
Another Dead Whale Is Reminder Of Plastic Problem - Shivetya
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/04/09/yet-another-dead-whale-is-grave-reminder-of-our-massive-plastic-problem/#2d0eda806cd2
======
dbatten
Where does all this come from?

I'm admittedly not the biggest saint on the sustainable living front, but I
also don't see how all of this is getting into the oceans? AFAIK, any plastic
that comes into my house either ends up in the recycling (where it's
presumably recycled or sent to the landfill if it can't be recycled), ends up
in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) or (in the case of plastic
grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling.
Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.

It's easy to blame others for this sort of stuff (and, as I already said, I
admit I could do more on this stuff). But I can't help but think that first
world countries with relatively advanced recycling/trash systems aren't
contributing much to this and can't do much about it by implementing
additional regulations...

Am I wrong about that?

~~~
heymijo
No, you aren't wrong.

"Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" [0] \- The source
is Deutsche Welle, which appears to be Germany's equivalent of the BBC. [1]

"It turns out that about 90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the
world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus,
Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the
Niger, and the Mekong (in that order).

These rivers have a few key things in common. All of them run through areas
where a lot of people live — hundreds of millions of people in some cases. But
what's more important is that these areas don't have adequate waste collection
or recycling infrastructure. There is also little public awareness that
plastic trash is a problem at all, so a lot of garbage, gets thrown into the
river and conveniently disappears downstream."

Someone linked a great map of these 10 rivers in a past thread, but I can't
seem to find it.

[0] [http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-
comes-f...](http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-from-
just-10-rivers/a-41581484) [1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle)

~~~
tshannon
I wonder how practical it would be to have some sort of plastic filter / water
processing plant where these rivers dump into the ocean. It would be in all of
our best interest to fund something like that, but I wonder if you could do it
without a negative ecological impact, i.e. blocking wildlife from traversing
the river to and from the ocean.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
You might be interested in Baltimore Harbor's Water Wheel

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l7s6wC50g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l7s6wC50g)

It uses the water flow, solar, some pontoons and a clever design to fill up a
dumpster with debris. This seems like the real issue: someone still needs to
take it from the dumpster, but at that point it's a manageable problem.

------
jdavis703
The other day I noticed someone had deposited a disposable coffee cup in the
compost bin. The top was a plastic lid. This plastic lid will wind up in an
industrial composter, and degrade into a few largish chunks of plastic. This
compost (with the plastic remains) will then be dumped on a farm field
somewhere. It will then rain, and those plastic fragments will then wind up
washing in to the ocean. The point of this story: if you genuinely care about
having clean water and a clean food chain, put the right materials in the
right waste bins.

Details:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/06/600174922/an...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/06/600174922/another-
place-plastics-are-turning-up-organic-fertilizer-from-food-waste)

~~~
whiddershins
Any system that can be so easily defeated by user mistakes is a terrible
system.

That’s self evident in a software development context, but I feel like people
lose track of that in the real world.

Asking people to correctly sort their trash in to more and more specific
categories manually seems like a system set up to fail. People aren’t
necessarily that trainable or malleable or conscientious.

Yelling at people to be more careful is only going to get us so far. We need
robust systems that can tolerate at least a certain threshold of abuse by the
user. The ideal system would require no thought on the part of the user, it
would be impossible to break it through misuse.

~~~
quantum_magpie
The system _does_ work in civilized societies, though. Getting a couple
hundred euro fine for improper sorting fixes the issue really fast.

------
jmcgough
I was vacationing in Thailand a year ago, and was snorkeling in this
beautiful, emerald green lagoon in koh phi phi. I suddenly felt something
brush up against me from behind... and it was a small pile of floating plastic
trash. Really upset me that someone would disrespect such a uniquely beautiful
place. Other tour boats were just dumping their plastic waste in the ocean,
because it was easy, the ocean is big, and there were no repercussions to
them.

It's just a small example of a much larger problem... that very few people
think about what happens to their plastic waste, or the amount of it that they
throw away each year. It doesn't decompose, so we're filling huge landfills
with it, and at least some of it ends up in the ocean (through bad actors,
natural disasters, or polluting water that feeds into the ocean). Eventually
we'll do something about the problem, but by that point we'll have an ocean
full of 200 year old plastic. It seems like global tragedy of the commons
problems are among the hardest to solve.

