Yeah, even the original scientific article didn't show the plastic bag itself. Had to go digging in the linked scientific database. Here's the entry for the plastic bag in the Mariana Trench, discovered in 1998 at 10,898 m (archive link to reduce burden of traffic): https://archive.is/qBl2y
Adobe Flash required to view the photo and video, or registration to download. Mirrors:
Amazing how the floor seems flat and even, down there. I would have expected... I don't really know, something looking more like the surface of the moon, that kind of thing.
Good work. I was digging around the original study looking for the gd photo. Some of the geo data was available but I have no idea where they buried the photo in there.
Yeah, external links (or lack thereof) are a good quality marker. It's disheartening the amount of articles (etc) that omit the links used to source them.
Name names. Most plastic in the ocean comes from Chinese rivers. Western countries don't just throw their garbage into the ocean like China does. Making westerners feel guilty doesn't help fix the problem.
This meme needs to die. Developed countries produce much more waste than developing countries. The disparity is even more striking if you look at the figures per capita. The US generates almost 3 times as much waste per capital as China.
On top of that, a huge proportion of waste is exported by developed countries to developing countries. The US also only recycles 9% of its plastic waste, compared to 25% for China.
> Europe, the biggest exporter worldwide of waste plastic intended for recycling, depends largely on China: 87% wt. is exported to China either directly or via the Hong Kong SAR. The exported quantity is 46% of the overall quantity collected for recycling, and 12% of the entire plastic waste arisings in Europe. In contrast, Europe exports only 1.2% of its primary plastics products to China.
> The USA is the second largest consumer of plastics in the world and depends mainly to China and HK for absorbing its waste plastics. Neighbouring countries such as Canada and Mexico are also a small market outlet. According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) reporting data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the USA exported 2.1Mt of plastic waste to China
The only study on this subject I'm aware of is the one funded by The Ocean Cleanup Foundation [1], which puts 86% of annually released plastic in Asian rivers, with the main contributor being the Chinese Yantze river, followed by the Ganges. This compared to a mere 0.28% and 0.96% for Europe and North America respectively.
They've also released an interactive map [2], although if you're just interested in the numbers I'd recommend reading the paper.
> This meme needs to die. Developed countries produce much more waste than developing countries.
Yes, but western countries also have better waste disposal infrastructure (land fills, incinerators) that is actually used, so in this case that is not very relevant.
> On top of that, a huge proportion of waste is exported by developed countries to developing countries.
This is because Chinese recycling companies underbid most of their western (more local) competition, essentially putting them out of business.
I strongly believe there should have been much earlier trade intervention by western (rather than Chinese) governments to prevent that. But on the other hand, western countries didn't aim guns at China's head to make them take their trash.
This is because Chinese recycling companies underbid most of their western (more local) competition, essentially putting them out of business.
Because the Chinese do an inadequate job of disposing of the waste of Western countries, so their costs are less, so this Western waste winds-up in the oceans with stops in China and the folks in charge in the Western nations more or less let this happen.
But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was entirely at fault. A bit reflection should show the reader this isn't the case.
> But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was entirely at fault.
I did say that Western countries should have proactively prevented this through trade restrictions. Free trade sucks when your trading partner doesn't care about pooping in their own yard for some short term gain. Sometimes developed western countries need to step up because the other country is being irresponsible and just can't manage to do the right thing for their own interests on their own.
Exactly. Free trade only works well if both countries are playing by the same rules. Which I guess is why trade deals take years and hundreds of diplomat hours to arrange.
There is no motivation to stop it. China doesn't want to do it because they would have to hike prices to offset the cost, thus making them less competitive. US companies don't want to change anything because they don't want to start paying for proper disposal either.
Also, free trade is freedom from regulations / tariffs, etc. I always thought it was free to compete (i.e. anti-trusts / monopoly). Silly me.
So it could be said this is a direct result of free trade in it's classical economic term.
Considering that China has now banned importing most of this kind of waste, it seems likely that the waste operators weren't operating in accordance with government policy in the first place.
Yes, but since China lacks much rule of law its not like there was any hope they would act accordingly in the first place. The only kind of regulations that really work in China are heavy handed ones (ban to-recycle-waste from entering at all, ban coal from being used at all, etc...).
FYI, China has recently upped the purity requirement for recycling imports. This is causing a somewhat large and expanding issue in Australia, where waste exporters who previously could offshore recycling collections from municipal councils cheaply, now must warehouse and sort that waste before China will allow it to be imported.[0]
Most of the trash in Chinese rivers is most definitely from Chinese sources.
Chinese companies decided to underbid for recycling contracts in western countries and then not doing the actual recycling. If you want to apply some blame the purchaser for trusting the Chinese companies, fine with me, but lets not absolve the Chinese from blame here.
I think you make a good point, but there's a big difference between the amount of waste produced and the amount of waste that makes it into the natural environment, as opposed to a recycling center or dedicated landfill. Just because developed countries are producing more waste does not mean that they are contributing more waste to the bottom of the ocean. (I am not suggesting that we should not all aim to produce less waste and handle what waste we do produce better.)
The point is that a large amount of waste produced by developed is dumped/exported to developing countries like China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. And a large amount of waste generated by these countries is done so in the production of goods meant for Western consumption.
>a large amount of waste generated by these countries is done so in the production of goods meant for Western consumption.
Why does this matter? A factory polluting local lakes and rivers to make goods for export to another state definitely couldn't use this as an excuse. They control the process, so they are responsible for consequences of using that process. So why rules are suddenly different when we talk about countries?
Because we’ve exported our externalities. Global industry doesn’t choose to manufacture in China because of the great views. Their regulations are effectively non-existent. Those regulations in the West protecting the environment, the community, the workers etc? They have a cost that many consumers are unprepared to bear.
Perhaps advocate for changes in the rules, whether that be directly or indirectly (e.g. by supporting propositions that mandate better supply-chain/whole-product-lifecycle accountability). Perhaps make choices that preference those companies with better lifecycle/supply-chains (and if you can't tell which those are, then perhaps advocate for changes in transparency regarding those things).
Change is slow and hard. Throwing up our hands and carrying on with the status quo is a choice not an inevitability. If we each live our lives according to the world we want to live in, and make our personal choices accordingly, then at the very least we'll be able to tell our kids we tried.
The article points out that 89% of sea plastic is the throwaway kind, e.g. cutlery and plastic bottles. It's relatively simple to cut down on these. Switch to using aluminium cans instead of plastic bottles, they're much more likely to be recycled. Then obviously put the can in the recycling. Better yet, use your own water bottle. If you want bottled water get it in crates of glass bottles. Shops will often take the crates back to be washed and reused.
But isn’t most of the sea plastic also from the Yangtze and Ganges rivers?
I try and avoid single use plastic, it seems obscene to me it even exists, but my waste ends up in landfill. To solve ocean plastic we need bin men and landfill in the countries causing it.
The fight against single use plastic in the developed world is just, but a separate issue.
A problem in the UK has been that plastics have been passed on for recycling only to be sent to China, for example, and dumped.
The issue as I see it is that we expect waste processing to be profitable and only do it if it is - waste processing should be handled from the profits of waste production.
So many companies conning their customers with half-empty packaging, products designed to break, etc., seems to be a large part of the problem.
I think it's become apparent that in pretty much every western country we were shipping them to China, as you described for the UK. That's now come to an end. Who DOES subsidise local industry enough to recycle in-country?
The main thing that needs to happen is the creation of a strong enough political consensus to force a strong limit to the production of unnecessary plastic objects as well as forcing proper disposal of the objects that are produced. This is would require international cooperation.
Obviously, this is far from where the world seems to be heading currently but it's still the only way.
No you can't do that either. If you are old enough to remember the 80's and 90's, these same people that are whining about plastic now are the ones that forced us to use it because paper bags were killing the trees. Oh fun fact they are also the ones that brought us trans fats as a "safe alternative" to using animal fat.
Hmm, the problem was not that paper bags inherently kill trees, it was that virgin forest was being destroyed and not replanted in order to make paper products. So the obvious solution of using sustainable forest growth and recycling was rejected (however, maybe by "The Market" - aka refusing to accept responsibility for externalities) presumably because plastics were marginally cheaper.
Market forces just don't work for these things because the negative consequences are decades away and don't necessarily affect the producers/consumers at all.
Your position that people who didn't want rainforest destroying for one-time use bags are responsible for one-time use plastics is way off the mark. Such people use reusable bags from sustainable sources invariably, for example.
When these issues hit the mainstream, and the public don't fully understand the position, then it's easy for the Capitalists to shift to the 'next-worst most profitable' thing rather than shifting to a sustainable production.
You can change what you purchase. Don't but so much temporary plastic, look for alternatives. Shop at markets where they don't wrap everything in plastic.
The mental acrobatics some people will do to fan the flames of western guilt is incredible. Ignoring the fact that the Asian market is massive, the fact that things are intended for western consumption doesn't mean westerners are somehow complicit in the pollution caused to make them.
I don't think Western-exported goods contribute massively to pollution in Asia. Local consumption drives most of it. You can't really blame disposable chopsticks or plastic bags in the Yellow River on Western consumers.
