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Comment by 317070 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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

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

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

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.

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