------
s0fa37
I find the closing remarks around the banning of single-use plastic bags
troubling - surely there are much more beneficial areas to target to reduce
our overall use of plastic? Within each of these plastic bags full of
supermarket groceries is likely anywhere from 5-20 other items caked in
plastic packaging. How much of an impact is banning single use plastic bags,
even globally, going to make really? Not saying that I'm against the banning
of them, but shouldn't bans be extending much further across other products.
The single-use plastic bag seems like such a low-hanging fruit, easy-win, that
in my mind will make a negligible difference

~~~
thoth
There probably are beneficial areas to reduce grocery plastic, but some of
that plastic packaging is how/why food stays fresh on shelves longer. Cutting
that back means increasing preservatives, throwing stuff out more often,
shopping more often, etc.

Getting rid of plastic bags and other low hanging fruit (like straws) might
not make a huge difference. On the other hand part of the battle is changing
human behavior so starting with low hanging fruit is a good way to get people
used to looking for plastic alternatives.

~~~
CM30
They could always start with the non food related products. Why does every
piece of tech seem to come in a ton of plastic packaging anyway? Not so much
the computers, but mice, printers, cartridges, etc...

Reduce or ban plastic from being used to package tech products, toys, media
and random non food consumables and you'd probably cut down on a lot of
plastic usage now.

~~~
Tyr42
To make it harder to shoplift.

It's the reason DVD cases are shrinkwrapped, otherwise people will just empty
the cases.

~~~
CM30
Yeah, I know that logic. But I think the same still applies; the environmental
impact matters more than a company's bottom line does, and I feel governments
should start taking that into account.

------
spodek
That picture is horrifying, as are the ones in the article's first link
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/10/27/idyllic-c...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/10/27/idyllic-
caribbean-island-covered-in-a-tide-of-plastic-trash-along-
coastline/#763919522524).

I hope all of our needless plastic bottles, food packaging, and trinkets bring
us joy greater than the centuries of destruction they bring.

Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for
hundreds of thousands of years.

Regulation and pollution taxes can help, but right here right now we can each
cut our plastic consumption by 90% without changing our lives at all beyond
saving money.

EDIT: Thanks barrad0s for pointing out the picture is a "representation,"
which I find counterproductive, though it doesn't change the situation or
images in the other link.

~~~
barrad0s
That's not a real picture. Kinda screws up the article a bit in my opinion, no
need for that. Says right below the pic "A Greenpeace Philippines
representation of a dead whale from ingestion of plastic. The representation
is increasingly becoming a reality."

~~~
setquk
Ignore the Greenpeace rubbish. There's a picture in the video of what was
actually extracted from the whale.

------
pasta
The Dutch Ocean Cleanup project planned to start cleaning up plastic mid 2018
[1]. I really hope they can make this happen.

[1]
[https://www.theoceancleanup.com/milestones/](https://www.theoceancleanup.com/milestones/)

------
gigatexal
Seeing this made me sick: the things we do to the environment and to the
animals that live in it sucks sometimes. My family has moved to reusable
plastic grocery bags and we try to recycle everything. Living in Germany they
take trash and recycling very seriously

~~~
lkrubner
" _and to the animals that live in it sucks sometimes_ "

We humans are also animals that live in it. I think a first step towards
fixing the problem is remembering that there is no meaningful "us versus them"
issue regarding the environment.

~~~
craftyguy
I don't disagree with you but, generally, we have a very hard time with "us
versus them" even within our own species to have little/no hope that we could
remember such a thing when we look at other species.

------
tabeth
All of these issues can be solved with pretty straightforward economics. If
only there was an impartial, non-corrupt entity that could price
externalities, which would then propagate to consumer product prices and
therefore minimize this kind of thing.

------
ulyssesv
Same goes for the birds:
[https://vimeo.com/218502282](https://vimeo.com/218502282)

------
pvaldes
I can say by direct experience that often is just like that, yes. I found
manure sacks, newspapers, lots of plastic bags and net chunks in knots.
Sometimes it was a little, other a lot.

Is unclear to me on the other hand, if plastic was the cause of death or just
a desperately starving animal trying to survive. The sample in the video is
very peculiar (not what they found. Is what is missing there). We talk about
26Kg of plastic, that could look like a lot, but was found inside a 6 ton
animal with a huge, huge gut. This is a terminal animal. Deaf by sonar or last
storms could easily be the real killer here.