That being said, I disagree with the spirit of your comment. When ABC corp relocated to underdeveloped country so they can avoid regulatory burden (be it pollution, or labor laws), the end goal is to achieve competitive product pricing back home. A portion of the $$ they save in Asia is passed down to the Western consumer.
Whether you want to feel guilty about it ("they only make 50 cents an hour making my Nikes, outrageous!"), or proud ("they make a whole 50 cents thanks to me!") is up to you I guess, but the link is there.
You have hit the crux of the matter, it's almost entirely outside our control at the local level. Not using plastic as much has no effect on whether or not an Asian man throws his garbage in the river in China, or if the company contracted to deal with the waste does, but lies about it to us.
What you are proposing ends up as "don't do business with Asian countries because they can't be trusted to deal with the trash properly."
It's really easy to find photos of waterways all over the world, and it's abundantly clear which countries and cultures value clean water ways over cost/time to deal with the garbage. Where it comes from seems to be irrelevant.
I think all cultures value nature to one degree or another. Once developing countries accrete enough wealth, they will probably invest some of it into proper waste disposal. It's hard to justify diverting resources into waste disposal now, when you are still poor and hungry and in the midst of industrialization.
Western societies went through the same process. They polluted heavily through much of the XX century, while building up their own industrial economies, and didn't start cleaning up until the 1970s and 80s.
I am hopeful developing countries follow the same trajectory. China, for example, has been successful at tackling its air pollution. And googling shows that they began rolling out programs to combat river pollution as well. Eventually, we'll get there. Not soon, but eventually.
Seriously. The countries with terrible work conditions and poor records with humanitarian rights could care less about pumping trash into the ocean? That should shock nobody. Who are these apologists?
Western countries generate more capita garbage and yet have figured out how to properly dispose it off. Not withstanding the tinfoil type environmentalists on HN, USA has damn good conventional waste management systems. Most waste goes to landfills which are very securely locked from all sides and once full they build resorts and amusement parks on top of it. Most landfills in USA will take centuries to actually run out of space.
Even in a filthy city like New York you can still swim in Hudson and come out alive and well. You can't do that in most rivers in India and China and in some cases even tap water.
The disparity is even more striking if you look at the figures per capita. The US generates almost 3 times as much waste per capital as China.
China has 4.25x as much 'capita' as the US, so in absolute terms they produce more. I'll grant that the disparity is "more striking" if you phrase it in a way that obscures the full details.
In fairness, you're right that exporting garbage is bad, and we all need to be producing less of it.
We don't intentionally throw our garbage directly into the ocean, but it still makes its way there. Follow a garbage truck for a while and note how much loose trash falls out either while it's driving around or while it's picking up a garbage can and collecting the contents. Realize that much of the garbage in the street will be washed down a storm drain, usually without a filter, and that the storm drain will dump into a creek or river.
Someone analysed the Thames in London and found it had 18 tonnes a year of plastic waste in it.
The Yangtze (which is longer to be fair) has 1.5 million tonnes of year of plastic waste.
Probably 1000x the waste per-river-km.
GPs point is entirely correct; plastic waste isn't a huge problem (unsightly perhaps) in Western world, it's the developing world which is causing nearly all of this problem. Be far better to focus resources on there, it would literally have a 1000x+ better RoI than the west.
If you go to a beach e.g. in Phuket, Thailand, you'll find a mountain of rubbish just off the part where the tourists sit. Plastic bags and bottles, old car parts, tin cans, all sorts of shit. Same in Rarotonga, or many of what you might label third world countries that tourists go to. Right next to where people live and work, blowing around.
In some cultures, rubbish is just ignored. You'd think if you worked next to the beach, you'd at least clean up the little patch next to your stall when you had some downtime, but this just doesn't seem part of the mindset. I don't know if its some kind of "tragedy of the commons" type thinking or what it is.
I have a related story. I was on an island in Indonesia, and the small town next to the beach (mostly locals, but still tourist related businesses), was full of garbage. I have a photo of a local kid that was sitting on the beach, on top of garbage, because there was no clean place to sit.
Now, down the road a few hundred meters and over a hill was a little cove, with a beautiful beach. It was a little more touristy (about 10 people were there), had a restaurant and chairs to rent, and the beach itself was only about 40m wide with rocks curving around the sides. This beach was also full of garbage. Two tourists showed up, both women in their 20s with snorkeling gear. They wanted to clean up the beach, so they went in the water and start snorkeling around, while picking up the trash. Fairly quickly, they had so much trash they needed garbage bags. They went to the restaurant a few meters away and asked if they had a spare bag, because they're cleaning the beach. Well, they didn't have wallets to pay the local restaurant owner, so they were refused a garbage bag. In the end, they just left the garbage and walked off.
The situation was pretty shocking. This restaurant business relied on this small 40m beach, and not only did they not take the time to keep it clean, they couldn't even do the smallest gesture of providing a garbage bag when someone else offered to clean it for free.
This was something of a problem in America a few decades ago. People thought nothing of just throwing trash along the roads, in parks, etc. Informal dumps were everywhere on vacant lots, in roadside ditches and ravines. This eventuality motivated the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering campaigns that are credited with changing public attitudes.
But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.
> But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.
In the situation the GP described, how would concern about litter (i.e. cleaning it up) put the ability to have food and shelter at risk? In fact, one could argue that cleaning up a garbage-strewn tourist beach would attract more tourists and enrich the locals, increasing their ability to provide food and shelter for themselves.
I have a less dramatic but similar story. In Portland OR, there is a lot of Asians (ie, non-American born) and during a conference, we went out to lunch, and we saw a group of Asians, very nice clothes, gold watches, get in to a Lexus and just leave all their lunch (takeout) bags in the gutter. Their cups, straws everything. Just set it down and drove off.
This was in the mid 90s, we were all pretty shocked. But I have since learned, that is what is common in Asian countries, just set your garbage down wherever you want. I even read a blog article where a dev when to a tech convention in some large Asian city, and there were no trash cans anywhere, and that the only place to put garbage was on the ground, and there were people paid to pick it up.
This is largely the way things are in Jerusalem. There is tons of trash all over the place, stuffed into crevices and just loose on the street. It seems to be largely ignored by the locals (it is like this even in very non-touristy areas as well, so it's not just messy tourists).
That is incredible. I have been all over the US in many, many parks over 40 years and never once, anywhere, did I see a pile of trash like this. Even in the early 80s this never happened at a park. (I know many, many other countries are way worse, but being 3rd world is at least a partial excuse)
In a big city, in a few places, (I lived on the streets for a bit in a few big cities) there wasn't even trash like this. Even the worst places in Portland, LA and other big cities, unless it was a total slum, it was not like this.
Anywhere there their is a public interest, the US actually gives a crap about keeping it clean. It's surprising how other cultures give the US such a hard time about "recycling" and "being green", I am about to be sick of hearing it.
Considering the size and magnitude of the park systems in the US, we are one of the cleanest, greenest friggin nations the world as ever known. (besides the nasty pollution from factories, but that is another issue)
You wouldn't nothing close to Tel Aviv garbage piles in Givatayim, Raanana, Herzliya or Netanya, but at the same time Yaffo, but somehow, Jaffa, Acre and Jerusalem have it much worse. (And before I get accused of racism, Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim are just as bad, with Tiberias getting worse every year.)
Israel is a very heterogenous country, with different communities having radically different lifestyles and ideals - reality that this Haaretz piece completely ignores.
I suspected as much. It doesn't seem worth the flame war (accusation of racism) online to even approach discussing that one group of people are naturally "messy" (for lack of a better term) while another is not.
I find it amusing though that since I don't know the language or the area, I have no idea what any of the names you listed implies. Maybe that's good.
Jewish cities with a (relatively) not religious and wealthy population, Muslim Arab and mixed cities, and finally orthodox Jewish cities (which Tiberias, as many other northern cities, is rapidly becoming). Correlation with wealth and religion is pretty obvious.
>Correlation with wealth and religion is pretty obvious.
This seems odd, in the US, the more wealth (and I would say possibly some religions) the more likely there are either volunteer projects or budgets for cleaning up public areas.
One is that there's no infrastructure in a lot of these places. When you're in South Ease Asia, there's nowhere to put your rubbish, there's no rubbish bins, and there's no proper waste collection for street stalls, so your chuck your rubbish on the ground.
At least in the larger towns and cities in Vietnam, they have workers that tow around a big rubbish bin on wheels and collect the rubbish off the street, but in smaller villages, they just occasionally pile it up and burn it.
Lack of infrastructure is definitely a problem there.
But on the other hand, a lot of people just don't give a fuck. Maybe it's because the place is so dirty anyway. My friend was draining the petrol tank, and asked if there was anywhere he could dispose of the water contaminated petrol at the hostel or nearby. They just told him to tip it on the street. They were surprised that he wanted to find a better place to tip it where it wasn't just going to run all over the concrete, then into drains and the sea, not to mention the fire risk of dumping a couple of litres of petrol on the concrete.
I guess you get used to your surroundings. It's certainly not an ingrained culture thing that's peculiar to Asia; Singapore and Japan are both very clean, and I remember Kuala Lumpur being reasonably tidy too.
