Our biggest ever river catch?
theoceancleanup.com
theoceancleanup.com
The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats, and from living on a remote tropical island myself, at least 90% of the things you find washed up on the beach appear to be from Chinese fishing vessels. (there's usually Chinese characters on the bottles and plastic)
Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN to require all fishing vessels to bring back their trash to port to be weighed and processed, their nets counted.
They say theres about 10 rivers in the world that contribute the remainder of the ocean plastic, so if they can put these recovery systems on those next then we're half way towards solving the problem
There are NGOs working on legislation/lobbying fixes to the problem; eg Ocean Conservancy. But those changes will take a looooong time to get through the system. And regardless, there's already plastic in the oceans that will have to be cleaned up regardless, causing damage right now. So starting on the cleanup at the same time seems reasonable to me.
The ocean cleanup also funds various research initiatives -- like the numbers you mentioned -- which lobbyists can use to help change legislation.
They estimate that 75% of the ocean trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is from fishing boats.
It's not called a bribed, it's called a secondary financial incentive..
Obviously there is demand for them otherwise capitalist fast food chains would have eliminated them long ago to cut costs. I don't think it's hard to see why they are useful.
The most hilarious outcome of this is the paper straws at places like Starbucks.
Feeding you coffee from a plastic cup through a cancer causing paper straw served to you wrapped in plastic.
Ignoring morals to lower costs is so plainly obvious as a way to increase profits that it is almost an insult to insinuate that any one group of people didn't think of it themselves.
Accounting for your externalities is something you have learn, and there is no guarantee individuals or societies learn it.
Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.
https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2017/11/06/jus...
They have been focused on the end goal, even if it meant having to kill the original idea that drove the initial fame and success. The automated, solar powered platform [1]
I try to remember them when I'm getting too emotionally attached to an idea. They remain pragmatic, focused on reducing the plastic in the optimal way. Even when that means doing it manually, by driving around in "dirty" ships, instead of the nice clean automated solar powered platforms they initially pitched.
Same with expanding to the rivers. Where their initial (and still working) platform is a automated and solar powered one, but recently they are just putting up fences/barriers and then manually scoping up the trash with (again, "dirty") excavators.
I wish them all the luck.
Messing with the top meter of ocean water does its own kind of damage.
So much of the life in the ocean surface layer is going to be involved with the floating trash, like it or not.
Ocean surface sterilization seems incautious and worrisome. Never mind we don't like to see trash. Stripping the ocean surface water will have unforeseen consequences.
See the "managing environmental impact" section here: https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/
I imagine there must be _some_ non zero risk, but I imagine the benefits of removing the plastic outweigh the risk. Ie removing the plastic is better for the wildlife overall, despite the small potential risk.
You do have a point that the impact on the ecosystem is a concern worth exploring, but your statement goes off the rails from there and assumes that they are sterilizing the ocean surface? You've got to expect pushback on such a leap unless you justify it.
According to the video on the site, the boats travel at less than 3km/h and they have live video feeds monitoring the nets. Am I missing anything here?
It's only the top surface, right? The ocean can be miles deep!
But the density of life in the ocean decreases geometrically with depth. By mass, the top inches contain more life than the entire balance of it. Because, sunlight.
Not trying to be standoffish. Just being aware that the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the ass every time.
To the degree this enterprise can remove pepper-sided particles of plastic floating near the surface, it will impact microscopic organisms almost exclusively. To the degree it does not clean at that level, it is not an ocean-cleanup device.
River garbage is, I think (and I began by saying) a brilliant solution. Keep it clean, rather than clean-up-after. Almost all the garbage comes from humans on land after all.
Just as it's so easy to think of the ocean as fish and whales, it's easy to think of garbage on a human scale - yogurt cups, straws, shopping bags. That assumption leads us astray from the actual nature of the problem.
Keep it out, with this device, sieving rivers. A brilliant solution. Not so applicable to the open ocean. That's all I said, am saying, and am finished repeating.
If only Boyan Slat had thought to ask you first
Messing with fragile systems like this is dangerous. Many studies show that blocking river flow causes the extinction of species. Until we can be sure that this is safe, we shouldn't do it.
We should first study it over a reasonable period of time (say 20 years) before doing anything like this. Humans think they can just modify the environment without consequences. That is the root of the issue. We need real change.
