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Comment by agomez314 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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

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

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

Awareness is just step one.

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

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/

What isn't measured isn't managed.

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).

> 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].

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.

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.

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

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

Not cynical enough in my books.

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

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.

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