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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how much effort is being put into avoiding this trash ending up in the rivers in the first place. Obviously it's important to catch it before it gets in the ocean, but if people are just dumping directly into the river far upstream, this feels like a Sisyphian task

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Here’s how it works in Colombia, we separate our rubbish and recycling, put the bags out for the garbage truck in the morning. Homeless “recyclers” come around and pick through your trash looking for plastics they can sell to fund their crack addiction. Sometimes they just take the whole bag down to the river bank, cut it open and sort through the stuff they want discarding the rest on the bank. Next time it rains the plastic gets washed into the river and here we are.

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.

The western mind can definitely comprehend it. When it's garbage pickup day in my city, sometimes people are going by on bicycles rooting through trash bins (or recycling bins if it's recycling pickup day) and taking anything they can turn in for a recycling deposit. This is in Vancouver, Canada. It's probably not nearly as prevalent as in Colombia, but yeah...

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 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.

The point of more resilient bags is you take them back with you. Both of our cars has a cooler bag with a bunch of regular bags to get packed at the Supermarket. You just have to remind yourself to bring them in with you.

The reusable bag idea only really works for car owners where you can keep a bag stash or intentional, stand-alone grocery runs where you can take bags from your house ahead of time.

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.

They do have tiny reusable bags that can go in a day-bag or pocket. Surprisingly handy for random things.

eg https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TT5VH1V/

It's worth asking to use a bag you've brought. I do that all the time and businesses don't mind at all. Many are actually surprised and think it's a great idea.

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.

No, biodegradable is far worse for the environment. Normal plastic sits on the Earth's surface for years, as an eyesore to remind us to clean up our act. Biodegradable plastic releases CO2 directly to the atmosphere quickly, contributing to climate change more quickly (albeit with less eyesore).

This is completely disregarding the impact of microplastics on the health of animals, plants and ecosystems (FWIW I am aware that bioplastics shed microplastics as well).

Actually, it is not.

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.

>The western mind cannot comprehend...

Haha, don't most of the users here live in the bay?

Having been to Guatemala, the culture is to throw most trash on the ground. The trash is then washed into the rivers during heavy rains. It's sad to see. The country has a lot of natural beauty, but there is trash everywhere.

Any insights into what makes this culturally acceptable?

The country lacks any real garbage collection infrastructure. And I'm not just talking about ritzy landfill/recycling/compost bin sets every few hundred feet on the sidewalk, emptied by the municipality, I mean there's literally nowhere for any service to actually take the trash if it was in a bin and not on the ground.

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.

If that's the case, then what is this charity going to do with all this trash? Send it back up the river to be dumped again?

"After trash is removed from the Interceptor Barricade using excavators, it is weighed on-site to determine the total catch quantity and passed to local partners and waste management authorities for processing."

Caption to the first photo in TFA.

Sure, I saw that as well. But based on the data in this post, the local trash disposal method is to just dump it in the river.

One would hope that specifically-contracted partners and authorities wouldn't be engaged in such activities, though Ocean Cleanup's site is ... somewhat vague on this point.

Might make for a useful pointed inquiry, as such gaps and loopholes are a stubbornly pervasive aspect of similar initiatives.

you'll make your progeny exceedingly wealthy beyond even your wildest dreams and for generations to come if you can answer the first question. but you're obviously just being sarcastic given the second, so no, that's not likely what they intend to do with it.

very, very well said.

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.

No Ladybird Johnson like figure driving public policy in the 1960s, melding the hippies and government together?

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

Even “Don’t mess with Texas” started as an anti-littering campaign in the mid-80’s into the 90’s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Mess_with_Texas

"Individual responsibility" anti-littering campaigns, most notoriously the 1971 "crying indian" advert, were strongly driven by industries associated with single-use packaging and products which overwhelmingly constituted such pollution. By putting the onus on individual "consumers", the producers were off the hook for responsibility.

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)

The "Walker told me I have litter" mashup/reboot of this is waiting to happen

The "Don't mess with Texas" campaign is supposed to have been fairly effective. I just don't know who is making that determination. If it has been effective, I would hate to see what it without. I'm just not sure where the "learning" is established that some people get it and others don't

If there's no refuse collection service, then people dispose of it themselves. In this instance, it makes rational sense for the individual to dispose of refuse continuously/immediately (dump) rather than aggregating it (collect). And if everyone around you is doing that....culture.

on a smaller scale, I've been involved in many outdoor events with large number of attendees. if you put a trash can further apart than every 10', people will think it is too far and choose to not bother. it's one of those weird things seeing the seemingly large number of trash cans placed around before the crowds.

so i can totally see how it would happen if a country just doesn't have the proper infrastructure to start

It’s acceptable because there is no other option. Except burning it and I’m sure that happens too.

SE Asia is the same. Literally in the culture. The mind boggles.

I have personally witnessed people in the Philippines who live next to the ocean quite literally taking out the trash from their bins, then tossing it directly into the ocean current to be taken away. No functioning garbage collection service there either.

Well, lack of "garbage collection infrastructure" better explains what's going on in SE Asia, India. When there is no such infrastructure, where else people dump?

Saigon is a massive city and has garbage collection infrastructure, yet people still dump trash into the rivers that run through the cities. It is actual culture to just toss trash onto the streets, into the gutters and into the rivers.

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...

https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/

I have worked with people who grew up in Central America and just drop garbage on the ground when done with something. Even if the trash is 20 feet away.

It's hard to shake natural habits from your youth, especially if you don't even care that much.

My experience is that it isn't about not caring.

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.

Ironically this is what people said when they were focusing on cleaning the ocean: "they should focus on rivers, that's how most trash gets into the ocean".

i read that a lot of ocean plastic comes from the fishing industry

Well, if you watch their videos most of what is caught is from the fishing industry, but it's probably a difference in durability. Plastic from rivers etc. are going to fairly quickly break down into (polluting) microplastics because the plastic is pretty thin, so it's best to stop that at the rivers, while a lot of what they are catching in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry because it's all made of thicker plastic and would take a lot longer to break down.

Narrowing their focus to rivers makes it easier to name & shame, & trace to source.

This organisation is more specifically focused on river/ocean plastic removal right now. The ocean conservancy is another organisation that, amongst a wide variety of ocean-related efforts, also deals with trying to improve legislation/etc further upstream (pun intended :P).

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.

Ocean Cleanup is also trying to tackle this

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)

Uninformed guess here but collecting at the river end feels much more efficient than creating culture change in thousands of third world villages...

To me it seems like this would potentially encourage more of the behavior that lead to all this trash in the river, since now people may know it is not going to the ocean.

That's a potential risk, but I think working on both is ok. Organisations like the ocean conservancy deal with trying to change more upstream things like legislation. Even when we do fix the source of the problem we'll have A LOT of ocean plastic to clean up, so starting now seems reasonable. Again, so long as people are also working on the source further upstream, which they are!

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