Monitoring marine litter from space | Hacker News Reader

Monitoring marine litter from space

esa.int

221 pointsbitschubser_89 comments

One thing I find interesting is how much more traction the problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have.

I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a wilderness, where litter doesn't belong, whereas we are very used to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?

It goes something like "not my fault, let's focus on others' problems not mine." You don't throw trash into the ocean so you feel like the real issue comes from something you are not knowingly contributing to with your hand.

The thing is most pollution and changes in the ocean are not visible right away, while hiking or on land in general I directly see consequences of littering and environmental impact and its possible to act upon (littering on highways)

in the oceans on the other hand a lot of environmental impact is just not visible, thus it needs to be made visible, I see a nice beach... I don't see particles floating just under the surface, I don't see the destroyed eco systems by trawling, I don't see "death zones" where there is no marine live...

so this is a good step into direction making these things visible

What you are seeing is a ratio of awareness and ease of solving the problem.

It’s a lot easier to stop throwing crap into the ocean than it is to replace a century of sunk cost in carbon emitting energy technology. We are plenty aware of climate change but almost don’t even want to face that challenge.

This is my feeling, too. I'm all for clean oceans, but we shouldn't think that this is the biggest threat right now.

Huh… rubbish lining the highways always stands out to me due to its rarity.

There are some stretches in the UK where rubbish collects by the roadside in large amounts, tangled in hedges etc, presumably because winds concentrate it there.

Even in my area, the most visible litter is along waterways. Regardless of where the trash originated, it will pretty much always find its way to waterways. Which might be part of why it's rare for you to see along the highways unless you have a very active group working off their community service hours.

It's because litter in the ocean can travel and pollute anywhere else in the ocean. A landfill in Germany doesn't affect anywhere except the immediate surroundings.

The ocean is a shared resource. Land isn't.

Ocean trash has interests groups supporting it. Plenty of groups taking money to deal with it (or not) and part of that is to advertise the issue to ensure more money keeps coming into this industry. There is are no large international organizations or government efforts going out there to remove all the trash outside the more commercial or industrial parts of town, no ones buying ads about it, so its not in the public awareness as much. It also doesn't help that over time people grow blind to it. Heres an experiment you can run: find some litter on the sidewalk and see how many minutes or months go by before someone bends over and picks it up who isn't paid to do so. Chances are it will be in the months to never category, unless the person picking it up owns the land under that trash.

None?

Ohio has a pretty well-established Adopt-a-Highway program that ultimately exists to help with removing litter, and it works mostly in places that are absolutely not "in town" at all.

It has been operating for decades and is advertised on signs alongside these highways.

Elsewhere in Ohio, I've seen ODOT employees picking up trash -- and I assure you that they aren't doing this [or anything else] for free.

(But the state of Ohio only maintains ~49,000 miles of roadways, so maybe none of this can combine to equal a "large effort".)

I think indeed the ocean is often seen as one of the last frontiers of untouched wilderness

Most of the places I've lived, litter isn't much of an issue. There's certainly more than I'd like, but you've got to go looking for it other than around overflowing public trash cans and such. Vegetation near highways has a pretty high carrying capacity for litter, too.

I've visited places where it's much worse. And have heard it used to be very commonly a lot worse throughout the US. But anti-littering campaigns with slogans such as Don't Mess With Texas and Litter and It Will Hurt and penalties seem to have had at least reasonable success.

I wonder if this can discern for fishing nets pollution, called ghost nets, which entangle and ensnare marine animals. The scale of harm for these animals is unthinkable.

Edit: the ghost nets come from ships. We need to pinpoint the “fishing vessels who continue to dump their old nets into the sea with impunity.”

https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/pla....

Ghost nets are haunting reminders of human impact, silently ensnaring marine life and disrupting ocean ecosystems.

The scale of harm seems miniscule to me: it seems unlikely that discarded fishing nets would entangle more animals than when they're actually used to fish, and they're presumably used more than once before being discarded.

Waste is a huge problem, clearly human made, clearly responsibility to address in every current generation.

Cost of products sold must include recycling and waste management costs.

Otherwise, the manufactures will keep making devices/items with built-in-obsolescence to make it 'fashionable' for consumers to replace them at the first opportunity.