------
svag
There is an interesting documentary regarding the plastic problem in oceans,
called [A Plastic
Ocean]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zrn4-FfbXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zrn4-FfbXw))

------
nanomonkey
I've never understood why we don't gasify our waste plastic and woody material
and use it as a fuel source. PVC withstanding (as it create toxic Chloride
gases), the stuff has value for a large power plant.

------
DataWorker
Isn’t most of this coming from China and if so how much impact can European
laws really have on the problem?

~~~
latch
There's a fine line between ignorance and racism and presenting a fact as a
question isn't particularly clever.

If you don't know, ask (or better yet, research and educate the rest of us),
but don't ask and imply (with no source).

The idea that laws affecting 770 million of the most affluent consumers won't
have an impact is laughable. The view of "why should we do things if _they_
aren't", is sad.

~~~
smsm42
How it is racism to find out - either by question or by statement - the actual
source of the plastic? Is attributing any issues to anybody other than "770
million of the most affluent consumers" racist? This is completely insane. One
can not solve a problem while ignoring the factual sources of it and being
driven by ideology instead of reality.

~~~
latch
It's a leading question which is based on what? Either provide a source, or at
least avoid singling a group out. If you say "China produces most of the
plastic waste" without any background, that's just prejudice. We constantly
see this ( blaming specific groups for all the pollution, or crime, or job
stealing, or...).

Changing that to "Doesn't China produce most of the plastic waste?" is not
better.

To add actual information to this, it looks like China is a major polluter,
but that until the recent Chinese ban (discussed on HN) Europe (and America)
was exporting a lot of garbage to China. According to [1] Europe exported 1.6
million tons of plastic to China in 2016

[1] [https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-recycling-china-
trash...](https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-recycling-china-trash-ban-
forces-europe-to-confront-its-waste-problem/)

~~~
smsm42
> It's a leading question which is based on what?

On facts. If you read the comments, there are multiple sources for this claim.
Even if the particular commenter did not have the source link handy, this is
discussed a lot and they might have heard about it or read about it in
relevant places and remembered the fact. Even if they didn't, assuming that
the country with world's biggest population, one of the world's biggest
manufacturing bases and known for not-exactly-excellent attitudes toward
environmental issues may be a major source of waste is not an unreasonable
assumption. It could be wrong (which it isn't, but it could theoretically be),
but jumping from that assumption directly to "racism" accusation is plain
insane and can only be aimed at preventing proper factual discussion instead
of facilitating it. I think you should apologize for mentioning "racism",
especially that you yourself admit China _is_ a major polluter (not that it
would be racist even if it weren't but even more in this case).

------
cvaidya1986
Is there a cheaper biodegradable alternative to plastic?

~~~
IAmEveryone
In many cases, "nothing" is the better alternative.

I was somewhat surprised when I was in the UK (IIRC) and saw apples where sold
in packs of six, on a tray of Styrofoam with plastic foil all around.

While in my country it's common to pack fresh vegetables and fruits into
plastic bags, those are a fraction of the weight and many people choose not to
use them.

Same applies to packaging across the board: bags containing smaller bags
containing individually-wrapped sweets are insane. Frozen pizzas packed in two
layers of foil plus a cardboard box? The US is actually better in that regard,
largely dispensing with the cardboard.

------
schnable
The alternative to plastic in many or even most cases are items that generate
more carbon to produce, and much more to ship.

------
Paul-ish
How much of the plastic is from consumers, and how much is from industrial and
commercial sources?

~~~
titzer
Almost all of it is single-use plastic containers for food.

Goodie bags and bottles. That's what killed Earth. Great ain't it?

~~~
Paul-ish
Do you have a source?

------
Eurongreyjoy
Its insane to me that back in the 80's a plastic trash "island" was discovered
somewhere between the size of Texas and Russia (depending on estimate). All
these years later and there has been almost nothing done to combat the
problem.

California is still the only state to completely ban single use plastic bags.

Is the convenience of a super market giving you multiple plastic bags every
time you enter worth the damage we are doing to the planet?

~~~
noer
Chicago banned single use plastic bags a few years ago. While some stores
switched to paper, most just began to use thicker plastic bags and called them
"reusable bags". I think the ban lasted about 18 months and when it was found
that plastic bag use hadn't dropped at all, the city instituted a bag tax of
$0.07 per bag used. I think that actually worked to reduce bag usage.

~~~
dragonwriter
California has both a single-use ban _and_ a minimum per bag charge (which
isn't strictly a bag _tax_ but should have the same direct effect on consumer
behavior, even if it has a different direct effect on retailer behavior.)

