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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

This is great, and should be done.

But we also need to stop it happening again. Which means stopping fishing nets and plastic trash from being dumped in the sea by ships. And preventing plastic that is dumped into rivers in developing countries [1] from reaching the sea. These are hard problems.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803

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Given that ~80% of the GPGP is from commercial fishing, I don't know how we ever stop them or catch them. A factory can be checked at its outflows. We'd have to monitor and catalog everything on every fishing ship and that just doesn't scale. At best we could add a fee to global commercial fishing fee to all boats based on the wholesale of their catch and spend that on clean up and other sustainability efforts.

Are all countries currently honest with their fishing practices, e.g. catch sizes, etc?

No countries are honest about any aspect of fishing

I assume not but that could become tied the ability to import and the western countries could try to drive that. Again, not an easy thing to even get your head around let alone implement.

You're assuming Western countries are compliant

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/06/...

So the solution is use tax money instead to commission citizen-run oversight then?

https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/

Great case study in my home country: https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/introducing-the-intercep...

> in developing countries

In this particular case I think it’s worth specifically calling out The Philippines, who are responsible for a third of all ocean waste. India are second at ~12%, but also with a billion and a half people that’s a little more understandable

Wow, didn't realise India had that many people!

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

What about China?

About 1/5 as much as the Philippines overall, so two orders of magnitude less per capita, and about half as much as India per capita. Here’s a pretty picture: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

>This is great, and should be done. But we also need to stop it happening again.

The patch was discovered 27 years ago (1997). So, $7 billion to clean it up, and then $250 million a year to keep it clean thereafter

Not too bad in the grand scheme of things.

The fishing market is 600B $... So if they invest 1% of that market size into the cleaning, they can go on with current practices... They can even improve the process and make it cheaper.

Good luck getting them to pay...

It's just a tax, we all pay.

1% is a lot.. gross margin for the big bulk fishing operations is around 10% so you are asking them to give up 10% of their profits

To put 1% in more context, the biggest companies like P&G, Verizon, Progressive Insurance etc will never spend more that 3% of revenue MAXIMUM on their total marketing budget..and that is money that they directly measure ROI from.

What if they raised prices by 1% to compensate? We just had double digit price increases for a lot of things so 1% seems pretty easy.

What if someone raised your rent by $35 a month?

When I rented they did it all the time.

On the pricing scale of rent, typically thousands of dollars per month, $35 is relatively inconsequential in most cases.

China and India do not give a shit about climate/ecology agreements

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