>"But on the other hand, a lot of people just don't give a fuck."
I had a religious minister talk about Ghana, there were these plastic baggies everywhere, they were sold with water in them on the streets. So they got all the kids together to pick up the garbage.
One lady was in charge of the final collection, she took all the piles of garbage they collected (spent hours) and through it out the back of their shop on the ground.
Japan has lots of trash cans, and is incredibly spotless. Downtown Tokyo, hardly any trash anywhere. (if any) I saw 1 single homeless guy there. One.
Oh come on, you know I didn't say that at all. A comment on the internet forum doesn't need to be a full story every time and so context matters, but that is a ridiculous implication.
Welp, here we are again. Written words have no body language to facilitate most of the meaning. Your words didn't come across as funny, and mine seemed to come across as negative in some manner to you. If we had been talking, you would have seen a smirk, and I'd have slapped your shoulder with a "knock it off buddy". (next time add /joke, I'll add /ah-shucks)
>there's nowhere to put your rubbish, there's no rubbish bins, and there's no proper waste collection for street stalls, so your chuck your rubbish on the ground. //
They don't have bags to take the rubbish home?
Fine, if there's no refuse collection domestically or commercially or you can't afford to have waste taken. But if you carried the waste to where you were then you can carry it to a recycling or disposal point.
Obviously if there's so much trash that it's overwhelming, you disregard it for the sake of your peace of mind. Picking up one bag out of millions in your immediate area feels futile. There also might not be any place to put it. First-world trash management programs don't magically spring out of nowhere. They are planned, developed, and maintained.
Another may consider population, the western world massively exporting trash, having decades of head start on polluting the oceans with plastic (micro plastic needs time) and totally fails to develop exportable clean consumer products or to build or sell the machines needed to produce them.
I don't like plastic in sea food, but it's probably to late with or without China. Pointing now at countries copy pasting our lifestyle is just ridiculous, they didn't invent plastic bags.
Pretty sure that until recently, the preferred mode of trash disposal in NY was to tug it into the ocean and let it loose.
edit: Yep, see [1]
> Through most of its history until the mid-1900s, New York’s primary method for disposing of its waste was simply to dump it into the ocean. At one point, as much as 80% of New York’s garbage ended up out at sea.
I knew it would be that gif before I clicked on it. It's compelling to watch, in a weird way. Sort of like the reverse effect of watching "satisfying" videos, the anticipation of waiting for something to go really wrong is nonetheless fascinating. I always end up staring at the one for a good minute or two.
A little from column A, a little from column B. I've spent too much time on reddit.... HN likes their comments snark free and I understand, It really is better that way. Sometimes I just can't resist though.
That is an interesting idea, an entire social group that shuns the minutiae. It explains some of my bad experiences here. They should have a "social rules" next to the "actual rules". I like the idea though, thanks for mentioning it. Plenty of other places for humor and stupidity, doesn't need to be on HN.
We ship most of our "recycling" to Asia and smugly pat ourselves on the back that we are saving the world. It would not surprise me that the original source of a significant portion of the plastics in the oceans are domestic recycling programs.
What gets me is the smugness of the "green movement" in that they are perfectly fine with ignoring facts such as the energy intensiveness to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels
And they also conveniently ignore the fact that without the plastics industry, the average quality of life for the average human would be far lower than it is now.
Top it all off, imagine the resources that would get used if the world stopped using plastic and went back to 100% paper, cotton, and glass. That's a lot of trees, plant material and sand. The first two would lead to an increase in fertilizers, which would lead to an increase in chemical runoff.
I'm not trying to shill the plastics industry here, I'm just saying that the green movement is rife with bias and hypocrisy, and the situation is far more complicated than anyone give it credit for.
I don't think this is smugness. The "green movement" (not that there is a single point of contact) usually advocates first and foremost for the reduction in consumption before recycling -- step zero is to use less of things, not just use greener alternatives, because even those require natural resources at some stage in their production.
Energy intensive processes used for example to create wind turbines can in the future be replaced by greener alternatives; just because the current solution doesn't immediately improve things in one respect, it can lay the foundations for future improvement. Think of it as rebasing a company's business logic from an old COBOL monolith to a bunch of modern, independent services that someone in 5 years from now has a chance of understanding (just replace "5" years with "50", which brings to mind the nuclear power plants designed in the 60s peppering the western world).
I think the argument for renewable energy would still be valid even if turbines and solar panels were much more expensive to build than traditional varieties, because they are tapping in to renewable energy supplies that make us less dependent on the whims of middle eastern dictatorships. The thing that sells the concept to governments isn't how much energy they require to produce, it's the renewable energy sources they tap into and the diversification of grid supply from monolithic, sparse power plants (and the geopolitics they couple) to local, maintainable facilities.
Plastic is also a much lighter packaging material than glass or metal. So a substantial amount of fuel is saved in transportation of goods to retail outlets.
Transportation of other plastic items we didn't need in the first place. A lot of the food we eat didn't have to be packed in plastic if it was stored properly and taken care of. If we cooked our own food more than we do, even more plastic could be left for other usage instead. While we are on the topic we don't need to actually eat as much as we do. We don't have to supersize every portion, we can survive and probably be healthier on a much lower portion per meal.
>No we don't. China just imposed a waste import ban.
Yes, we did. That ban does not invalidate that it was occurring, on a massive scale, up to that point. Right now several nations are amassing a stockpile of materials with no viable destination for it.
>ignoring facts such as the energy intensiveness to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels
First off, energy intensiveness becomes less of an issue as more of the energy supply moves over to renewables. There's more to be concerned about around use of rare/harmful materials and harmful byproducts in the manufacture of panels. Second, I don't see that those issues are being ignored, rather that most people will (reasonably) make the determination that between the tradeoffs available, this option is a good choice. Third, there is a bit of a myth of a 'pure environmentalist' you're conjuring here which I'm sceptical exists in significant numbers. Most people that consider themselves environmentalists are probably fine with 'better' in lieu of 'perfect'.
>conveniently ignore the fact that without the plastics industry, the average quality of life for the average human would be far lower than it is now.
That implies a binary choice where we either have all the plastic products and the extent of modern usage, or we have no plastic products. Again that polarized view is not useful or realistic, most will take a more nuanced view where a world with less plastic use but not no plastic use is preferable. Wanting to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics for things like shopping bags and packaging does not have to also imply that beneficial uses of plastics should be verboten.
>Top it all off, imagine the resources that would get used if the world stopped using plastic and went back to 100% paper, cotton, and glass.
As above, I'm not convinced that the majority of 'environmentalists' are quite as hardline as you imagine, but I'll indulge the idea for a moment:
>That's a lot of trees, plant material and sand. The first two would lead to an increase in fertilizers, which would lead to an increase in chemical runoff.
You've made several leaps here that are not implied by the premise. First, paper and cotton are renewable resources, the renewal of which does not require increased use of fertilizers (in any form, artificial or natural e.g. intervention composting). Allocation of more land mass, yes, plus 'sustainable forests' has been a thing for decades. Even mainstream political views are light years ahead of the naïve position you've put forward here, see the current UK plans to re-forest almost the entire north of England, coast to coast, as a great example. Second, the amounts of materials you're imagining needed to replace plastics, and the single-use behaviours that go along with them are entirely up for debate. This is intrinsically linked to my first point, because what happens when a paper or cotton item is no longer useful and is discarded, even littered in the wilderness? Oh yeah, it decomposes. Becoming.... compost.
>I'm just saying that the green movement is rife with bias and hypocrisy
I don't disagree, but will point out that it's a fallacy to call someone living in a system while also advocating to change that system a hypocrite.
>and the situation is far more complicated than anyone give it credit for.
I do disagree with that assertion. Many people are giving this lots of headspace. Overwhelmingly, the output of those considered positions is messages to the effect that we need to make gradual, incremental improvements in whatever areas we can identify, and that we should do this even when those improvements are less than optimal. The alternative, decision paralysis, cannot be allowed as various windows of opportunity draw to a close.
Throwing shade at any effort to improve simply because it is not entirely 'pure' doesn't advance the discussion and the point is not as novel to proponents as you might imagine.
I used to hear that quite a large portion of plastic that you think you are "recycling" is in fact simply landfilled because there is no market for it. Not sure that is still the case; hopefully it has improved in recent years.
Landfill sites amount to a very small portion of overall land usage of human industry. Beyond making sure reusable and affordably recyclable stuff is not being wasted, the wider environment is not improved or significantly relieved by expensive efforts to reduce landfill.
The immediate environmental action priorities should surely be:
- Taking waste out of habitat
( collection and filtration )
- Reducing waste going into habitat
( biodegradable material use,
design re-usability and reliability,
affordable recycling )
- Study and assist heavily disrupted natural systems.
We don't have to be able to reprocess all of the waste collected since there is relative space to simply store it while we work on the technology and clean energy supply to make it reusable.
I believe advanced landfill as a long term waste curing and storage ability should be considered a big part of urgent clean industry and not characterised as a major problem in itself.
Recycling should really be called downcycling. With plastic as with paper, the quality of the recycled product is lower than the original, unless enough new material is mixed in.
We aren't forcing it on anybody. They buy it, ship it, and make $$$.