2) they didn't block the river flow! 100% that would be very dangerous. The have a capture device on the surface of the water. Wildlife and water travel freely under the surface.
3) the mission statement of this organisation is about helping wildlife, so I reckon they think a lot about the impacts that anything they do can have on wildlife.
The open ocean approach had always been far out in terms of good intentions but unrealistic expectations in my eyes, but with this pivot it's actually awesome: the fancy idea as an accidental Trojan horse to get the reasonable but not quite as exciting idea off the ground.
In hindsight this could have been the one best possible path, I doubt that they would be where they are if they had started out with the effective but boring (compared to their exiting off-shore fantasies!). And neither would they be where they are if they deliberately started with the Trojan horse, knowing of its nature. The best salespersons are always those who honestly fail to understand why the buyer might prefer something different than what they are selling.
I am always encouraging people to donate. These are the kinds of projects that might save us.
I wish YC, and it's kin, would fund companies like this.
Edit: I just watched their 2023 summary video, and it seems like they might also be doing more stuff with the plastic they extract that can be recycled/repurposed. That might be a potential revenue source, but not sure.
If those countries had the political will and financial resources to deal with the waste, they wouldn't need for an NGO to do it in the first place.
The western mind can’t comprehend the level of stratification in society that leads to problems like this. It’s not a case of bumper stickers and catchy slogans for school kids, it’s people trying to survive at a level below any societal cohesion.
The root cause as I see it, plastic. Everything is plastic wrapped in plastic as there’s cleanliness and trust issues in society. Want a bag of lollies? Plastic bag, individually wrapped lollies with an inner plastic wrap as well.
Swapping to trash that’s going to break down in the river is a much easier solution. Some places have started to do this in the last couple years, but it’s mostly virtue signaling fast food places that want to give a western feel to charge higher prices. So you get two layers of plastic on your vegetables but your McDonald’s straw dissolves in your coke.
And yes, for sure, the root cause is the creation of plastic and its inclusion in nearly all commercial products. It's everywhere, and it's not the fault of you and I. We didn't choose it. I completely agree that having discard that is biodegradable (and perhaps can directly contribute to a compost pile) is a very worthwhile goal.
Oh yeah, a bunch of cities here banned plastic takeout bags, but it's implemented in such a poor way that it's now just a great profit center for fast food restaurants: they are _legally required_ to charge $0.25 for a bag, even if it's a paper bag. I'm sure McDonalds absolutely loves this new policy. They already gave out paper bags with takeout, but now they cost the customer $0.25! It's especially funny because now all the restaurants give you these thick "plastic fabric" bags (and charge you for them) which you'll get more use out of, but are not any better for the environment. I still get one every single time I get takeout from any sushi place. Now instead of a bag full of thin plastic bags in my closet, I have a bag full of just as many super-thick plastic/cloth bags in my closet! Good stuff. Some are recyclable, I have a huge stack of these from takeout: https://lppackaging.ca/collections/biodegradable-bags/produc... ... I wonder if I can just tell them I don't want a bag, and arrive with my own...
I bet you can. I've recently discovered you can ask the cold cuts/cheese counter to pack things in containers you brought.
Admittedly I'm not sure that ends up as a net win (is washing liquid better than a gram of oil paper?) but it shows we have a lot of mental dark spots for reuse.
If you're just walking back home from some unrelated task and want to grab some groceries you will rarely have a bag on you, so you'll end up buying one anyway, it'll be then collecting dust at home for months before eventually being thrown away.
For less planned purchases, I find it pretty easy to keep a bag in backpacks, jackets, etc. for ad hoc purchases (or carrying anything generally) to forgo one time use bags. The ones I use for everything are lightweight and foldable, and can easily fit in a pocket.
> having discard that is biodegradable (and perhaps can directly contribute to a compost pile) is a very worthwhile goal.
For one thing, biodegradable plastics release microplastics, just sooner so there is less opportunity to collect them (as is done in TFA). And for another, even if it were not so, the looming climate catastrophe is a far greater danger to all species then is the microplastic concern.
Haha, don't most of the users here live in the bay?
Most cities don't even have a functioning, modern landfill, just clandestine piles served by dump truck. Much of the trash picked up by this effort may have literally already been collected and dumped by a truck in a pile by the river.
