Plastic bag found at the bottom of world’s deepest ocean trench | Hacker News Reader

Plastic bag found at the bottom of world’s deepest ocean trench

education.nationalgeographic.org

71 pointselorant33 comments

So where is the referenced study? Or the actual picture? I did not see a link from this article and the photos are unrelated.

Edit: I think they are talking about this? [1] The depth, location, and description match. The observation is from 1998 which I believe has relevance that would be curiously missing from the article?

Edit 2: I think I found the referenced study: "Human footprint in the abyss: 30 year records of deep-sea plastic debris" [2]

[1] https://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/dsdebris/view/metadata?key=J...

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X1...

> The observation is from 1998 which I believe has relevance that would be curiously missing from the article?

What you're missing is that it's not an article, but an educational resource for kids in grade 3–12.

That only makes me more upset! Why stifle the curiosity of kids that want to investigate the original sources of such information?

It literally says it comes from the Deep-Sea Debris Database, it doesn't spoonfeed it by listing the specific reference, but a search for "mariana trench" and I can see a large variety of debris, including

Plastic bag/sheet (Several), Unidentified debris

Can

Beverage can

Other plastic product (Several)

etc

I feel educational writing would be a better resource by listing their sources.

Philippines is the world's largest source of ocean trash. Even more than China.

The UN should start censuring countries which just throw their shit into the oceans.

> Philippines is the world's largest source of ocean trash [...]

Here's a nice (well, actually horrifying) visual of the problem:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

> The Philippines—an archipelago of over 7,000 islands, with a 36,289 kilometer coastline and 4,820 plastic emitting rivers—is estimated to emit 35% of the ocean’s plastic.

So how can we even start tackling this problem? they need about 4820 garbage collection services, it's going to be expensive...

How much of that originates from rich / developed countries?

Comparatively, very little [1].

And with developing nations quickly moving up the economic ladder, there's perhaps hope this comes to an end within a few short generations.

[1] https://www.plasticethics.com/home/2019/3/17/the-countries-p...

That article's misleading, probably out of ignorance of the author since it looks like an indie page. Up until 2018 China was importing about 45% of the world's trash plastic for recycling. [1] The world's waste is not well tracked, with a lot of opaque shifting about going on, but the paper makes some effort to estimate exports/imports.

The top trash plastics exporters (excluding Hong Kong, which imports and then exports a massive amount back to mainland China) over the time period studied (1988-2016) are: USA 26.7 million tons, Japan 22.2, Germany 17.6, Mexico 10.5, UK 9.26, Netherlands 7.71, France 7.55, Belgium 6.41, Canada 3.89. China imported a total of 106 million tons. It's estimated that the Chinese ban will see some 111 million tons of displaced plastics by 2030.

It's definitely just another example of developed countries exporting their problems to developing countries, and then looking the other way.

[1] - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aat0131

Is this not because 1. the Philippines is a bunch of islands, mostly tiny ones; where 2. the smaller islands have mostly-agrarian populations who live mostly below the poverty line, and therefore can't maintain reliable working electrical infrastructure, let alone municipal waste + recycling collection infrastructure; and so, in combination, 3. the trash just piles up near homes in these areas, and then gets easily washed out to sea every time it rains, because effectively everywhere on a tiny island is directly upslope of the ocean?

I'm not sure what "censure" would do to address that problem. It seems endemic to the conditions that a large number of Filipinos live in — in a similar way to how India's highly-polluting use of wood and dung for home cooking fires seems endemic to the conditions a large number of Indians live in.

This is the reason. By far, most people in the Philippines live in poverty and anything affordable to poor people comein plastic sachets.

Instant coffee, shampoo, detergent, soap, almost everything is most affordable in a plastic sachet, and usually in very small amounts.

The detergent is enough for two small loads of laundry, the shampoo for two or three showers, etc.

This is combined with virtually no garbage handling, and often where there is garbage collection, it usually goes to landfills which are close to the sea and "leaks" plastic to the sea every time it rains or the wind blows.

Some places have started banning plastic shopping bags, but until there is an alternative or regulation to plastic sachet packaging, this problem won't go away.