"Junkyard Planet, Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter
> Minter traces the export of America's recyclables and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of consumption, innovation, and the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans don't.
There's at least one nation that gets most, if not all, of their power from burning other nation's trash. Having a hard time remembering which, perhaps a Scandinavian country.
Sweden has since a long time been working on building out central heating for whole cities, connected to garbage/oil/electricity plants (with good filtering of gases). While doing this network of hot water pipes all over the place we also put down fiber so on top of it we have access to minimum 100 Mbps internet almost everywhere, even out in the northern forests. Our small town was doing this already 20 years ago, only 3000-odd inhabitants. Now we live in a bigger town and this area was built already new with central heating from the power plants about 15 years ago.
Garbage dumps have mostly been closed down and we recycle and compost what we can't burn. We also import garbage from our neighbors to burn. Handling our old dump sites is a problem still though, a lot of toxins there.
Aren't we just sending it back? If it was important, perhaps rather than not accepting the garbage, China could use their resources to guide the progression of the problem. I am aware that the Chinese didn't create this problem, but they are definitely in a position to do something about it and arguably have the most to lose given the size of the population.
But you'll never succeed in making the Chinese feel guilty. Why should they care that their trash flows into Chinese tributary states or - as they increasingly claim - Chinese oceans?
We need to get Trump on the Twitter bully pulpit (actually, he's been there since before being inaugurated) and chide China. He's already got the trade war narrative going, what's one more issue?
Have you seen the vast region of plastic bags floating in the Caribbean, between Puerto Rico and the Northeast US? I'd wager that is all American trash, one way or another.
In Austin, TX we've outlawed these kinds of bags. All grocery store bags are required by law to be sturdy enough to be reusable. This results in a few different things:
- Bags are heavy enough to not get blown away in the wind
- Half of the time, the bags are made of paper instead, meaning they're recyclable and (presumably) at least partially biodegradable
- The plastic bags that do exist are larger, robust enough to be brought with you to the store again and again, and at least at HEB they cost 25 cents, which discourages people from getting them unless they actually need them
Finland has similar, sturdy bags. It was a real shock coming to Canada, where they use the flimsiest POS bags. If I'm not paying attention, I get about 2-3 items per double-bag.
This really seems like a weird glitch in the algorithm:
1) The plastic bag line in Excel is too damn high. We need to lower that cost
2) Order cheaper, thinner and crappier bags
3) Now we need to double-bag everything, and a bag can only handle the weight of a single chocolate bar
4) Customers use five times more bags than they used to
5) The plastic bag line in Excel is too damn high. We need to lower that cost
Where I am the thin bags are quite strong, but all the cashiers are forced to double bag anyway because of that one time it breaks and the customer gets mad. I have to just go along with it instead of bothering them.
When they did the plastic bag ban for grocery stores in California, I immediately went out and bought a case of those thin ones to stick in my car.
They're far stronger and more reliable (even with the overall poorer quality control, which I believe causes the occasional breaks you refer too, easily remedied by conservatively under-filling) than even the best paper bags they're replacing. The handles on those paper bags require such delicate, special handling, and if there's any wetness, well, I'd better have a cart, because I'm not making it to my car no matter how closer I parked.
The case of 1000 takes up very little space in the trunk, lasts me essentially forever, costs way less than the mandatory 10 cents per bag the stores are now required to charge, and, more importantly, is far more sanitary than reusable bags.
It is enough of a challenge to shop for fresh, relatively healthy food and having it last a worthwhile length of time, without worrying about cross-contamination from the last shopping trip.
Sanitary? Are you sticking uncovered pieces of raw meat into the bag? Everything in the store already comes in a package, except possibly produce, which I'd hope you're washing before you eat it anyway.
I don't know where you shop, but I've had plenty of packages (especially food packaged by the store) leak, and even if the ones I bought didn't leak, I often discover dried or partially dried residue on my package from a leak from somewhere else.
My concern isn't so much that I'm at greater risk of a food-borne illness (although there is that, and it's a greater worry now, with the increase in antibiotic resistance driven by driven by agriculture) but of the food spoiling earlier than necessary. This is especially a problem with the produce that you mentioned.
Is there any evidence that merely "washing" produce helps at all with cross-contamination, from a food-borne illness perspective? I imagine it would, if one were to do scrub it with warm, soapy water for at least 20 seconds, but does anyone actually do that? I have never in my life seen that done.
I believe the best practice is just not letting it ever touch raw meat in the first place.
Actually, yes, I absolutely would also have a sanitary issue with eating salad off of panties that had been used to hold raw meat that had merely been tossed in the wash. (Othersie, panties or other clothing are a strawman).
As for my plates, those go in the dishwasher, which uses both a chlorinated detergent and boosts the water temperature to kill bacteria.
I'd surmise that such treatment of nylon or even cotton would reduce the lifespan of those bags. What's worse, I'd have to buy a significant number of them to make sure I had enough on hand for shopping and to run a full machine load when sanitizing them. Good thing that's just not going to happen.
In the early 2000s when I was a grocery sacker, many customers would ask to get their items put in a paper bag and then into a plastic bag so that their paper bag had handles.
I'm so glad that we're seeing a shift to reusable bags and, hopefully, a culture of reusability.
I wouldn't be too proud of yourselves. There is debate over the relative environmental impact of plastic, paper, and reusable shopping bags. If you jump to the conclusion that plastic bags are the worst, it's probably because you haven't researched enough.
I've always thought the debate was in terms of energy required to manufacture the individual bags. In terms of recyclability and sustainability doesn't paper win out? The stuff literally grows on trees on farms
From what I've read, all of the types have different tradeoffs. The thinnest plastic ones technically have the smallest carbon footprint because there's less weight to ship around, the materials are easier to acquire, etc.
My personal reasoning is that there are lots of other (more significant) ways to combat climate change, but there's no other way to stop whales from choking to death on plastic. Then again, I could just be more emotionally affected by the tangible images of plastic pollution than by the more abstract notion of carbon footprint.
It's changed over time. 30 years ago, paper recycling wasn't mainstream and paper bags were made from Amazonian forests.
And even with recycling, you have to account for costs including not only energy but also chemical pollution caused by manufacturing process.
And then there's the question of which items get re-used. The reusable bags haven't proven to be much of a win because not only do they cost more in energy, materials, and pollution to create, people still forget them at home and buy new ones each time.
When I was a retail cashier between 2000 and 2007, the store I worked at offered both paper and plastic, but we were told not to ask and to just bag plastic and if a customer wanted paper, they would have to specifically ask for it. We were told it was because plastic bags cost a fraction of a penny, while paper bags were about 7 cents, and they didn't want to waste money on paper bags for customers that honestly didn't really care.
For a long time, the default in many grocery stores in NYC (where the typical method of getting your groceries home is on foot, a bag in each hand) was a paper bag (for strength and structure) inside a plastic bag (for handles).
We use paper bags at our retail outlet, they're more expensive and suffer catastrophic failure vs cheaper plastic which is, well, plastic (stretches first usually).
You have to take more care with paper (people are lazy) and it costs more from sustainable sources (people are miserly).
My buddies and I went to Austin on a motorcycle trip and one of our bikes broke down and we had to go to an auto store for a few small parts. When we asked for a bag to put the items in to transport them to other bike and they said "we don't have bags" we started laughing and were floored when we realized that they did not in fact have bags.
Most places didn't stock paper bags either, which we would of gladly paid for. We got used to it during the week but it was some big culture shock for us. Great for locals, infuriating for travelers.
I can certainly see how it could be frustrating to be without a bag if you need to transport your items on a motorcycle (though you were on a motorcycle trip and no one had a saddle bag they could put the things in?). Extending your experience to 'travellers' at large is a bit much. I'm from one of the dozens of other American cities with a plastic bag ban(yay!) so I think I would be quite non-plussed were I traveling in Austin. :)
I've never been to a grocery store that didn't have some kind of bags, and to be honest I've never bought enough things at once from a retail store to warrant a bag, but I can see how that could be a problem in certain situations
Bag levies are a simple and effective solution. Here in the netherlands (and other European countries) for example you are not allowed to give away free plastic bags. That significantly reduced plastic in the north sea: https://uk.reuters.com/article/oceans-pollution-plastics/eur...
I go to Austin now and then. It gives me hope for the future when I see the organic hemp reusable tie-died bags. Amazing how many plastic bottles, plastic packaging, plastic garbage sacks, and plastic tableware can fit into those bags.
Everyone who wants plastic can just drive to Manor, TX and do shopping there though. Possession of the bags isn't actually outlawed, the stores just can't give them to you in city limits.
-Plastic is recyclable. Why would you think it's not?
-Besides that, paper bags are made up of (dun dun dun) plant material. Which means CO2 is being brought into the equation.
-The energy required to make a paper bag versus a plastic one are still neck and neck.
https://ecomyths.org/2014/05/27/myth-paper-bags-are-greener-...
I'm not saying plastic bags are better than paper, but they're not really worse, aside from the fact that people suck at disposing of them. You need to get society better at recycling. It's not really the bag's fault.
IIRC plastic bags are not recyclable, you cannot meaningfully put them in the recycle bin[0], and the plastic bag collection bins outside of grocery stores go directly to the trash.
