly pristine and doesn’t see regular cleanup efforts.

Ok, I haven't been to those specific spots. But I bet you'll find small plastic debris (1-3cm in size) at the high tide line on beaches. They're everywhere in all oceans.

That’s possible. I never specifically went looking for it and could easily mistake something that small for bits of shell etc.

This is the unfortunate thing about giving a beach a deep clean. Now you start to see it everywhere.

It can also be under the sand.

I once spent a morning cleaning ~50 plastic bags in the wet sand of the beach at low tide. They were empty shopping bags, but had opened up and filled with sand, so they were basketball-sized and really deep; they required _digging_ every single one to get them out. Next day, 50 more were there. There was no way that many washed up in one night. So I did a little digging with a spade, as deep as I could go in the sand, all the way down to my armpit. And I brought up piece after piece of plastic from the depths, punching through bags on the way down; I don't know how many layers deep. Then I realized these "new" 50 bags had just been there under the surface. The layer of sand made free by yesterday's cleanup was now washed away by the tide to reveal them. That was just the worst feeling, knowing that that beach was basically a 1km-long landfill, riddled with garbage at least a meter deep. An extreme example, but it kind of broke me.

> Some places like Okinawa and Kamakura beach are generally cleaned

As for Okinawa that seems to depend on the island. When I was there some years ago, many beaches on the smaller islands were covered in trash (mostly of Western origin – one could often still decipher the letters on e.g. beer and shampoo bottles).

That doesn't necessarily discount it being local waste due to the large number of foreigners on Okinawa (American military, mainly) who get familiar products shipped in from abroad. The military base even has its own mall that locals can apply to visit and buy American products.

Personally, I'm not surprised Japan has a plastic waste problem, the shops and manufacturers here are addicted to plastic, and the culture is one of appearances above truth so I'm not surprised to hear about the differing levels of care dependent on whether tourists frequent a place.

I've also lived in other parts of Asia and I've seen some shocking things to do with waste. India was the worst. As another comment mentions, it's probably best that developed nations export knowledge and attitude towards waste, not just waste.