
Planet’s ocean-plastics problem detailed in 60-year data set - sunraa
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01252-0
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acd
It would be interesting to run it against a data set with percentage of
consumer packages in plastic wrapping.

csv data set of plastic production [https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-
pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution)

~~~
devoply
Funny thing is that this whole packaging problem could be much improved with
some regulation. You could force brands to put their products in large
receptacles in the grocery store which would take the place of outer packaging
from which you would remove them to buy them... the products you would buy
would have a minimal amount of packaging. You could also regulate a certain
set of standardized containers made of glass to contain items with easily
removable stickers that could easily be cycled through the system.

I would love to see some artist take this up as a project and create an art
display with this sort of imagined reality of what things could look like in a
modern store with a bit of regulation pushing business to make packaging
reusable.

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bubblewrap
"Fishing gear was the biggest culprit — involved in 55% of all entanglements."

Is anything being done to address the fishing gear issue?

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acdanger
Eating less fish is something we could all start to do immediately.

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genericone
Replacing the commercial wild-caught fish with the more expensive farm-raised
fish will bring the most roi if you enjoy fish.

~~~
askvictor
OTOH farm raised fish are often quite detrimental to the environment in other
ways - unless it's a sealed system (which is only practical for smaller fish),
they add massive amounts of nutrients and pollution to the local environment.
Also, many farmed fish are fed smaller fish, which are caught wild, and
require some 3kg+ of feed fish to produce 1kg of farmed fish.

~~~
imtringued
This is a problem with pretty much every type of factory farming. Food can be
cheaply imported from any country around the world but the animals still
produce feces locally. The factory farm owners do not own any land to use this
natural fertilizer on. Therefore it is either stored in lagoons or in case of
aquafarms just sinks to the bottom of the water until years later it becomes
impossible to farm fish anymore because of excessive algae blooms.

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krisrm
Interesting - I wonder what's responsible for seemingly large variance in the
data set between 2005 and 2008, or if it's just an anomaly.

More importantly, hopefully this data can be used to increase pressure on
governments to strengthen regulations against single-use plastic items.

~~~
Junk_Collector
From the original work (linked at the end of the article)

"CPR that has been towed within the North Atlantic and adjacent seas. 36% of
the total number of CPR tows between 1957 and 2016 (16,725 tows) had faults
logged, 4% of these faults were due to plastic entanglement and 1% were due to
natural entanglement "

They only had a total of 208 cases of their devices getting entangled out of
those 16,725 tows of which 52 were discarded because they did not involve
plastics. Then they did a normalization across each year. I think the large
variance is probably due to the small absolute numbers of total incidence and
the exaggerated scale that they chose (0-5%).

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WrtCdEvrydy
I mean 0-5% starting at 0 isn't a terrible scale.

~~~
Junk_Collector
It's not terrible and it's clearly labeled which is great. It's just that the
total numbers are small and small numbers give rise to the appearance of large
variance simply by virtue of being small. It's a data set issue and one to be
aware of because in other cases it is one that can be used to misrepresent
data trends.

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rupertdev
Any idea if this is a free and open data set? I'd love to get my hands on it.

~~~
dsaavy
Three supplementary data sets from the article source:

1 - [https://static-
content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...](https://static-
content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM4_ESM.xlsx)

2 - [https://static-
content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...](https://static-
content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM5_ESM.xlsx)

3 - [https://static-
content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...](https://static-
content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM6_ESM.xlsx)

~~~
dsaavy
I ended up making a visualization for the second source just for fun.
[https://public.tableau.com/shared/X9CQJ7QKK?:display_count=y...](https://public.tableau.com/shared/X9CQJ7QKK?:display_count=yes)

It's a path visualization from the starting and ending coordinates with
classification of the entanglement recorded.

The second data source was just natural entanglements that occurred, not the
plastic ones... kicking myself for not starting with the first data source.
I'll probably end up doing the same thing for plastics.

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carapace
I've got a plan based on self-replicating swarm robots. The basic idea is to
collect oceanic trash and recycle it into more robots (to collect more trash
to make more robots, &c.) The geometric increase should allow for a
(relatively) small "kernel" to grow to handle the global problem.

Two primary recycling technologies seem promising: Thermal Depolymerization
and Molten Salt Oxidation.

I've acquired two boats, one to serve as a base and the other to get to/from
it, and I hope to begin collecting trash (in SF bay to start) this summer. :-)
_Fingers crossed..._

~~~
ademup
Although I'm happy you are actually doing /something/ about it, and the
limited information in this comment seems like the project may have flaws. A
robot needs more material than just recycled plastic (glass/metals? power
source? processing? fasteners/glue/resin to stick it all together? Plastic-
collection device?). Undoubtedly, there will be an addition of material to the
ocean system. Will the all-in cost of adding the additional material offset
the all-in cost of the amount of plastic reduction? What damage can these
devices do when they malfunction? What environmental harm can happen when they
break?