Looks like that may have changed recently[1] but I'm a bit skeptical that all grocery stores have set up the correct supply chain to have the plastic bags be recycled.
The plastic bags are made from can be recycled. If you're determined you can recycle almost anything. However, the bags are a total nightmare for automated or semi-automated sorting of mixed recycling.
If you give me 10 trucks per day of mixed soda cans and newspapers, I can build a factory the size of a small building that separates and processes them into bales of crushed steel cans, bales of crushed aluminium cans, and bales of newspaper, all three have recycling markets and I can sell them.
If we add "some plastic bags" to those truckloads my machine is now a nightmare. The bags will tangle with anything, and they might more or less at random "hop" over or fall into holes sized to match objects, the machine that sorts alumium cans can't handle them, the machine that bales newspapers can't handle them, everywhere is now "also plastic bags", and all my customers don't want plastic bags, their specifications are clear, a little bit of Pepsi or Budweiser in the bale of steel cans is tolerable, a plastic bag is not; One cardboard loo roll mixed in with the newspaper is tolerable, a plastic bag is not; And so on.
I visited a plant in Central London that handles their area's recycling - very noisy, very interesting, they said if visitors took away just one single idea from their visit that idea should be "Don't put any fucking plastic bags in the general recycling".
Does this apply to bags that aren't of the grocery bag type? Take for example the large linked plastic bubbles that Amazon and such use as padding in their boxes. They have a recycling mark on them (#4, I think), but I'm never sure whether to mix them in with the grocery bags, which I separate from other recyclables, or with the other recyclables.
They should probably invest a bit of money in communicating that fact to the general public. For example, on the side of council recycling bins. I can't work out if my neighbours are ignorant or just lazy but it might help a little.
Lazy. Whenever I see it happen, I tell people I know: not to recycle plastic bags, not to recycle food stained paper products. I tell them, and explain why; no one I've told cares, and they all just keep their old habits.
"How do they expect us to remember this?" is the response I usually get. How do they expect you to remember what to do in a decision you make literally every day of your life? Too difficult!
That's more than a bit dismissive and ignores what has been the reality, at least here in the US:
The rules are different in every (small) municipality, often different between all three of home, work, and other commercial locations and can change remarkably frequently.
So, no, it's not something anyone does every day of ones life, at least not in the same way every time, not unless it was, "throw all trash into the one trash can".
Food stained paper? Well, actually, today, in some locality, it is recyclable, because it's "compost".
For the general public to know the details of the particular waste management program du jour of every geographic location they happen to be in is, indeed, too difficult.
And that's why I'd start making it clearer on the side of the vessel you are literally putting that recycling into. That's not too difficult and it's a start. Where I live we have some info but it's vague and doesn't mention, for example. food stained paper (which I happen to know you cannot recycle here). We don't even have compost available in my current flat, where as down the road in my old place (the same council) it was! There's no excuse for that kind of difference in waste management program and that's another thing they could easily improve on. It doesn't need to be too difficult.
Since you mention your flat, I must still insist on it actually being too difficult for the general public. Just exactly how many separate vessels, with frequently changing "clear" labelling are people going to have to keep inside their homes?
I do agree it doesn't need to be too difficult, but I think the only way that can happen is if the sorting is moved way downstream.
The primary reason I sort at home is because of the economic incentive of a larger black bin (landfill) costing more, whereas everything else is unmetered.
I'm referring to the large communal recycling vessels in the basement that people empty their stuff into a few times a week. There are three of these and they are emptied every so often.
I'm not talking about every geographical location, I'm talking about their own home. Where they have lived for the past 5+ years. Where the vast majority of their waste products are disposed of. Where recycling food stained paper or plastic bags has never been allowed.
Even if it were true that no residential waste program has ever accepted for compost food-soiled paper (nor ever will) and that even the vast majority of people discard the vast majority of their waste at home, it would not follow that this means it's not too difficult for them to remember which rules apply where.
Is it even true that people stay put an average of 5+ years in the same home or locality?
I can personally attest to the recycling rules changing more often than every 5 years in every locality I've lived in.
Recyclable is a relative term. Given a really long time you could say fossil fuels are a renewable energy source too.
I think the point here is that other types of bags are either sturdy enough to be reused, or paper, that decomposes MUCH faster and is not anywhere near as harmful to wildlife. In the ocean, paper would break down even faster than on land.
One of the worst ideas ever, spreading like a plague. All it results in is stores becoming sellers of bags and finding ways to bundle bags into the sale to capture the bag fee which they keep. Some stores didn't even use bags previously.
The bags sold are not generally reusable as a practical matter, so it causes more waste (more plastic weight over all being transacted). When they are reusable they have caused sanitation issues.
Why would you incentivize stores to sell bags? Has any of the bag ban cities seriously thought this one through?
The bags at the store are more like a forgetter's fee. Though I don't see how they aren't reusable.
I don't understand your criticism when you can bring any reusable bag into the store. Don't like the store's bags? Bring your own.
If the best criticism you can come up with for the reusable bag mandate is that you need to bring your own, that's not very damning.
In fact, I wouldn't mind if stores sold the same shitty bags as before but for 10 cents. The real win is a cultural shift towards reusability, not a good deal on plastic bags at the point-of-sale. Once again, just keep your favorite reusable bags in your car.
Wrong. The bags are a tax on the poor. Not everybody has a car, are they supposed to carry several reusable bags on their person at all times? The poor also reuse plastic bags to bag trash, now they need to buy garbage bags.
Wasting is a first-world problem. The "culture shift of reusability" is a rich person's luxury, like those alarm clocks that shred money, except it is mandated for everyone. I hope you see the absurdity and arrogance of it all.
> are they supposed to carry several reusable bags on their person at all times?
I don't get it. Do you think going to the market, especially among poor people, is some spontaneous event?
I live in Mexico with its awful purchasing power and, yes, everyone -- especially those with less money -- are bringing their own bags.
Here's how that plays out:
1. I need to go to the market
2. I'll bring some money, reusable bags, and my shopping list
3. Oh, and I'll bring my sunglasses because it's sunny
Why is this such a surprise to you? Poor people are also likely to reuse other things like clothes (hand-me-downs) and containers (like yogurt containers) just like anybody else.
It's ridiculous when people like you assume poor people are so helpless and dumb that they can't even muster the foresight to bring a bag to the market.
The bags sold are not generally reusable as a practical matter
Citation abso-fucking-lutely required.
I moved to Austin 4 years ago and use the exact same Wal Mart & HEB bags I got the first week here like literally everyone else, not a single one has gone out of use.
"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
"Plastic... asshole."
we generally see the outdoors as property of the government or public property, and the property that we rent or “own” as our home. We generally have low regard for keeping public property clean. We’re not leaving earth, we’re just going to have clean yards and clean homes and dirty streets.
That sounds like a perfect place doe waste. Just pump it I to the mantle. Put this stuff back in the ground where it belongs. Better than in out air or floating around our water.
Reminds me of one of my favorite colony buildings in Master of Orion 2:
"Core Waste Dumps take man-made toxic and polluting agents and stash them deep within the planet. Since they’re so far below surface water supplies and often destroyed by the intense pressures and temperatures at the fringe of the molten core, this completely eliminates all Pollution on the planet." https://masteroforion.gamepedia.com/Core_waste_dump
What a game! I used to make massive spherical space-ships with annihilation beams and the computer would make about 300 small ship fleets. The turn-based combat meant my 5 ships would kill 5 ships with my huge death beams, then all 295 of their small ships would fire each of their 3 dinky peashooters, then 885 shots later, I'd destroy 5 more, then 90 of their ships... Fast forward to today, and I'm setting my data analyses to run for 2 hours and walking away just like I did back then with battles.
Surely this would result in the high temperatures of the mantle burning the waste; the air pollution associated with this must make this a poor option for waste disposal.
From my understanding when things burn hot enough -- which I think the mantel burns hot enough -- this sort of thing is not that big of an issue.
Also, I am not entirely sure this would raise the temperatures of something so massive. In any case it would probably become the "global mantel worming" debate.
This statement is not strictly true but in context correct. Any volcanic eruption is full of really nasty gasses like carbon monoxide, sulfur, chlorine, and even fluorine, to name just a few. This comes from the content of the earth already (well, all the garbage comes from the earth originally also). But like you implied, adding the tiny amount of garbage generated by humans to the mix to an entire crustal column of rock would have insignificant impact on what comes out on top.
There is no substitute for you, the person reading these words, to stop accepting plastic bags and as much similar things -- coffee cups, utensils, etc.
Each reduction makes the next easier and simpler. Eventually you work up to fewer cars and bigger reductions.
Most importantly, you find the reductions improve your life. Most Americans could probably cut 75% with zero problem. More likely increased self-awareness, community, savings, health.
I cut out about 95% of packaged food about 3 years ago. The last time I had to empty my trash was June 2017.
More importantly, I've never eaten more delicious (nor saved as much time and money). The success led to reductions in other areas and I keep finding more because I look because it improves my life. There's nothing special about me. Anyone can do the same.
