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Comment by pentae | Hacker News Reader

A commendable operation but sadly, this is a very small fraction of a percentage of the 8-10 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year.

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

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Those percentages surprised me, so I did some research and it looks like the stat from their research is that 80% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing industry plastics. Not all ocean plastic, which is what the 8-10mil refer to. Ref: https://theoceancleanup.com/ocean-plastic/#other-sources-of-... . Plastics from rivers gets caught in currents that bring it near ocean coastlines/beaches, and takes a long while to make it out to free sea/GPGP. These plastics are mostly non-fishing related. (note: this link is actually a great write-up of why their mission is what it is, and their research backing it).

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.

> The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats

They estimate that 75% of the ocean trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is from fishing boats.

Consider this project the R&D towards a scalable solution, mass production reduces costs. Even more so with automated manufacturing that will soon be possible with the new robotics

> Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN

It's not called a bribed, it's called a secondary financial incentive..

I’m glad I’m doing my part one straw at a time /s

Those straws aren't even paper and theyre full of forever chemicals.

The anti straw campaign was proof that both sides engage in science denialism.

What is the scientific argument pro-straw beyond "yeah sure it doesn't make any difference, but it sure raised awareness of the plastics in the oceans issue! Don't forget the turtle!"

Claiming the anti-straw is unscientific doesn't require that I supply a scientific argument to support using one.

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.

I think straws are useful for the same reason take away coffee cup lids are.

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.

You mean besides not causing cancer?

China is just adopting western ideas. Socialize the cost and privatize the profit. The western solution which is to make criminals of business people doesnt work well enough. Epa superfund sites go unfixed for decades. Governments should just print money and hire cleanup companies. Its like a massive jobs program for when AI takes normal jobs.

Profit min-maxing precedes the west by a few millennia.

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.

Any parent can see that "outsourcing externalities" is the default way of thinking of all humans.

Accounting for your externalities is something you have learn, and there is no guarantee individuals or societies learn it.

95% of all plastic from rivers comes from these 10, none are in the west:

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...

Are those rivers, by any chance, the rivers along which most people live? Weird that.

Do 95% of the world's river-adjacent population live along those rivers? That's the question to be asking.

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