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?
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
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'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.
The ocean is a shared resource. Land isn't.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
> Maybe I’m being too cynical?
Yes. What’s the point in spreading negative falsehoods?
>> 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.
"Let's first fix the problem, and maybe later figure out if it exists" is much worse than the opposite order.
There's a great podcast called Plastisphere that had a lot of coverage of the most recent meeting in April: https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/
The west, or for that matter even most third world countries do not cause much plastic pollution at all.
“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.
There's a multi-trillion dollar startup just waiting for you to solve that problem.
As the saying goes: trust is good, control/verification is better
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 ..
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 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.
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 ..
A bit like Mr Fusion[0]?
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.
