
Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag - bauc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-48230157
======
wnissen
You're picturing plastic waste in the oceans wrong. Most of it comes from
fishing gear that's abandoned or lost, not disposal of waste like plastic
bags. In total 80-90% come from Asian and African countries with poor
environmental policies.

[https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-
cause-90-pl...](https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-
cause-90-plastic-pollution-worlds-oceans-13233)

For the record, I am a scuba diver who has participated in the "Dive Against
Debris", we use paper straws at home, I bike to work a couple days a week, and
switched to reusable bags years before they were required in my locale, etc.
I'm not saying that reducing single-use plastics isn't a worthy goal (and
microplastics are just as bad as they seem), but developed country waste is
getting safely landfilled. Your plastic straw is not ending up at the bottom
of the Marinara trench.

~~~
nicoburns
> but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled

That's definitely not true in the UK. A lot of our "recycling" has been being
shipped to China until recently. I believe that other countries have been
doing that too.

~~~
steve_adams_86
It's hard to define "safely" landfilled as well. Many places still leak out
toxic leachate into water tables due to a lack of barriers on the landfill.
They also severely disrupt large tracts of land. They also vent off tremendous
amounts of methane. There isn't much safe about most landfills out there.

~~~
wnissen
True, there is a lot of variety there. Around here everything is properly
lined and the water table monitored for various poisons, but that's not true
everywhere. The methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, and I see little
progress on that, even in eco-conscious California. Composting more or less
eliminates the methane but I see maybe half of the households in our
neighborhood putting out a green waste cart.

Global warming is really the problem, and I will admit to being a huge
hypocrite on that. I drive about half the average American's 13.5K miles /
21.K 7km, but fly a lot, probably 20K miles / 32K km. Sigh.

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hawkjo
The most exciting news is that they made several extremely deep dives in quick
succession, advancing the way to a future of regular deep sea exploration.
Congrats to the team!

~~~
mc32
Do you think this has the potential to result technologies allowing the
exploitation (extraction) of deep sea natural resources (i.e. minerals and
metals)?

It seems people are more excited by exploiting the Moon for resources, but
deep sea should be more economical once extraction tech is figured out.

~~~
Konnstann
I'd rather exploit the moon, to the best of my knowledge nothing lives there,
and I doubt we'd make a large enough dent to affect tides or other moon-
related events.

~~~
mc32
The Moon is nice, but for Earth usage, extracting on the Moon seems like it
would be more energy expensive than on Earth, no?

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erentz
Instead of anthropocene we might be better to call the current era the
plastocene.

~~~
bdamm
With some previously non-existent radioactive elements mixed in for good
measure. This layer of plastic, radioactivity, and airliner exhaust will be
forever buried in the geologic record at every point on the earth. What fun!

~~~
linuxftw
Do you think the geological record might indicate a type of 'evolution and
migration' of plastics across the globe?

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rtkwe
Not sure it will because it's a very short time period that plastics have
existed geologically speaking and the time periods found in rock/soil/ice are
generally pretty imprecise until we can relate them to something like tree
rings that show precise year cycles where there's a large event like a fire
that shows up in both the rock/soil layer and in trees. Generally without
large anchoring events like that the best we get is very large time frames for
events and mostly in relation to other events in the local area where you can
measure forwards and backwards (up and down in the rock formation) relative to
other events.

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arestifo
Plastic reached where humans never managed to.

Great, just great.

~~~
geddy
I think about it this way - the planet will survive, humans will not. Within a
year of us being gone the planet will take over everything we ever owned.
Weeds will break through the streets and house foundations, and in a decade or
so (blink of an eye in Earth time) it'll be like we were never here.

Well except for all the garbage we left behind. But even that will become food
for something.

~~~
mirceal
in the grand scheme of things, humans and what we have produced is nothing.
Given enough time everything will be decomposed. On in the words of a great
comedian: "the planet is fine, people are f'ed"

My worry is that we will transform Earth into a landfill and in desperation we
will search (and find) another planet to trash. Humans are very very creative
when it comes to survival. Only a fraction of people alive will make it to the
new planet. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
MS90
Given enough time, the Earth will be incinerated by the sun as it expands into
a red giant. Solved the plastic problem!

Though as you said, I'm sure we'll have a few hundred (thousand) landfill
planets by then.

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benzene
On a smaller scale, how about using a mass accelerator to dispose of trash by
shooting it into the sun?