We need an exclusion for our actual shit and for animal shit though, as we haven’t really tried solving that and don’t want fines.

And what exactly will censuring them do? My expectation would be nothing because the UN is an inept and corrupt organization that has not done anything useful ever.

Maybe the solution is rather to end NIMByism in advanced economies and stop exporting dirty jobs to countries that have way worse environmental protection regulations in the name of saving the environment.

The US reduced oil production in recent years, just to import more oil, and unless they only imported more oil from Norway (they didn't), every imported gallon of oil is worse for the environment than US produced oil.

Same with most other production, NIMByism needs to end and production should move back to advanced economies. If you are not comfortable producing things in your country, stop using those things.

The other day while eating food I had delivered from a restaurant, I found a small piece of plastic mixed into it, about half a square centimeter. Pretty lucky to have spotted it, mixed in amongst multi colored rice and whatnot. It almost certainly would not have caused me issues, but I still do not like the idea of eating it. Encountering things like this makes you think about how many similar cases you don't notice.

If the human body reacted badly to ingesting indigestible items, we'd have been (rightfully?) extinct a long time ago.

I have found a packet of cigarettes in a pelagic odontocete so, why not? I can't think about one single reason why plastic would be unable to reach this places eventually. Is just a few Km sinking after all

Is not like if we would lack an abundance of proofs. Sea debris database here. You can browse photos by type and minimum deep:

https://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/dsdebris/e/index.html

But not everything that looks like plastic in the ocean is really plastic.

Meanwhile, one day some Japanese fisherman on some rust bucket trawler unknowingly passing over the Mariana Trench is unpacking his lunch on deck when a gust of wind comes along and blows it over the side....

The point being that though there's definitely lots of plastic in the oceans, an incident in one place doesn't necessarily make a pattern, and random trash being swept into a place that naturally takes in debris from the surrounding shallower ocean possibly makes for better headline drama than a realistic assessment of anything particular.

This information is fairly old, but the article is recently updated. Does the post warrant (1998) or (2018) in the title? Or is it appropriate as is? There was definitely a flurry of reporting on this plastic bag half a decade ago (e.g. https://www.science.org/content/article/plastic-debris-found...)

I think this old. That aside, if I'm not mistaken it should be expected - beyond a certain depth free divers get pushed downward, so presumably rubbish would too.

As seen in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoEVezcE0k0&t=726s

The merits of the writing itself are dubious as many commenters point out. However this doesn’t mean the overall message of the article is wrong.

We are truly the worst stewards of this planet capable of sustaining life. Every year we slowly kill the planet, harm local ecosystems, pollute the planet with GHGs/plastic/microplastics/… and continue to do absolutely nothing about it.

The planet will survive just fine. Over enough time, whatever species manage to survive this, will evolve to thrive in the environment we have created. See e.g. the plastic eating bacteria. However, humans might not survive the major alterations we are introducing to the ecosystem. Or at least, we probably don't want to wait long enough time for the human physiology to adapt to it.

>The planet will survive just fine.

Such a tired and nihilistic take. to call it survival is a stretch when we are artificially creating and contributing to the sixth mass extinction while we leave the planet full of plastic and cement, and devoid of the old growth forests that used to live here and help life flourish.

You know about ice ages? Snowball earth? You know what 1km depth of ice does to old growth forests?

Cement is just human rock. Almost all of it will eventually be subducted.

The planet will survive just fine.

As long as there is even a tiny patch of living stuff somewhere on the planet, things living on it will slowly evolve and take over everything else. Sure, it's a slow process and we will not live to see it, but I find it pretty arrogant to think that we are actually capable of completely ending all life on earth. We are not; only our own lives.

Scientists have found plastic in rain water, in clouds, in the most remote wilderness, in underground caves, highest mountains, deepest trenches. We've permanently covered every inch of our little planet with plastic.

We live in the age of plastic.

The Plasticine?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB0th8vNLxo

Crazy that one of those generic THANK YOU plastic bags you get at a store could one day end up at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench.

More like one of those reusable ones that contain 100x as much plastic

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