I disagree that individual action will ever move the needle on use of plastic. Policies set and enforced by governments is what is necessary. This can take the form of rules and bans for packaging itself or taxes that drive up the cost of plastic. So we can all do our part by advocating for these rules.
Also, making machines that do the work in bulk is IMO a much better use of time than e.g. organizing beach cleanup efforts where a dozen people come out with grabbers: https://youtu.be/A_ESkZmbL2c
What would also be neat would be something like an organization that operates these on beaches across a state / country. Even better: get the government to do it.
Even better than that: outlaw production of the kinds of junk that ends up on beaches. Start doing takeaway food in glass lock containers and bags that are actually reusable (not paper or thicker plastic or cotton) and charge deposits for them. Sure, it creates other problems, but those are usually better problems to be solving.
That machine looks like an excellent way to take in macro plastic and convert some of it into micro plastic, and then redistribute it onto the beach, where it'll be impossible to remove.
And it isn't as simple as banning plastic bags and then patting ourselves on the back for solving this issue. Society functions as an ecosystem like any you would find in nature and removing plastic bags has consequences that need to be addressed as part of any government action. For example, plastic bags are an important resource for homeless people. Banning plastic bags resulted in a large hepatitis outbreak in San Diego among the homeless population that quickly spread and resulted in over 20 deaths.
You need people like spodek to show that it is possible, that it doesn’t cost a lot and can even have a positive impact on you quality of life. Without that it will always be an uphill battle trying to get laws changed.
1. Individual action and legislation are not exclusive.
2. Legislation will happen faster if people act. Politicians know that when people say one thing and do another, they'll vote consistently with their behavior. News of waste like this tells politicians not to legislate conservation because it doesn't represent the people.
People conserving will tell politicians voters want it.
I never asserted that the two are exclusive. Individual action is satisfying and does demonstrate what is possible.
However, I still assert that to make changes on a huge scale you need to make the economic choices and desired outcomes align. Using plastic for packaging and single use containers is just so ridiculously inexpensive right now that its often the cheapest, most convenient option. If we change that equation then collective behavior will change.
Oceans are big and mysterious, but land is right here and if you go to just about any forest from California to Vermont, you'll stumble on human garbage about roughly every thirty steps. Cans, bags, shotgun shells, shoes, buckets, really just about anything. And same for inland waterways. And yet besides Earth Day, it doesn't get cleaned up. I put fault on the abstract environmentalism we practice. This is easily done with cheap resources, yet so much is spent on meetings, treaties, awareness and education, science and studies, etc.
Edit: To make things less abstract, I now tend to bring a plastic bag on walks in the woods to collect the litter.
Trash being so close to so many people should be even more reason for it to be picked up. You don't have to travel to the middle of the Pacific to collect it. Yet old cans with pull off tops are still common in the ground in popular outdoors areas.
Well all these things are luxuries that techies in bay area can afford with their high salaries but what about the single moms, disabled people, old people and many more who are struggling to just live by ?
And wait a minute what if a plastic bottle was found at the bottom of the ocean ? We need to work better on our landfill systems.
P.S. USA has enough landfill sites to landfill garbage we will generate over next 50 years. You can use plastic bottles and they need not end in the ocean. So please stop spreading tinfoil type suggestions.
> There is no substitute for you, the person reading these words, to stop accepting plastic bags and as much similar things -- coffee cups, utensils, etc.
There is: regulation by the government, restricting use of items harmful to the environment.
It appears naive to suggest that the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by individual action, when the financial interests are not aligned.
I asked for a mug at my local suburban Starbucks and got a blank look in return for a few seconds while the request registered. Finally they found one on a shelf out of reach of all but the tallest staff member. There were 3-4 on that shelf and I've never seen anyone else ask for or use one despite the place being filled with seated customers at most hours. I also was unable despite 15 minutes of searching to select a mug on their online ordering app on iOS.
Think of the ecological impact if Starbucks just asked patrons whether they would like a to-go cup or mug when they order inside.
> The last time I had to empty my trash was June 2017.
I would like to know more. What sorts of things have you eliminated? What are you recycling/composting that normally is deemed trash? How do handle things like greasy cardboard?
Wow you've read a lot into that comment (and hyper-literally). My point was that the "little" things we overlook add up to a lot of trash. My question is not "how about his toothpaste?" but rather "how does he live his life?"
Thinking back over the last week, I've bought grass seed, a dehumidifier, paper, toiletries, and some toys for my kids. All of those are easily overlooked but add up to me not being able to go a year without emptying my trash, even if all my food waste and packaging were removed.
Thanks, this is what I was hoping for. Sorry if my questions brought you negativity.
I dig the absolutist approach you take to garbage. Have you thought about it's impact on your overall environmental footprint? For example, have you considered the trade off between energy efficiency and trash efficiency? You poke at canned tomatoes, but eating a canned tomato is probably more energy efficient than eating a fresh one. Another example, I have eliminated paper towels in favor of reusable cloth. I wonder if the paper was overall more environmentally friendly, given that I don't have to run the paper towels through the washer. Thoughts?
Well first I guess he can do composting, because even though I cook most meals, I still have to peel and cut stuff, and without a garden that's filling my can. Also greasy cardboard is not much encountered when you cook.
Thanks for saying that. Somewhat related, inspired by John Robbin's "Diet for a New America" [1], since 2015 going mostly vegetarian for breakfast/lunch was one of the better ways for me to reduce my footprint.
The convenience and value of plastic bags and paper cups is huge. I try to remember to take a bag with me to the grocery store, especially here in the U.K. since a cost is levied now but I do often forget. I think rather than try to not use this stuff it’s better to create incentives to do more research into creating biodegradable versions. The incentives have never been there before.
The problem of ocean plastic isn't an issue of plastic use. It's about disposal. That sandwich bag used at a California Whole Foods is going to a landfill, not a deep sea trench. Landfill's aren't pretty or environmentally good, but a bag in a landfill is infinitely better than one wrapped around a baby turtle.
90+% of Ocean plastic comes from ten rivers, none of which are in north America or Europe. (See 100s of articles based on a study published last november.) This is a cultural issue. We don't need to stop using plastics in the west. We need the east to stop throwing plastics into rivers. In that sense, the problem is much easier. We don't need to invent new schemes or hamper development. We just need people in some countries to do what other have been doing for generations: stop treating waterways as trash disposals. That is not a big ask.
It's microplastics that are the main problem, and it's primarily not macro physical impact (trapping creatures in plastic) it's biological and chemical impact on the organisms affected; in part due to other chemicals carried with, or accumulated with, the microplastics.
That bag in landfill can break down to small particulates that get washed away to local rivers which are cleaned out in to the sea.
I think the saddest part of this is that we've managed, as a species, to come up with such a resilient and durable material, and yet we've come to simply waste it in great quantities, treating it like it's useless rubbish. From the picture posted in one of the comments here, that bag looks quite intact and certainly could've been reused. It probably comes from a time when most plastic bags were made with much better quality, thicker plastic than the ones today.
There seems to be a movement now in the West to ban plastic bags and put higher taxes on plastics among other things. This is pointless as the West is only responsible for a tiny fraction of the plastic waste in our oceans.
The study linked in the article claims that "The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88−95% of the global load into the sea."
Those rivers are:
Chang Jiang, Indus, Huang He, Hai He, Nile, Bramaputra, Zhujiang, Amur, Niger and Mekong. Eight in Asia, two in Africa.
To put it bluntly, these are regions where most people don't know the meaning of the word recycling. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.
You'll be surprised to know then it's not just the "West" that considers it a problem. Here's the Indian state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, introducing a plastic bag ban and deposit on PET bottles.[1]
While I don't think it really refutes your point; are you aware of the minimum charge on plastic bags introduced in England? It practically overnight reduced the number of plastic bags used by 80%.
> This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.
Its about poverty. Almost none of the communities that border these rivers will have access to organised waste disposal, never mind recycling. So the trash goes into the river. Thats bad, and I suspect that its known to be bad by the people involved, but where are the alternatives?
Check out [1] for some pretty horrifying descriptions of what plastic pollution is doing to coastal communities in Cambodia. Quote: "according to Water.Org, about four million people in Cambodia still lack access to safe water, leaving them with no alternative but to buy endless bottled water, perpetuating the environmentally destructive cycle. [...] this plastic waste that all the people here live amongst is unavoidable- they are not about to feed their babies the black muddy liquid that comes out of the taps, it’s poison.”
Clearly the solution involves people not throwing plastic into the rivers, but labelling dirt-poor people in a poisoned environment as having a "cultural problem" isn't going to help.
How is being poor an excuse for throwing your trash in the river?
A cart, a horse and you have a garbage truck. Add some plot of land where you can dump the garbage and you have the mvp of a garbage management system. I'm having a hard time believing these countries can't afford such a simple system.
Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.
> A cart, a horse and you have a garbage truck. Add some plot of land where you can dump the garbage and you have the mvp of a garbage management system. I'm having a hard time believing these countries can't afford such a simple system.
Who pays for it? Cambodia's per-capita GDP is just under UD$1300. A third of the country earns less than US$1.90 a day. Its a poor country. From a developed-word perspective it makes sense to collect the trash, but their perspective may be very different.
> Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.
