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Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

2000 seems like a large number, until you realize that you have to compare it to the mindbogglingly large number that is the surface area of the ocean. He may as well pissed in it for all the harm he did.

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Not to detract from the man's project (which I think is cool), but every little piece of garbage in the ocean does add up. Oceanographers have mapped garbage patches in each of the oceans, e.g.:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/atlantic-plastic/

And in this case, it adds up to a mere 2000 plastic bottles.

If this were a fad, you might have a point.

2000 plus what others throw there all the time and what was already there. That adds up to a <Big Number>.

'others throw there all the time' - 2000 = <Still a Big Number>

He had no meaningful effect.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch) is a real problem. Estimates put its size between 270,000 sq miles 5,800,000 sq miles of floating trash, most of which is plastic. It pollutes the water, kills marine life, and introduces toxins into the food chain which can end up on your dinner plate.

Saying 2000 bottles is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things is shortsighted and irresponsible. Millions of tons of garbage doesn't appear in the ocean for no reason. It exists because everyone thinks to themselves "hey, the ocean is a really big place... what harm does a few bottles really have?" The problem is only getting worse, and after all.. we haven't had plastics for that long.

There's no justification for throwing plastic bottles in the ocean. It doesn't improve the environment in any way, but it currently negatively affects hundreds of species.

A one-off deposit of 2000 bottles has a negligible impact on the Patch. To tackle that, we need to fundamentally re-think a lot of the ways we conduct ourselves.

Perhaps starting with modifying our views that tell us since 2000 bottles is negligible it's ok to do?

Compared to the amount of oil burned around the world for all the computers reading HN I think you can ignore the bottles

Perhaps a better, and more rational argument, is that we should care more about the oil being burned around the world, and not less about the amount of trash being thrown into the ocean.

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