> The world produces a whopping 380 million metric tons of plastic annually, and a large part of that plastic ends up in the world’s oceans and rivers.
That's an average of about 50 kg of plastic produced per person per year which is insane but I wonder what the median is and what the distribution looks like. How much plastic does a person in the US go through compared to someone in a developing country? How much of that plastic is used in industrial settings to support our infrastructure compared to plastic we actually touch?
This is horrible but now I really want to add some plastistone to my mineral specimen collection.
Agree, but now you have microplastic particulates to dispose of, and containing these long term is a far harder problem than containing the original larger plastics.
We put it in trash bins. Companies with contracts collect it. It get's shipped to asia or africa for recycling. Job done. Recycled ...
It is dumped where ever it is convinient for the contracting company
But I totaly undersand your point. For me, it would also be real work to not put waste in the trash bin, but to drive somewhere to dispose it
This isn't the case, at least in the US. Trash from trash bins is almost exclusively dealt with locally, whether in landfills or incinerators. Essentially zero US household trash is shipped internationally.
Recycling is another matter. Plastic recycling frequently does follow the path you mentioned.
For this reason it can sometimes be more environmentally friendly to throw away plastic waste, sequestering it in your local landfill, than "recycling" it into the Pacific ocean.
> This isn't the case, at least in the US. Trash from trash bins is almost exclusively dealt with locally, whether in landfills or incinerators.
It's exactly the same in Germany.
I was talking about plastic.
In germany we recycle paper and "some" plastic. But all I've seen/read is, it's a miniscule amount. Like greenwashing. Most of it get's just shipped somewhere else with some super shady "we recycle it for you, so you can can wash you hands in innocence" deals.
And IIRC it's the same for the US.
During Covid there were numerous chinese container ships waiting on the US coast after unloading, to load "recycling material", because waiting was cheaper than driving back empty. (they just dump it somewhere in the end)
Actually if you look at EU export statistics, so little actual plastic waste gets exported to the Pacific (in contrast to wood chips going to Netherland power plants or cubed cars going wherever) that if 100% of it did end up in the ocean it would only increase the level of plastic outflow by a single percent. One of my earlier comments here has the more proof with links and stuff, it's just really buried and I don't feel like finding it right now
About a third of all marine plastic comes from one country: the Philippines, which has essentially no landfill capacity. One would hope that this concentrated hot spot (to use profiling terminology) makes it "low-hanging fruit" for intervention, but that hasn't happened yet.
Perhaps a global or regional coalition of commercial fishing associations interested in protecting their market. Speaking for myself, I can confirm that I've reduced my intake of ocean-sourced seafood over the last decade precisely because of the increasing prevalence of micro-plastics in the food chain (which seems to be a far greater problem for ocean-sourced food than land-sourced food).
You'd be surprised how often your responsibility ends up in the water anyway
In the woods near me there is so much trash -- caused by wind storms knocking off recycling bins and carrying the stuff until it's "caught" in the trees and other nature
A little more than half of the plastic found in the ocean and large enough to be recognizable comes from fishing nets. Those are enormous and are used very aggressively: raking the floor, pulling hard even when it’s stuck against rocks, etc. It’s cheaper to carry spares on the way out at sea than to care about not losing them: those will go gone soon enough and replaced by fish on the way back anyway.
If you care about that, there are ways to get fish that isn’t caught with industrial trawlers like this, but it requires meaningful attention. Be conscious fishmongers will lie to your face, so traceability is critical. They routinely lied to my dad when they knew him personally; they knew he was in charge of fish stocks too, and he wasn’t shy about his ability to differentiate species. And not white lies, like misplacing the species with something equivalent or from the wrong part of the same bay: he was routinely told they were selling fish that was banned from sale after he had pointed out it wasn’t the right species, that species was extinct in that country, and the only stock available was farmed…
All that to say: you can help, but it’s a big uphill battle. I guess that half counts as industrial that you don’t touch.
The other half (of the plastic found in the ocean) is from countries without sufficient garbage collection. There was an effort to collect it around the “Team Rivers” effort (after “Team Trees”) from a couple of YouTubers.
I remember someone criticizing the effort as whitewashing the reality: there were draft laws to collect garbage. However, in budget-constraint countries without an omnipresent tax collection capacity, that depends on financing it by collecting a fee from known brands using plastic packaging. Lobbyists from well-known international brands opposed the laws to protect margins. I couldn’t find that reaction with minimal effort, but I can try harder to track it if you are interested.
There is plastic thrown out by pigs in Western countries. It flies in the wind and gets into rivers and the ocean, but that’s materially less overall. I’d still blame the same well-known brands for not using glass or metallic bottles, though.
So, in that second case, you do touch it and the culprits are well-known sugary water vendors.
You're forgetting two absolutely massive and completely endemic plastic vectors:
1. Car tires.
2. And literally all clothes that aren't natural fibers. Which is a huge, absolutely huge percentage.
Neither of these get any better by preventing littering. Driving and clothes washing and drying is spewing your plastic mist into the air 24 hours a day.
A lot of synthetic fibers during clothing washing goes into sewage and after a treatment (which doesn’t remove micro plastics) into the environment. I wonder why home washing machines are not equipped with mesh filters so it would go to a landfill instead of waterways.