> Almost none of the communities that border these rivers will have access to organised waste disposal
Does anyone have any deeper reading on this? I've spent a few years backpacking and Myanmar was by far the worst offender when it came to trash flowing down it's rivers and streams.
I know they don't have trash systems in place, and they often dump it in piles and burn it. What is happening around moving towards some kind of centralized landfills? Even basic pickup? Trucks and fuel are cheap relatively speaking. How do we move to the next step?
Much of that plastic discharge is from manufacturing of goods that will be consumed in the West. Economic and environmental policies in these places are exploited by Western businesses
Simple blaming it on the culture of a people seems myopic
The West isn't forcing them to dump everything on the street or in their rivers. That's on them. Besides, if you look at pictures or videos of rivers drowning in plastic, it doesn't look like industrial waste at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PavA4rUypE
The west isn't forcing them, but it's choosing them for manufacturing because they are the cheapest. One reason they are cheap is because of no environmental regulation.
There's a great documentary on YouTube about the ship breaking industry in Sri Lanka. Rich nations selling old ships for scrap to a very poor nation who couldn't care less about the environment or workers rights. Much better to dump it there than in a western nation where asbestos must be mitigated and oily pipes can't be welded on the beach.
See also China. Especially a few years ago when their "smoggy cities" photos were making headlines. The west chides them on their pollution, yet where do all your consumer devices come from and why do they come from there and not your country ? Of course they're more polluted when they do most of the manufacturing for the world.
Having just visited Vietnam, this logic no longer makes any sense to me and I’m not sure how it ever did. Standards we set many decades ago for ourselves aren’t even close to being followed in that country. I can see no reason to believe why any future restrictions on ourselves will be any different.
We are. We have recycling programs, we have fines and social pressure against littering, city workers cleaning the streets. Those simple things can reduce almost 90 % of ocean plastic.
What is the problem with implementing bag taxes/bans then? Even if it’s simply symbolic, don’t you think it sets a good example for the rest of the world and further ingrains the idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle” in our own societies?
Because it's worse for the environment to ban plastic. And who likes to be taxed more? A new Danish study claims that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) has the smallest impact on the environment. Meaning plastic bags are more environment-friendly than paper bags, bio-plastic bags or cotton bags.
"The use of a unbleached paper bag is equivalent, as it needs to be recycled 43 times, a bag made of renewable PP needs to be recycled 45 times, and a cotton-bag has to be brought to the supermarket and back up to 7100 times (and around 20,000 times, if the cotton is organic),to assure the environmental impact is similar to the LDPE-bag."
> A new Danish study claims that low-density polyethylene (LDPE) has the smallest impact on the environment.
"In general, LDPE carrier bags, which are the bags that are always available for purchase in Danish supermarkets, are the carriers providing the overall lowest environmental impacts when not considering reuse."
It might be worth a small increase in CO2 emissions to reduce plastic pollution TBH. We have other ways to offset those extra CO2 emissions, plenty of waste to cut. But once plastic and particularly microplastic pollution is in water and the food chain it's going to be nigh impossible to remove it.
Not all cities in the US participate in recycling programs equally. The overall US plastic recycling rate is still only 31%. Many states (maybe most?) don't have a plastic bottle deposit program.
Most recycling centers bundle plastic up into barges and ship them overseas where they may end up being partially recycled and partially in the ocea. There's often too much contamination to properly recycle. China has also recently stopped taking in these plastic barges so many municipalities don't have anywhere to put this except the city dump.
Not to mention the fact that the correct handling of garbage (so it ends up in the appropriate processing plant or landfill rather than the ocean) is vastly more sensible, effective, and economical than regulating plastic use.
I use plastic bags (from groceries) as a garbage can liner and always feel bad because I suspect there might be a better or less wasteful way to reduce plastic usage. Anyone have any ideas or tips?
I feel like I should use reusable grocery bags but then I have to clean the garbage can (boohoo).
I think you must mean the smaller trash bins sprinkled throughout your house, right? Because a kitchen (main) trash bin is typically too large for little shopping bags? In any case, have you looked into compostable bags? I tried a bunch of different brands and a lot were not very stiff/strong at all until I got a 100pack of stuff that's almost indiscernible from a regular trash bag, except green.
I'm not sure how it works in your house, but in mine the small trash cans throughout rooms are almost entirely filled with compostables like paper towels, tissues, floss, and tampons (I've gotten in arguments about whether floss and tampons will actually compost - that experiment is currently running in our backyard). So you could just Chuck those bags straight into the compost bin, if your city has it. If it doesn't, maybe not a good idea cause the bags will just disintegrate at the landfill and blow trash everywhere.
Really the answer here is convince local government to do recycling and compost collection and make an effort to purchase and cook in such a way that as little goes into the landfill bags as possible. I recently visited my childhood home in Texas and felt super gross when my only option for a can of Coke I had finished was chuck it straight into the bin... I've been thinking a lot lately about how stuff just is accumulating in landfills. Maybe it's my SF instincts screaming "that's a couple square miles of great real estate if it wasn't full of trash!" Lol.
Floss is often / typically Nylon, which will take decades. If you accidentally wound up with PTFE floss (which is apparently a thing) I'd expect millennia unless it's in direct sun.
Tampons should biodegrade at home, but I'm willing to bet there are large swaths of the US where composting anything with human fluids is illegal.
In any case, hat-tip for empiricism! Very pro composting, wish it was safer, smaller, and easier to do at home.
Unless they are the fancy unbleached 100% cotton organic tampons, I doubt they would compost. Tampons and other menstrual products aren't required to have an ingredients list, so who knows what's in there. I believe most tampons have synthetic as well as natural fibers. we
Personally, my menstrual cycle has been 100% reusable since 2003, and I much prefer reusables to disposables on a comfort level. I mostly use cloth pads, but I use a cup sometimes also. I used to be the opposite - mostly cup, sometimes cloth pads.
> I think you must mean the smaller trash bins sprinkled throughout your house, right? Because a kitchen (main) trash bin is typically too large for little shopping bags?
Depends on how many people you have/how frequently you empty your bin? In my apartment, it's just me + my partner, and we empty our main trash about twice a week, using a regular shopping bag. Most of our waste is food waste (we have a food waste bin) or packaging (which can be recycled).
> I've gotten in arguments about whether floss and tampons will actually compost - that experiment is currently running in our backyard
I, for one, would love to know the results of said experiment once you are satisfied that it has run it's course. Also, do you happen to have a link to the compostable bags? I gave up trying to find some that worked years ago.
Unfortunately I don't remember the exact brand, but when I get home I'll at least tell you that. Theyre probably available online somehow but I get them from the local hardware store.
Reusable grocery bags and tell the cashier you don't need bags when you're only buying a few things (just carry them out). Cashiers always default to putting even one item in a bag but just need some prompting to not do so. My wife goes so far as to take things out of the plastic bags and leave them for the odd occasion that the items end up there during checkout. Small trash cans usually don't need to be emptied every week, unless they contain organic matter. And when small cans do need to be emptied, you can often dump them into your larger weekly trash bags.
One tip, is to keep re-using them as long as you can. We have non-biodegradable trashcan liners for our kitchen trash-can. It helps that we recycle, compost, and are vegan (so nothing particularly icky is in the trash). We can usually go 2-3 months on a single kitchen trash bag, they usually give out because the corners wear out and start to tear.
I live in Finland where recycling is wide-spread, and most buildings have facilities for disposing of:
* Plastics
* Cardboard
* Paper
* "Biological stuff"
My single biggest gripe is that the biological (i.e. food) waste has to be put in biodegradable bags, and these break very very easily when moist. The end result is that you need to throw out quartyer-empty bags every day, rather than full bags every few days. If you gamble chances are your bag will tear en route to the garden/central bins.
In the UK we have a selection of bins, one for the plastic + metal + glass and another for the paper/cardboard. To go with that we also have a food waste bin. There is no need to buy anything that won't fit in one of those bins and therefore no bin bags are required.
I had a bit of difficulty persuading an American housemate to recycle, it was my turn to buy bin bags, I bought clear ones and after the neighbours complained and shamed my housemate for trashing tonnes of cardboard (they could see what was in those black bags when they were transparent) a change of habit was made.
All waste should be clean plus factories such as the Honda factory in Swindon can exist on a zero waste basis then so can anyone.
Take pride in your recycling and having squeaky clean bins!
One can only hope that eventually a solution will be developed that fixes the long-lived problems that plastics cause- perhaps a bacteria or chemical that breaks them down. In the meantime plastic waste is here to stay.
I know that it's a natural reaction to try to think of a technical solution to a massive problem like this, but to be completely and brutally honest I think humans, as a race, are now obligated to get off our fat asses and pick up some trash. Hands and knees, trash bags, buckets, shovels. A single person can easily pick up 10kg of trash an hour. The 8 million metric tons that will likely end up in the ocean this year, if it were instead collected by people (on land, before it gets in the ocean) at 10kg/hr, 2000hrs/yr, that's 400,000 people. That's really not many when spread across dozens of countries. Also, it's way easier and cheaper to just put garbage in the garbage bin. So in reality it could be far less than this number that are all that is needed to keep the planet free of trash.
Also, robots. But mostly we just need to get off our asses and pick up some trash!