Is this even a good approach? What part of the problem does this tackle? It
seems like the main problem is "How do we get the most plastic out of the
ocean possible". The "Many Robots" idea seems to identify the least difficult
of the problems, which is "What do we do with the material once it is
collected". Indeed, I suspect 1,000 super durable metal robots made on land
that have sufficient technology would be superior to 10,000 'recycled' bots.
Indeed, 1 gargantuan vehicle cruising the ocean and pumping out giant plastic
floating cubes would be even more efficient.

Then again, if you've made a robot that can collect micro plastics from the
ocean and reproduce itself well enough such that its prodigy can do the same,
then you've already won.

~~~
carapace
> A robot needs more material than just recycled plastic (glass/metals? power
> source? processing? fasteners/glue/resin to stick it all together? Plastic-
> collection device?).

The bulk of the robots will be very simple bio-mimetic structures made out of
bubbles of plastic attached to each other with glue (in situ production of a
suitable marine glue from e.g. algae is one very big open question for the
project. Although I can make do with filaments and knots.) Actuators will be
mostly simple pneumatic/hydraulic systems. Peristalsis. Power will mostly be
passive scavenged from the environment. MSO is an exothermic reaction. Think
of giant artificial hydras lining a vast floating spiral "digestive system"
that concentrates plastic at the processing center at the, er, center, while
rejecting fish and other biota.

> Undoubtedly, there will be an addition of material to the ocean system.

Yeah, the limiting factor will likely be small robust electronics packages.
Still, not every drone has to have the full complement of sensors and
processors. It's not impossible that a simple "clockwork" brain will suffice
for the bulk of the drones.

> Will the all-in cost of adding the additional material offset the all-in
> cost of the amount of plastic reduction?

I figure so, because I'll be only adding at much matter as needed to make the
trash "smart". And the ratio of stuff removed to stuff added should be
10,000-to-1 or better. One ATMega microcontroller can provide brains for
several tons of plastic.

> What damage can these devices do when they malfunction? What environmental
> harm can happen when they break?

Very good questions. So far I'm designing them to be no more of a problem than
the trash itself. I expect to be able to have a boat pass through and neither
it nor the swarm should even notice each other, FWIW. Also, the robots
themselves will be recycled once they have passed the inflection point.

The main issue was how to maintain control, and I think I've got that figured
out. I had to design a system that lets me specify my hardware and software
from the gates up to be provably correct. Now that I have that the actual OS
and robot guidance system is pretty straightforward. It helps that things like
ML have come a long way since I started. A lot of problems I anticipated have
already been solved in the the meantime.

> Is this even a good approach? What part of the problem does this tackle?

When I first heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch I was horrified, but
then I looked at it from the POV of Permaculture, wherein you see this sort of
thing as a resource, rather than a problem. As a resource, the plastic waste
represents a huge trove of carbon atoms, they are just in the wrong place.
(They also aren't bio-compatible, but that's a whole 'nother story.) Using TPD
or MSO the trash becomes a resource.

> It seems like the main problem is "How do we get the most plastic out of the
> ocean possible". The "Many Robots" idea seems to identify the least
> difficult of the problems, which is "What do we do with the material once it
> is collected".

The swarm is designed for the collection phase.

The recycling _into_ more robots is just to let a small initial system scale
to handle a global problem in a reasonable amount of time.

> Indeed, I suspect 1,000 super durable metal robots made on land that have
> sufficient technology would be superior to 10,000 'recycled' bots. Indeed, 1
> gargantuan vehicle cruising the ocean and pumping out giant plastic floating
> cubes would be even more efficient.

Efficiency is less important that it might seem, because there are plentiful
ambient energy differentials on the ocean. The issue is range and detail: you
have to reach _most of the oceans down to the molecular level_ to really clean
this mess up. I'm not good at enlisting the aid of others so in order to
tackle this problem I had to design a system that scales with relatively
little human inputs. I can't build a "gargantuan vehicle" directly but I can
build a small system that can replicate itself (with a little help) and scale
that up. Eventually I will have gargantuan vehicles.

> Then again, if you've made a robot that can collect micro plastics from the
> ocean and reproduce itself well enough such that its prodigy can do the
> same, then you've already won.

Riiiiiiight? ;-)

~~~
ademup
Thank you for your response! As a Shark(tank investor), I would say "I'm Out,
but truly, good luck on your endeavor!" :)