There's a big "broken windows" element to the continuation of the problem. It's going to take altruistically motivated, powerful regulators and a lot of money to fix, and neither is not easy to come by in Guatemala.
Caption to the first photo in TFA.
Might make for a useful pointed inquiry, as such gaps and loopholes are a stubbornly pervasive aspect of similar initiatives.
just from one language learner to another, so i hope you can appreciate this small grammatical correction:
> and neither is not easy to come by in Guatemala.
...the infamous 'double negative' que es correcto en español y otros, ¡pero es incorrecto en inglés!
it would seem to be true, and i would certainly defer to you, that altruistic minded and not toothless regulators, plus a whole lot of money are both necessary—and *neither is easy to come by in Guatemala.
again, great explanation of what might be difficult to comprehend from the perspective of others in this modern, interconnected world.
The TV was inundated with public service announcements shaming trash throwers in the USA for maybe 15 years. It made a difference.
Having seen similar "just throw it on the ground" behavior in India and china, I think that it may be a natural response in a rural culture that needs to be changed once it is in a city and non degrading packaging is used
Create an economy in which there is nothing to throw away, or in which costs of recovery and recycling are built in to the products themselves and effectively incentivise round-trip material flows, and the problem largely solves itself. Market dynamics tend strongly away from such mechanisms.
Free-market advocates like to point to the general success of anti-pollution, clean air, clean water, safety, and other similar measures in rich Western countries, without acceding in the least that overwhelmingly such progress has come through courts, legal processes, and social advocacy, rather than market mechanisms. Wealth overwhelmingly has shown that it is self-serving power, as Adam Smith noted nearly 250 years ago.
There's a 1967 interview of Ralph Nader by Studs Terkel I've recently run across, and which describes very much what's happening now as it did the circumstances of nearly 60 years ago, though the industries addressed have shifted somewhat. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...>
Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)
so i can totally see how it would happen if a country just doesn't have the proper infrastructure to start
I used to live alongside Truong Sa river and watched people dump their trash into it all day long. There is even a govt run group that goes up and down the river all day long picking up trash.
I've been following this group for a while now... they do cleanups all the time...
It's hard to shake natural habits from your youth, especially if you don't even care that much.
It is that people who have very little (or come from very little) care about different things, like putting food on the table, today. It is survival instinct only.
Quality of education goes a long way too. Do they teach sustainability in schools there? Even if they did, how many generations of kids do we have to go through before they teach these things to their kids?
There is no concept of a week or a month or 10 years from now. When you're lacking that, you have no care for the future or how your actions today, will affect things down the road.
It really was eye opening taking myself out of my nurture and actually living in a place like SE Asia.
Both do pretty impressive work! I personally find The Ocean Cleanup's more narrow focus at times useful, since it makes them a bit more defensible. Meanwhile finding exactly what the ocean conservancy is even doing is a little difficult because they touch a ton of ocean related things.
From 4 days ago! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGY4rpOnbhw
(that is a depressing and amazing amount of trash, I can't imagine the big one in the ocean)
- It's a carbon sink,
- it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions)
- it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces
- and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint.
The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper disposal place. This isn't Coke's fault, people can just as easily dump a paper carton in the street. I think you'd get more dividends by ensuring the public has the motive (stick or carrot) to not dump their garbage into waterways, and in very poor countries, funding sanitation infrastructure.
It doesn't take much energy to get a ton of petroleum out, compared to a ton of sand, aluminum ore, or lumber.
We are in terrible situation and nothing is simple and even simple stuff is hard to implement and can turn out negative when we implemented.
Things backfire. People are buying plug-in hybrids but then they almost never charge them so material is wasted and de facto ice cars are unnecessarily heavier.
I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.
Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint.
All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.
trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing
Just cut down all the forests they said! It'll be better for the environment!
That doesn't mean trees aren't extremely important in countless different ways.
Which also doesn't mean that we shouldn't use wood as a material, if it's produced with principles.
if it's produced with principles.
This documentary gives a good idea into my reasoning on why believing timber propaganda that "trees are better when cut down and regrowing" is false:
Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.
"Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. "
- https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-...
For reference, the two plastic plants mentioned in the article you linked can emit 3.65 million tons of CO2 per year (about 30% of the nations plastic production annual total). This is a little less than what the average natural gas power plant produces in a year.
And there are about 1000 gas plants in the US. And gas is the least emissive of the power fossil fuels.