In many countries it already often does. My guess is that in most of the biggest polluters it does not. Either due to corruption or lack of regulation.

When I buy packaged groceries I often decide whether I'll buy it again based on the packaging used. And I feel like from my perspective things are getting better slowly. Lots more paper where plastic used to be, good stuff.

Now the other day I went to my ethnic neigborhood store that I usually only buy veggies from but this time I got some imported roti breads and good lord, the amount of plastic they use is just insane. It opened my eyes to the fact that probably the vast majority of the world still packages their food like there's no tomorrow. Every roti was wrapped in 2 sheets of plastic, packaged in a bag of plastic. 5 rotis in bags in another bag, 5 bags of those in the large bag you see in the store. They tasted great but I'm not going to buy them again, it's just too much garbage, most of it isn't even recyclable where I am. It's completely unreasonable what we're doing here.

I’ve seen rotis sold in grocery stores and they look almost nothing like you’d typically get in the actual country they’re imported from. I wonder if the plastic is added on to appeal to our sensibilities?

They need to work out a way for the costs to actually go towards targeted local cleanup operations which is no easy feat considering you need to extract them from all of society that produces trash. You'd have to create probably a new government agency that staffs cities with sufficient trash pickup. It would probably be in the billions in labor considering trash is often just as prolific in a tiny town of 400 people as it is in the big cities.

What would be perhaps more realistic is regulating packaging and other materials such that they can degrade safely in place with the assumption they will be littered and not properly recycled.

What’s the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I’m being too cynical?

Awareness is just step one.

Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts.

There's a multi-trillion dollar startup just waiting for you to solve that problem.

ah yes, get ready for the startup that will solve EDCs in my ballsack and the ballsacks of all my descendents.

In garbage disposal in South East Asia? Almost all plastic comes from a few countries.

Have fun trying to persuade people to give you money to help stop it, when the corporations producing it can pay the same people a lot to stop you

If you catch someone littering, you can fine them. Theoretically.

The more information we have about where waste comes from, the more we can target our efforts at reducing it to the biggest sources

Now in the UN, or at the next climate conference, people can actually say:

"Look, Vietnam, you are somehow responsible for 12.2% of the marine plastic in the ocean, with only 1.23% of the world population. We are making this trade agreement or that international investment conditional on that number improving by 2028."

Before, there was simply no way of monitoring these things. I had to invent that number. That is a massive problem in terms of the politics.

And it goes up the hierarchy as well. Vietnam can now also go "Ho Chi Minh City, look at this map, how on earth did that happen?"

Now we can actually monitor it, it's a way of keeping countries on the promises they have already made: https://www.oecd.org/ocean/topics/ocean-pollution/marine-pla...

I was assuming the UN has to deploy bouys or ships at river mouths to the anger of the country owning the territory.

> Using a six-year historical series of 300 000 satellite images, the team scanned the entire Mediterranean Sea every three days, at a spatial resolution of 10 metres, on the hunt for windrows.

Indeed, but I'd assume it's also a long way to go from doing it for a small section of the world to doing it everywhere and with multiple countries participating.

The Sentinel-2 mission is doing that [0]:

> Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56° S to 84° N, coastal waters, and all of the Mediterranean Sea

The constellation is not complete yet though. Sentinel-2C is planned to launch in September [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 [1] https://www.satnow.com/launch-mission-details/sentinel-2c

Additionally, the only sea covered in its entirety is the Mediterranean. Generally, constellations don't do captures over open ocean as researchers/customers tend to be much more interested in events on land; this makes it difficult to do long-term analyses of marine events as the data just simply isn't captured.

Source: work in the industry

True, but coastlines are well covered. Assuming the pollution comes from the coast it should be fairly easy to determine what the hotspots are (see Po river on the map in the article).

> I'd assume it's also a long way to go from doing it for a small section of the world to doing it everywhere

This probably isn't a good assumption. It's likely more about it being much faster to iterate/validate the methodology on the smaller dataset of just the Mediterranean (2.5 million km^2) before spending the effort to run it on the entire ocean (361 million km^2, 144x larger data).

Interestingly The Philippines is responsible for 35% of ocean plastic waste.

