We have been seeing massive fishing net globs come ashore for the past few years on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's getting worse. My boys and I personally dragged a large chunk ashore this past year. They are extremely heavy and take a lot of work to move and dispose of all the netting. Here's the image: https://imgur.com/12U4FXg
This might be off-topic WRT the linked article, but I just wanted to take the time to say that I admire that you did this with your sons. If I become a parent I want to also instill the value of leaving behind a wake of improvement to our environment and communities, even if it's just picking up a piece of trash that would otherwise sit there until it decomposes.
Plastic pollution clearly is an emergency now, but that this much of it comes from abandoned fishing gear means cutting the pollution at it's source should be a lot less complicated than trying to completely change the whole world's view on plastic production.
Obviously we still need to curb plastic production globally, but it's so commonplace that this will be almost impossible to realistically achieve with the world the way it is. I'd hope that over time we could introduce legislation to move to biodegradeable plastics, but really, we need to change our cultural view of consumption and waste entirely.
It's a task that makes solving climate change look trivial, so I'm struggling to hold out hope - although the one ray of light here is that it seems that the scale of the problem is bi-partisan acknowledged, for example, on the left:
So at least some cause for optimism if the WHO can pressure the UN to take multilateral action, but it'll take pressure on the ground from people the world over.
I wonder if within 1,000 years they don’t develop nano robots that actually mine our current trash for the minerals? We toss out gold, silver, rare earth metals, petroleum, every day... the trick is it’s so very hard right now to extract those minerals, but perhaps our current landfills and garbage patches will become the “gold mines” of the future. It would be super easy to reach — landfills have trash just feet below the surface. No dangerous digging.
Just thinking optimistically here. I personally do what I can now to keep the earth clean. No sense peeing in your own pool.
Not using nanobots, but some municipal waste incineration plants are already recovering valuable metals. A more recent development is using dry discharge of bottom ash to recover >95% of all metals [1].
From 100 000 metric tons of clinker, ZAV Recycling AG in Hinwil (Switzerland) is extracting 60kg of gold, 1500kg of silver and 800 metric tons of copper each year.
When I lived in a crappier area of a city I noticed an interesting system: "scrappers" - poor, probably homeless, people who would dig through your trash looking for recyclables that they could sell.
So there was this totally organic system that had emerged which helped make sure the trash didn't contain things that still had value. Of course it wasn't perfect, not to mention that we really don't want people to have to do that. Interesting non the less.
Michigan has a 10 cent bottle/can deposit and it's very common for homeless people to go through trash looking for bottles and cans.
Before and after college football games it's common for people to go around asking for empties at the tailgate. They can make a pretty good amount of money on those days.
Yes, they would also go through my recycling bin. That part may be a net negative, because I assume they take the most valuable stuff and leave the rest for the city, which has to cover the costs of picking up and processing most of the recycling.
They are often in a terrible state here in New Zealand. No liner, on costal estuaries and all of a sudden a storm pulls a section into the sea. It’s depressing how perfectly set up they are to cause trouble.
Landfills don't compare well to even low quality ores. Extracting the materials in them may get cheap at some point (at which point they can be thoroughly cleaned up), it won't get cheaper than other sources.
This is a technical solution to a human problem. Even with extremely advanced technology (by today's standards), the garbage of today will still be separated into valuable materials (just, more than today) and garbage... and the garbage will still be dumped in the ocean (or wherever).
If you consider it from an atom and energy perspective, you only really need to worry about the atoms that are going to cause you problems no matter what you do, like mercury and the other heavy metals. Those are generally valuable, though (the fact that they are valuable is why they are in a landfill at all in the first place, because it had value at one time), so if there was a cost-effective mechanism to remove those things from a landfill for profit, what was left over would not necessarily be a problem anymore.
Garbage getting dumped somewhere is not intrinsically a problem, if the garbage is not as intrinsically harmful as our current garbage.
(This is also why radioactive waste is so difficult to get rid of; it isn't a chemical problem, it's a problem all the way down to the atoms. Were it a mere chemical problem we'd have solved it long ago.)
A fish with a polymer of "innocuous" organic atoms in the digestive tract is likely to disagree.
Removing more harmful materials would certainly be a benefit, but it wouldn't solve the large part of the problem (which, in the case of the patch, is plastics).
"A fish with a polymer of "innocuous" organic atoms in the digestive tract is likely to disagree."
First of all, since the topic was landfills, I have some questions as to how the fish managed to get plastic from a landfill stuck in them. Yeah, it's possible, but somebody screwed up along the way.
Second, that's the exact opposite of what I meant by thinking just from an atom and energy perspective. It's a small amount of energy to turn those organic atoms into something less harmful, and probably a net gain from a strictly chemical perspective (i.e., plastics tend to burn). We are intrinsically speaking from a much higher tech than we currently have here. The process of extracting out mercury and cadmium and such can be reasonably assumed to either process waste to something safe before putting it out into the ecosystem, or that they will place the plastics somewhere where they aren't going to affect anything when done. I don't think our hypothetical future landfill miners are going to be allowed to just tear open the landfills and start shooting whatever they decide they don't want with cannons into the surrounding countryside.