>However, in budget-constraint countries without an omnipresent tax collection capacity, that depends on financing it by collecting a fee from known brands using plastic packaging. Lobbyists from well-known international brands opposed the laws to protect margins.
This is very much the answer. The producers of a product must pay the *full cost, including all externalities,* of recycling it. This will incenctivise them to e.g. find packaging which is easier to recycle. Otherwise why bother? Wrap things in plastic inside of paper inside of plastic inside of cardboard, who cares, it's dirt cheap and you don't have to pay for the harmful effects of its improper disposal!
"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?”
Good thing is, maaybe, maybe, plastic merging to rock will decompose less into microplastic and will be bury into sediments layers, eventually showing again in millions years.
But we'll probably never know, as permafrost is melting under +5°C increase in Arctic regions. Which is a ticking bomb in term of co2 release.
39 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 82.5 ms ] threadThat's an average of about 50 kg of plastic produced per person per year which is insane but I wonder what the median is and what the distribution looks like. How much plastic does a person in the US go through compared to someone in a developing country? How much of that plastic is used in industrial settings to support our infrastructure compared to plastic we actually touch?
This is horrible but now I really want to add some plastistone to my mineral specimen collection.
At least for me, it’s an order of magnitude easier to throw plastic into a trash bin than to drive down to the river and dump it in.
Waste incineration to create electricity, and also (according to those companies) to reduce emissions from landfills, and the need for land for waste.
Even if you think it's going to landfill, a lot is not.
And when it's burned, plastics are released into the environment, if not immediately then over shorter time than if they were left intact and buried.
It's best in every single possible way, except for one: Emotional people who don't realize it's the best way.
Recycling, who knows. But trash, I know exactly where it goes.
But I totaly undersand your point. For me, it would also be real work to not put waste in the trash bin, but to drive somewhere to dispose it
This isn't the case, at least in the US. Trash from trash bins is almost exclusively dealt with locally, whether in landfills or incinerators. Essentially zero US household trash is shipped internationally.
Recycling is another matter. Plastic recycling frequently does follow the path you mentioned.
For this reason it can sometimes be more environmentally friendly to throw away plastic waste, sequestering it in your local landfill, than "recycling" it into the Pacific ocean.
It's exactly the same in Germany. I was talking about plastic.
In germany we recycle paper and "some" plastic. But all I've seen/read is, it's a miniscule amount. Like greenwashing. Most of it get's just shipped somewhere else with some super shady "we recycle it for you, so you can can wash you hands in innocence" deals. And IIRC it's the same for the US. During Covid there were numerous chinese container ships waiting on the US coast after unloading, to load "recycling material", because waiting was cheaper than driving back empty. (they just dump it somewhere in the end)
Zero trash gets shipped. And any recycling that gets shipped is purchased by the receiver, which means they don't dump it because the want it.
In the woods near me there is so much trash -- caused by wind storms knocking off recycling bins and carrying the stuff until it's "caught" in the trees and other nature
Kinda eye opening
If you care about that, there are ways to get fish that isn’t caught with industrial trawlers like this, but it requires meaningful attention. Be conscious fishmongers will lie to your face, so traceability is critical. They routinely lied to my dad when they knew him personally; they knew he was in charge of fish stocks too, and he wasn’t shy about his ability to differentiate species. And not white lies, like misplacing the species with something equivalent or from the wrong part of the same bay: he was routinely told they were selling fish that was banned from sale after he had pointed out it wasn’t the right species, that species was extinct in that country, and the only stock available was farmed…
All that to say: you can help, but it’s a big uphill battle. I guess that half counts as industrial that you don’t touch.
The other half (of the plastic found in the ocean) is from countries without sufficient garbage collection. There was an effort to collect it around the “Team Rivers” effort (after “Team Trees”) from a couple of YouTubers.
I remember someone criticizing the effort as whitewashing the reality: there were draft laws to collect garbage. However, in budget-constraint countries without an omnipresent tax collection capacity, that depends on financing it by collecting a fee from known brands using plastic packaging. Lobbyists from well-known international brands opposed the laws to protect margins. I couldn’t find that reaction with minimal effort, but I can try harder to track it if you are interested.
There is plastic thrown out by pigs in Western countries. It flies in the wind and gets into rivers and the ocean, but that’s materially less overall. I’d still blame the same well-known brands for not using glass or metallic bottles, though.
So, in that second case, you do touch it and the culprits are well-known sugary water vendors.
1. Car tires. 2. And literally all clothes that aren't natural fibers. Which is a huge, absolutely huge percentage.
Neither of these get any better by preventing littering. Driving and clothes washing and drying is spewing your plastic mist into the air 24 hours a day.
This is very much the answer. The producers of a product must pay the *full cost, including all externalities,* of recycling it. This will incenctivise them to e.g. find packaging which is easier to recycle. Otherwise why bother? Wrap things in plastic inside of paper inside of plastic inside of cardboard, who cares, it's dirt cheap and you don't have to pay for the harmful effects of its improper disposal!
Plastic… asshole.”
― George Carlin
But we'll probably never know, as permafrost is melting under +5°C increase in Arctic regions. Which is a ticking bomb in term of co2 release.