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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

In 2023, 221 shipping containers were lost at sea, out of a total of 250 million shipped. That's a loss rate of 0.000088%.

Plastic pellets are a visible pollutant on beaches. I have not seen any evidence that they're a particularly harmful pollutant. A single 20 tonne containerload of plastic pellets can leave a visible residue on hundreds or thousands of beaches, but the 15 tonnes of CO2 emitted by the average American every year is entirely invisible.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ff6c5336c885a268148b...

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They are particularly harmful because they end up in your food and cause damage to your organs.

A plastic pellet is typically 3-5mm in diameter. I think I'd notice that in my food. Even if I did enjoy swallowing fish guts whole, a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system.

Additives can leach out of plastics and enter the food chain, but pellets lost at sea are a completely insignificant factor because the total volume of waste produced by this route is so small. The majority of marine plastic is either post-consumer waste dumped in rivers in developing countries, or fishing gear that is lost at sea. If you're really worried about this, then you really need to take it up with the government of the Philippines and the global fishing industry.

https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

"I think I'd notice that in my food"

That isn't how food processing works.

There are many steps of grinding, pulverizing, mixing, re-forming, de-forming, extruding, heating, cooling.

The 3mm plastic pellet becomes a thousand smaller bits.

Also, you'd be surprised how many bugs are in your creamed corn, and you don't notice those either.

>> a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system

Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral), these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose, lodging in your brain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141840/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

It's a pity the parent commenter led with that point. Their second point, that the overwhelming majority of ocean plastic pollution comes from those two sources, remains valid (albeit I'm not sure if it's actually true but it certainly seems feasible).

To their second point, blaming the Philippines for dumping our ‘recycling’ in the ocean is a little bit like blaming African countries for burning our e-waste. We can’t pretend you can generate pounds of single-use plastic waste per person and have the problem disappear when you put it in a blue bin. Recycling is a lie invented by the packaging industry, and the reality is that we export the problem in bulk to the developing world, who inconveniently happen to share a planet, physics, and economy with us. We’re the ones buying the plastic to begin with, and it’s only right it washes onshore back here so we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist when it hits the bin.

The Philippines accounts for 0.16% of the world's waste plastic imports. Switzerland imports 10x more plastic waste and the Netherlands imports 100x more. Your explanation is very wrong.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-impor...

I don't see how that contradicts the above poster's point that if there wasn't demand there would be no supply, and then to deal with it we ship it back to said third world countries so it can be "somebody else's problem", essentially exporting our waste and the ensuing health issues to other countries.

e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-48444874

And to just back up one of their minor points — "Recycling is a lie invented by the packaging industry"

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

...and where they'll just do absolutely nothing.

So do many other particles flying in the air and getting into water. Just imagine what that little dust from ground sand does ...

Well, probably not the nurdles themselves unless they're scooped from the oceans and used as a food additive, but they'll break down into microplastics and enter the food chain that way. The damage of said microplastics is still being researched, at the moment (I believe) it's still fairly vague, not unlike asbestos or smoking. IIRC they have been found to mimic hormones though.

What do you find vague about the studied effects of smoking or asbestos? Or did you mistype and mean “unlike” instead of “not unlike”?

I think they meant "not unlike" as - we didn't think asbestos was bad, then we thought it could be bad, then yes, after studies, this is really awful. Similarly, we might find that ingested plastics cause more damage than we realize now.

There was never any doubt about asbestos, we just didn't care.

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

Two things.

The first is that that is actually crazy late to me. Asbestos has been in use since antiquity. I am genuinely surprised that something so toxic wasn’t noticed earlier. Then again, in times where tuberculosis was common I suppose it wouldn’t have looked that odd.

The second is that you’re viewing it through a modern lens, where of course literally everyone should believe and know that it’s bad the very first time someone notices it. The reality is that it would be much more murky. I would not be at all surprised if microplastics are viewed the same way in 100 years; how could they not have immediately known it was bad? Because we need to quantify how bad, and we can’t just force feed it to people so we have to wait until we naturally get case studies.

We really don’t need to quantify that.

We knew smoking was bad, we knew plastics were bad, we knew PFAS was bad.

But it’s cheaper than the alternatives, so we pretend we need studies to show “how bad exactly”. We don’t. We really, really don’t.

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