It's interesting that (according to this article), while 20% of marine debris globally is fishing gear, 46% of this sample was from fishing sources. There is one source quoted as saying that the study is based on "limited surveys", but the study also apparently took 752 surface trawls (which, to my layman's ear, sounds like a lot). Would the concern be not about the number of samples, but the type of samples? Perhaps fishing gear is more inclined to float to the top where the trawls were taken, or more gear is abandoned in a location that is more likely to float to the patch?
> Perhaps fishing gear is more inclined to float to the top where the trawls were taken
Virtually everything non-living either floats or sinks in water. There isn't a major accumulation of debris with exactly the same density as ocean water that follows this garbage patch 100 metres lower.
Perhaps it can be explained by the location of the patch and where fishing boats typically go? I would imagine other types of garbage may have a coastal bias?
> Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today.
"only eight percent of the total tonnage"? We are talking about microplastics, that is still an incredible amount of plastic.
What's more interesting is I think this article shows how journalism about environmental destruction has some significant problems. It works as with most other human communication, we want narratives and images that evokes emotion (a kind of mythic/romantic understanding of things). That's why "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch" works so well, we all mentally see an island of trash in our heads that needs "cleaning up" and along comes the hero, a young entreprenour. Other things that work well are pictures of dead birds on a beach with their stomach full of different colored plastics.
The problem is when our "romantic" idea of pollution hides/ignores the more destructive (and more complex) effects. Pictures of flooding being the poster images for climate change is an incredibly shallow view of the problem. And no part of the world is free of plastic, so basically the entire earth is a plastic garbage patch. Even worse, when an image that is built up doesn't fit what it started out as. You have basically made things worse by planting doubt about the problem in general by having an incomplete and shallow image of the problem..
Yeah, and the relative harm between microplastics and heavy chunks of garbage is also off the charts. A big chunk of stuff floating around in the open ocean can actually become a habitat for all kinds of creatures, whereas small bits of plastic are basically poison.
How the hell can you clean this up without a thousand people using tweezers?
You can't get a backhoe down to the beach. Every tide brings more of the stuff in. It's so overwhelming that it seems pointless even attempting to pick it up. There's f-ing miles and miles of it.
Definitely a great job for robots that are like beach and water roombas [1]. They can side as mapping the oceans better and report other data. These types of robots still need to be widespread and better but that is probably the only way to tackle this problem.
Other solutions in the water are being worked on that scrape it off with a large line [2] or a boat like Mr Trash Wheel [3]
This isn't the title of the article, and the change is not only inaccurate (46% is not 'mostly') but it downplays the significance of the garbage patch.
The 46% is only the nets, the title is absolutely true if left as it was.
“The study also found that fishing nets account for 46 percent of the trash, with the majority of the rest composed of other fishing industry gear, including ropes, oyster spacers, eel traps, crates, and baskets.”
The title is clickbait so we changed it, in accordance with the site guidelines, to the subtitle. But we can take out "mostly" if that bit is misleading.
But you're right. Gifts aside, we can at least reduce the packaging. Recently I had a chance to spend some time in Japan and the overuse of plastic bags and packaging was startling. (I expected a modern island nation to be more environmentally efficient.)
Sources suggest this is "customer first" culture-driven:
I do not know if plastic bags are banned in France, I can use any amount of PLA bags that I want for free and if I pay one euro per bag, I can buy as many plastic bags that I want.
In France often what the law says and what is reported in media differs widely. It is absolutely out of context but the best example was the 35 hours per week laws that authorised up to 56 hours per week for some kind of workers.
PLA bags aren't bad for the environment; they will decompose quickly. Having 1 euro for durable plastic ones looks more than enough to di discourage their use (even if it's not an actual ban).
PLA will only decompose quickly in an industrial composting facility. If it gets into the ocean it will decompose at about the same rate as regular plastics.
That's quite an interesting looking one, I've not directly heard of it before but as it's been around for a few years is quite possibly used in some products.
It looks to be a PLA base with some other additives, presumably to aid the breakdown. Thanks for the info, I'll look into it more.
A few people in the comments have pointed out problems with the reporting, and the general motive of downplaying environmental issues aligns with those of the aforementioned media company.
I don't mean to imply anything wrong with the article, but I totally agree that bringing this up is relevant. The potential motivations of who is telling you something is very important. One of the first things I did was google "who owns national geographic". Then I looked through the comments here to see if it'd been mentioned. (I would've made a similar comment, despite the almost inevitable downvoting which I see has so far happened to your comment.)
Agreed. The article itself doesn't seem wildly biased from a cursory glance, and I'm not really qualified to comment on its scientific rigor, but it's worth being aware of potential sources of bias nonetheless.
This is the latest, the largest tangle of net researchers have seen wash ashore. http://www.fox8live.com/story/37529263/its-huge-40-ton-mass-...