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nitrogen
I think the sun is further away in terms of energy required than one would
expect. You don't just have to escape the Earth, you also need to cancel or
redirect its orbital velocity around the sun to get a trajectory that reaches
the sun.

~~~
Pawamoy
Then throw it into space, whatever the direction. The universe is so vast,
even if the entirety of the earth was garbage it would be nothing compared to
it ;)

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sjclemmy
The best thing about this is that the vessels’ names are inspired by Iain M.
Banks’s Culture novels.

[https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/names/](https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/names/)

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JTbane
There ought to be a principle that packaging is evaluated on how much harm a
'careless' disposal would cause: even though a paper bag takes many times more
energy to produce than a plastic one, it causes less harm when disposed of by
dumping.

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nealrs
I believe we've known about plastic bags at the bottom of the Mariana Trench
since
[1998]([http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/catalog/dsdebris/metadataDisp...](http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/catalog/dsdebris/metadataDisp/JEDI_KAIKO0073_00010V?lang=en))

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swarnie_
Reading the comments here is a bit scary. Is taking the same 4-5 plastic bags
back to the supermarket each week not super common everywhere?

~~~
rohit2412
Or cloth bags. Seriously, they are stronger, hold more stuff and hurt less
because of sharp edges. All you need to do is just carry them

~~~
CelestialTeapot
I use cloth bags, too. But, ignoring the marine dumping problem, cloth bags
can be the worst.[1] You would need to reuse each thousands of times to be
worth using over LDPE bags.

1\. [https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-
cotto...](https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotton-totes-
might-be-worse-than-plastic/)

~~~
A2017U1
That's more an indictment of cotton than reusable bags. Other materials are
fine.

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dfilppi
Cool. That would be a good place to stick plastic bags.

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otabdeveloper1
Trash flows downstream. Not very surprising.

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gedy
I’m old enough to remember being berated by a family member for using paper
bags instead of plastic bags because, quote: “Plastic is recyclable!”

~~~
chrisseaton
Well they’re reusable, which is even better than recyclable. They also use
less materials to make and are stronger for the same weight, so they also
reduce, which is better still.

Just don’t throw them into the ocean. But that much should have been obvious.

~~~
libraryatnight
I don't know what kind of plastic bag it was, but the grocery bags we get
where I live start to develop holes rather quickly so they're not actually
reusable. They also aren't allowed in my city's recycle bins because they
apparently just get stuck in the sorting machines and cause all kinds of
issues.

When I tried saving them for various uses and noticed they develop holes
quickly, I thought maybe that's good - maybe these bags were made to decompose
quickly or something, but that's not the case. And now that we know
microplastics are inside lots of organisms (including ourselves) I can't help
but just feel like plastic is just a nasty SOB.

We've ended up getting a bunch of those cloth re-usable grocery bags and using
those. I also use containers rather than zip lock bags. But I doubt I make
much of a difference because when I take my morning walks on trash/recycle
pickup days I frequently see bins filled to the brim with plastic water
bottles where it seems like people just buy multiple cases of water bottles
and drink from them like they're cups or soda cans and toss them.

~~~
skookumchuck
I reuse the paper grocery bags. They can usually be used 10 times or more
before they disintegrate, then I use them again as trash bags. I wonder why
I've never heard anyone mention this.

The grocery store has no problem at all with me bringing back the paper bags
and stuffing my purchases in them. They've never said a word about it. I never
see anyone else do it.

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jdsully
The grocery store loves you. Bags are a major expense for them - unless you’re
in an area where they get to charge.

The only potential issue is extra scrutiny from loss prevention.

~~~
frenchy
> unless you’re in an area where they get to charge.

Why don't they do this everywhere? Is it because customers would throw a fit?

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Kluny
In my city, it took a long time to get a plastic bag ban passed because of
strong opposition from plastic manufacturer lobbyists who pretended that they
were taking the side of "local businesses".

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bazooka_penguin
Plastic bags are the cthulu we've always been expecting to find deep in the
ocean

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Dirlewanger
What are you talking about? No one actually needs single-use plastics; they're
a wholly unnecessary, superfluous byproduct of consumer capitalism. Unless
there's some medical applications I'm not aware of, the world would be a
better place if most single-use plastics disappeared tomorrow.

~~~
fjp
While you are correct, I do believe that these feel-good campaigns distract
from the corporate polluters that cause the vast vast majority of these
problems.

If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small amount
of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay attention to
the real villains.

~~~
EForEndeavour
> If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small
> amount of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay
> attention to the real villains.

Plastic straws are a negligible fraction of plastic pollution, but they
represent much more than that. Viral attention on plastic straws serves as a
convenient lever by which the broader topic of environmental stewardship is
pushed to the forefront of peoples' minds, indirectly achieving the goal of
cleaning up the world. At least, that's what I hope, not what I expect.

Sure, some people will react with supercilious contempt at the hordes of
selectively ignorant masses signalling virtue with their social-media images
of strawless drinks. It's not like their personal choices are saving turtles,
let alone the oceans. But this misses the point: the anti-straw campaign
reminds entire populations that people collectively throw away too much
plastic, and that things need to change -- at all levels, from the individual
upward.

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7373737373
Is there a list of governments, companies and other organizations that
documents how much waste they direct into the sea?

Or is the majority of it individual people littering?