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

https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

I mean how much of that is because western countries take advantage of Vietnam and other countries in their region to cheaply produce their plastic crap?

The US produces plenty of plastic waste on its own, but it ends up in landfills because of modern garbage collection and street sweeping infrastructure. Before the development of landfills and garbage trucks, trash was a much bigger problem in the developed world - plastics just weren’t very common yet.

Most developing countries don’t have that infrastructure so plastic pollution is everywhere, regardless of how much they export to Western countries.

It's not "regardless" at all though. Knowing they don't have the infrastructure in place to deal with existing waste, it's easy to predict what happens when we outsource production there. However much uncontrolled waste they would generate, we are choosing to add to it.

Most of the waste likely comes from their native consumption, not their production.

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

More than a third comes from The Philippines, India 13%, China 7%.

Not much? It’s the habits of the society. Other places have similar economic situations without the pollution.

Is there a principle or a name for how measurement leads to enhanced control?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

What isn't measured isn't managed.

There are efforts to reduce the production of waste and to eliminate ocean dumping. There are thousands of such efforts. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

> Maybe I’m being too cynical?

Yes. What’s the point in spreading negative falsehoods?

>> to reduce the production of waste and to eliminate ocean dumping.

>> Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

We need to stop conflating problems. Production of waste is different than disposal of waste. Reducing the volume of waste by a few percentage here and there isn't an efficient use of energies. Rather than teach developing countries to reduce/recycle, we need to get them to landfill garbage rather than dump it into rivers. That should be the focus.

So you build a landfill. How do you get the collected waste to the landfill? How do you do collections? Then of course, there's the training/habit breaking to use the new collection system.

I'm not stating this as a reason not to, but a realistic look on the logistics. It's a multi-generational solution, not a quick one in the least. So we should start now, not tomorrow

It's just the very first step. How are we going to stop it if we don't even know where it comes from?

You stop production by showing it's harmfulness.

Not cynical enough in my books.

As the saying goes: trust is good, control/verification is better

As they say, you can’t fix what you can’t measure. This is a first step.

> Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts

“Nice and all” is exactly what we’re going for. It’d cost us too much today (in terms of change to lifestyle and in terms of money) to stop the bleeding where it starts so we’re hoping that we can just fiddle around and that we die before the effect people have on the Earth gets really bad for us. We don’t care if it gets bad for other people though.

Don’t underestimate the power of ego and national pride. Shinning a light on the foibles of nations is generally very effective, for good or not. It’s clear from the images so far that there are local hotspots, and those areas aren’t incapable of mustering the resources to ~solve it~ [improve or maintain their national caché].

its useful to measure and track the problem if only demonstrate it's validity

Very similar situation in medicine. Diagnostics seems to have improved but not the cures, or prevention. To add to the confusion often early diagnostics + treatment is presumed to be prevention. All in all, it appears to me that there is grand delusion of progress while somewhat regressing.

If you don't measure the problem you don't know if it's getting better or worse, or even, strictly speaking, that it exists at all.

"Let's first fix the problem, and maybe later figure out if it exists" is much worse than the opposite order.

You are being too cynical, there are ongoing global negotiations over a UN plastics treaty that will govern plastic production: https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution. It is slow and difficult but it is moving.

There's a great podcast called Plastisphere that had a lot of coverage of the most recent meeting in April: https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/

No, you are right. A lot of effort is being poured into monitoring and advocacy because that is the only place those interested in tackling these problems have to go. If there was an appetite for reform or mitigation, the folks doing high tech problem solving would be put to work in more meaningful ways. Worldwide though there is little interest in or support for changing our lifestyles, industrial systems, or resource flows to any significant extent (beyond extending them within poorer countries).

It is not a technology issue. It is a political, infrastructural and educational issue. Almost all plastic pollution comes fram a handful of countries which do not care about proper garbage collection and recycling.

The west, or for that matter even most third world countries do not cause much plastic pollution at all.

> The west, or for that matter even most third world countries do not cause much plastic pollution at all.

This is naive given that consumption, production, and use of plastics is distributed worldwide, but with a heavy concentration in OECD nations.

You are correct that the issue is political, but pretty much everything else you've said is subjective and shifting blame. The truth is if you use and dispose of plastics you are part of the problem and your country should be working on solutions (the easiest of which is simply to not use plastic).