So while strictly speaking plastic production does create greenhouse gases, you can basically offset an entire years worth of plastic production emissions with only a handful of wind and solar farms displacing fossil fuel power plants.
Also I don't count burning plastic in lifecycle assessments. That is trivial to outlaw and dramatically pumps emissions figures.
Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute
(Source: Saul Griffith's excellent book Electrify, which cites this report: https://www.ciel.org/plasticandclimate/)
And recycling most common types of plastics actually releases more CO2 than creating new plastic products. There is no panacea one the carbon has been pumped out of the ground.
Maybe we can make it Coke's problem. For example by requiring them to collect and properly landfill weight in plastic of every bottle they intend to sell to customers?
Dig tunnels deep in the earth were it can sit for millions of years before breaking back down into whatever simpler hydrocarbons.
Irony off
A bunch of 3rd world countries on the other hand?
If the companies are making recyclable products then the problem is disposal. There are lots of glass bottles products solid in Latin America like coke that’s put directly into a bag and the store keeps the glass for a refund. It’s easier to put an incentive on the collection of the bottle.
Isn't that the point?
I'm not arguing (or not arguing) for this solution, but charging people the cost of cleanup and allowing them to "ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage" seems like an improvement on the status quo? Because the local government collecting the tax would now have funds to put toward the solution. This is classic internalizing of what were externalities.
So people might throw trash into nature because they think that someone will collect it.
You can make the same argument that you shouldn't clean your own house because that will just encourage others to make it dirty again. And thats obviously not how it works. Some people throw trash and some don't.
We should clean it up anyways.
For those not familiar with Aldi in the States, they have a very rudimentary analog system that locks the carts up, and you put a US quarter in the lock to unlock the cart. You shop, put your groceries away, and when you go to lock the cart back up you get your quarter back. A quarter is basically nothing in today's modern age, but the mental desire to get it back is apparently powerful enough to incentivize people to walk the cart the 10 meters or so back to where it belongs. I haven't been to the Aldi's in Germany but I assume they work the same way.
Fighting to fix the problem at the root is an effort that will take decades. Interfering with the clean-up in the mean time because it might change the perceived urgency of the problem tells you a lot about what you need to know.
Glad to see them still in action!
i feel certain that this relatively new (sub?)industry—waterway/ocean waste management—is here to stay for a very long time. but i struggle to see how it could ever turn a profit, unless and until they're able to generate revenue/s from the waste they're retrieving. it all feels like a fascinatingly super long play.
* System described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 and links back from there
Further, I imagine that for some cities, the potential increase in tourism from having clean waters might be worth the investment.
It's a non profit org, although they did have an effort a few years ago where they created fancy sunglasses from the plastic they removed, and raised more money from there. The Wikipedia page lists a number of big donation campaigns/big partners who provide funding.
My only complaint is their use of kg instead of tonnes to let them use big sounding numbers. You don't need to do that guys. It's lame. We can see the photos. It's clearly worthwhile even if it is only a small part of global waste.
https://theoceancleanup.com/faq/are-donations-to-the-ocean-c...
- initially funded via crowdfunding
- individual donations
- a few big partner/company donations
- occasional fundraising campaigns for donations
- occasional awards
- a while back they made fancy sunglasses from the plastic they removed, and sold those. Not sure if that's still a thing though.
Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup#Funding
Looks terrible but if you catch the trash in the end and burn it or landfill it nearby it becomes a kind of replacement for network of diesel trucks running around each day collecting trash.
Not sure if or why a NGO would need either of those.
> "The Foundation may also place tracking/marketing cookies, such as from Google Ads, LinkedIn, Bing, and Facebook. These cookies are placed once you give consent in the website cookie bar on your first website visit. The purpose of these cookies is to better assess the performance should we run ad campaigns and to include or exclude specific segments of people from seeing those ads depending on their interactions with the website.
So fund raising.
In fact, I found opting out to be as easy as it would have been to click "Accept"; but that prevented me reading the article.
I see on their FAQ that they try to recycle the plastics, but they catch a lot more than plastics.
They should burry it deep into the ground (in defunct mines?) basicslly returning the coal to the earth instead of putting it into the atmosphere.
The ROI is literally cleaner environment. If there was only a way to tax proportional to emissions producers.
You can see exactly why this would not impress people concerned with ROI, right?