I'm not sure that's the answer. I got an eye-opening view of the problem when I took a trip to Southeast Asia a couple years ago. Being in the third world, there's very few recycling plants to process plastic waste. The next best option, as you've implied, is landfills to sequester plastic waste...sacrifice that land to keep the rest of our planet clean(er). But even that's hard in many places.
On many of the islands I visited, people did make a conscientious effort to throw their plastic garbage in bins and do the right thing. And that worked great, up until one of the massive deluges of rain that the area gets would come. And since they had no landfill area that was far enough from the water, the rains would wash the entire landfills out to sea in a massive river of plastic waste. It was one of the most depressing sights I've ever seen. On one of the scuba dives I went on, we found ourselves surfacing in a debris field that had washed out to sea and it was astonishing to see the magnitude of it. Collecting everything together, as in your suggestion, just led to a massive batch dump into the ocean and it didn't do anything to keep the waste out of the ocean.
What we really need is a way to simply produce less plastic products. Increased use of glass, increased emphasis on reusing what plastic we do have and, yes, new technology to replace plastics with materials that break down faster so that when they do end up in the oceans, which in much of the world is inevitable from the moment of creation, they don't cause the amount of damage that plastics do.
Absolutely +1 to producing less plastic waste. There is some reason to hope that high temperature plasma incinerators can burn plastic waste and generate power with little residual pollution. That might be an option for areas without recycling and landfill capacity.
This was mentioned before. Plastic is used in all sorts of applications for its durability and lack of reactivity. It doesn't rot. It doesn't corrode. In certain environments it dries out and cracks but that's about it.
While there's a lot of plastic in the ocean it's relatively thinly distributed. It's not like there's a bunch of bottles floating in one place. It's a bunch of plastic dust in the water column. Any sort of bacteria or chemical that is self sustaining enough to be dropped in the ocean and expected to clean up the plastic would likely wreak havoc on all sorts of things. Any sort of bacteria or chemical that is sensitive enough that it won't wreak havoc in the environments where we don't want it to likely can't be applied in a effective or economical manner in the oceans.
> While there's a lot of plastic in the ocean it's relatively thinly distributed. It's not like there's a bunch of bottles floating in one place. It's a bunch of plastic dust in the water column.
But it's distributed over a very large area, and affects sea-life. Guess what that means for people who consume fish?
I don't know how it affects sea-life. Other than the occasional scare-tactic picture of a turtle with a plastic web stuck to it, what is the systemic effect? Sure there's lots of plastic in the ocean; there's lots of sand too. What's really at issue?
The United Nations Ocean Conference estimated that the oceans might contain more weight in plastics than fish by the year 2050.[33] Some long-lasting plastics end up in the stomachs of marine animals, mature and immature.[6][34][35] The food chain is affected as the plastic attracts seabirds and fish. When marine life consumes plastic allowing it to enter the food chain, this can lead to greater problems when species that have consumed plastic are being eaten by other predators.
Besides the particles' danger to wildlife, on the microscopic level the floating debris can absorb organic pollutants from seawater, including PCBs, DDT, and PAHs.[40] Aside from toxic effects,[41] when ingested, some of these are mistaken by the endocrine system as estradiol, causing hormone disruption in the affected animal.[38] These toxin-containing plastic pieces are also eaten by jellyfish, which are then eaten by fish. Many of these fish are then consumed by humans, resulting in their ingestion of toxic chemicals.[42] While eating their normal sources of food, plastic ingestion can be unavoidable or the animal may mistake the plastic as a food source.[43][44][45][46][47]
Marine plastics also facilitate the spread of invasive species that attach to floating plastic in one region and drift long distances to colonize other ecosystems.[15] Research has shown that this plastic marine debris affects at least 267 species worldwide.[48]
Plastic fails to degrade - fish eats, breathes or otherwise absorbs plastic - plastic is now in fish - plastic fails to degrade - fish is caught - plastic fails to degrade - fish, along with thousands of other fish, is caught - plastic continues to fail to degrade - fish are processed into ready meals... can you guess where the plastic (which is still failing to degrade, by the by) is going to end up?
Again with the loaded words. And what is the actual health issue? Do we imagine that fish are exposed to more plastic than the average human? Not likely. We already accept plastic into our lives continuously.
In a couple hundred million years the Earth will regenerate, new species will evolve, etc.
I do think we have a responsibility as self-aware beings to pick up after ourselves, but at the same time the Earth will be fine long-term. You could even say it's fine now. Yes, species are going extinct at an alarming rate, but we came from the Earth too and are not the only contributing factors to Earth's various disasters. I'm not about to throw trash out the window because of that fact, it's just that I don't have so much anxiety about totally destroying the planet. Maybe we will destroy the planet inasmuch as we can't live on it anymore, but that's our own damn fault and it's almost nothing compared to the longevity of the Earth.
Given sufficient time evolution makes pretty much any waste a resource. Oxygen used to be a toxic pollutant. Then nature evolved and started using it to produce energy in cells.
From when until 2015? You can't divide 6.3 billion tons by the number of people on earth in 2015. You have to count all the people who ever lived and died between whatever the start date was until 2015.
Without knowing the start date, I can't believe your figure.
It was in the video in the middle of the article. And yes, you'd have to count everyone who lived in the 20th century, too. Still, that's a staggeringly large amount of plastic per person.
Sometimes as I take out my trash I consider how much of the landfill I personally contribute to. I mentally picture the bag containing plastics (especially packaging from shipping) joining all my other bags, and it's a terrifying amount.
Or a cube of solid plastic about 1.5 miles on a side. It would be cool if some country took the West's plastic and recycled it by creating a series of kilometer sized geometric objects in a desert somewhere.
Why do so many people blame the west solely, because other countries can't help it, or because other countries export to the west, or because the west exports an amount of trash to other countries? Not even a Billion people in the west, those other 6 had nothing to do with it?
It seems like many here are making excuses why only the west is at fault. While most trash going in the ocean happens not in the west.
I used that phrase because of a recent policy change by China where they will no longer be the place where the West "recycles" its plastic garbage. The plastic that people in the West clean diligently and sort into the recycle bin, in a kind of ritual of forgiveness for consumption, must now find another final resting place. I just did not believe other countries feel the need for the ritual of recycling yet. If they just get plastic into a landfill after use, that is all that is really necessary for the environment.
It would be almost impossible to calculate, but I would guess 98% of plastic reuse is an environmental net negative. Reduce and reuse. Then bury it. Maybe burning it for electricity generation would help if it would offset coal burning power plants.
It is about who is doing it NOW, and what can be done about it. Some plastic program in the west has 0% impact on the polution on global scale. That doesn't mean that the west shouldn't be active in addressing the problem, but it means focussing on where the problem is and actually doing somethig about it.
You can blame the west all you want, but please don't think that other countries only produce for the west. There is a much bigger market.
I like the "Where did the plastic come from?" section in this article. Pretty sure it was a fish that carelessly tossed away the bag after going grocery shopping.
I'm not pro-plastic waste (obvously), but it'd be interesting to see a pro-con analysis. What is all this plastic use getting us, how could we replace it with sth else, and what would it cost.
Also, based on the article 40% of the waste here is from discarded shipping equipment. So it seems to me this can't be that must waste actually, compared to what we produce and presumably store on/in land [presumably that's a lot more than fishing equipment]. Or I'm reading it wrong.
It is that much waste. I suspect you underestimate the size of the fishing industry and fleets of boats. In 2004 the estimate of commercial fishing boats was over 4 million. As an example
of the impact of their waste consider the great pacific garbage patch: “the patch is 1.6 million square kilometers and has a concentration of 10-100 kg per square kilometers. They estimate there to be 80.000 metric tonnes in the patch, with 1.8 trillion plastic pieces, out of which 92% of the mass is to be found in objects larger than 0.5 centimeters.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch Obviously, it is not all fishing vessel waste, the belief is that the majority is, particularly discarding fishing net creating the body that all the other waste gets trapped in.
Or for the Americans with little concept of the rest of the world (no judgement; I'm one of them), over twice the size of Texas (which is just under 700k square kilometers).
Not even slightly surprising given the shear volume of trash on most beaches and reefs in the world. As any fishermen, diver, or snorkeler knows, the ocean is literally full of garbage, and the problem has gotten exponentially worse over the last few decades. Tourists often don't see it because most tourist destinations have workers (or volunteers) raking up the daily trash load from the sand in the early mornings before everyone else wakes up, but if you get up at say 4am and take a peak outside your hotel, whether in the Caribbean or most pacific islands, you'll see the people raking the beaches for trash.
And then if you travel to developing Asia in particular, you see why it's such a problem to begin with. There is trash literally everywhere, their landscapes, streets, creeks, rivers, are like a never ending open garbage dump or landfill. Not that the rest of the developing world is much better, and frankly much of the USA is increasingly full of garbage, litter, and detritus too, though not nearly to the extent of China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, etc. But just yesterday I watched a group of US tourists visiting a stunning scenic vista and proceed to toss multiple bags of fast food wrappers and garbage out of their Range Rover, they must think the litter magically takes care of itself.
So I found it there: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/09/worlds-deepest-p...