At some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest ocean plastic, and use it to produce energy .. and every time I see one of my favourite remote-beach Youtubers climb over piles of plastic rubble on some remote tropical island, I can't help get the feeling that there has to be some kind of way to make a portable, self-replicating 3D printer that can go out there and just reproduce itself.

But I guess the chemistry behind all of this is beyond me. It sure seems like the 3D-printing revolution needs to be followed up with a plastics-deconstruction phase, so that 3D printers don't get factory-produced spools of future ocean-bound plastics, but rather a giant hopper into which one can pile collected plastics from the environment. Some sort of primordial proto-Feed, I guess ..

"portable, self-replicating 3D printer" you mean bacteria? I am sure someone is working on plastic eating bacteria but it might not be a great idea to have it loose in the world.

Nature seems to be on the case already, for example: https://futurism.com/the-byte/plastic-eating-fungus-pacific-...

Many scientists/people only think about problem in the scope of the their discipline. Keep in mind this is the problem-solution knee jerk (treat the symptom) responses is how we got to our current situation in this world.

Oh we don't like horse dung, we going with cars now!

With bio-engineering such as this, many intergenerational horizontal studies need to be done before it even should be consider releasing in the wild.

I'd prefer it had an off switch and an API entirely subservient to our needs, rather than DNA.

You can engineer systems that effectively have an off switch (sterilized progeny with short life or a certain environmental lethality condition e.g. dependent on you constantly supplying certain substance) as well as even an API (e.g. built in features that enable integration with other genetic techniques such as insertion sites for cloning).

"At some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest ocean plastic"

I hope not. You can harvest landfills much cheaper today. If that becomes more expensive than taking plastic from the ocean, then the oceans would be really full of plastic.

The ocean is a major source of energy which could be used to power the thing.

And I'd prioritize ocean cleanup over landfill, first of all. I mean, maybe we use the ocean to construct the fleet, and then when its nice and clean, send the fleet to land ..

You might want to learn something about engineering first. And run some numbers.

And read about them, who tried something way less ambitioned:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup

And still were not that effective.

Oh, this is just a thought experiment, the engineering isn't within our grasp.

I'd imagine some sort of floating device which can build copies out of itself with the plastics it finds is not far away, but it probably does involve a fair bit of science before it becomes more than just fiction..

If we would have that tech, we also could then release the engineered plastic eating bacterias. Way easier.

But currently we want some plastic to remain intact.

Landfill is also a source of energy. Some cities have built power plants that are fueled by landfill emissions or through incineration of excess materials.

> a giant hopper into which one can pile collected plastics from the environment

A bit like Mr Fusion[0]?

[0] https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion

As long as that means we also "don't need roads" too!

Already being done?

https://theoceancleanup.com/

It's good to see how to track it, but what's more important is knowing how to clean it up. Additionally, dumping nuclear wastewater might pose an even greater threat.

The thought of this relentless deluge of plastic entering the seas is heartbreaking.

it does take a non-profit effort to be able to monitor the seas. iirc most image satellites make trips on land masses and the seas and oceans are just approximated in commercial settings.

I thought this article was going to be about all the satellites and used rocket parts we dump in the ocean all the time, which is a problem that doesn't have a great solution other than launching cargo ships like Starship to retrieve old spacecraft for recycling.

Finally we can see niat from space. All that ancient spite towards the various occupiers who owned the allmende, visible in wild littering worldwide.

amazing, would be funny, liter? no nuclear submarine

I read it as if stuff from space was littering the sea....

Kind of sad to imagine the satellites doing this are also surrounded by orbiting trash in space

How much space trash is there in total from less than a hundred years of space travel? How large is the surface of the earth? Would you really consider yourself "surrounded" by trash if there was one piece of trash a mile away from you? Your intuitions about this space trash problem are way, way off.

The problem is that this space trash is flying at 20,000 miles/hr relative to you.

> Your intuitions about this space trash problem are way, way off

I'm not sure that's true, for example (with many more available)

"Analysis: Why trash in space is a major problem with no clear fix"

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-trash-in-s...

Also, I'd say "intuition" is a mischaracterization of the source of my sentiment. I've been passively hearing about this issue for years.

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