
Plastic Bag Found at the Bottom of World's Deepest Ocean Trench - techrede
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/plastic-bag-mariana-trench-pollution-science-spd/
======
mrb
How can the author write that a plastic bag has been found in an (open!)
database of photos and videos, and not actually show the photo??

So I found it there: [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/09/worlds-
deepest-p...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/09/worlds-deepest-
plastic-bag-found-bottom-mariana-trench-highlighting/)

~~~
vatueil
Yeah, even the original scientific article didn't show the plastic bag itself.
Had to go digging in the linked scientific database. Here's the entry for the
plastic bag in the Mariana Trench, discovered in 1998 at 10,898 m (archive
link to reduce burden of traffic):
[https://archive.is/qBl2y](https://archive.is/qBl2y)

Adobe Flash required to view the photo and video, or registration to download.
Mirrors:

Photo (1801x1201):
[https://i.imgur.com/7RVIpJH.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/7RVIpJH.jpg)

Video (480x360, 2:55):
[https://gfycat.com/RightBitesizedBrownbear](https://gfycat.com/RightBitesizedBrownbear)

(Source: JAMSTEC deep sea debris database. Used for non-profit educational
purposes.)

~~~
sacado2
Amazing how the floor seems flat and even, down there. I would have
expected... I don't really know, something looking more like the surface of
the moon, that kind of thing.

------
guelo
Name names. Most plastic in the ocean comes from Chinese rivers. Western
countries don't just throw their garbage into the ocean like China does.
Making westerners feel guilty doesn't help fix the problem.

~~~
wz1000
This meme needs to die. Developed countries produce much more waste than
developing countries. The disparity is even more striking if you look at the
figures per capita. The US generates almost 3 times as much waste per capital
as China.

On top of that, a huge proportion of waste is exported by developed countries
to developing countries. The US also only recycles 9% of its plastic waste,
compared to 25% for China.

> Europe, the biggest exporter worldwide of waste plastic intended for
> recycling, depends largely on China: 87% wt. is exported to China either
> directly or via the Hong Kong SAR. The exported quantity is 46% of the
> overall quantity collected for recycling, and 12% of the entire plastic
> waste arisings in Europe. In contrast, Europe exports only 1.2% of its
> primary plastics products to China.

> The USA is the second largest consumer of plastics in the world and depends
> mainly to China and HK for absorbing its waste plastics. Neighbouring
> countries such as Canada and Mexico are also a small market outlet.
> According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) reporting
> data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the USA exported 2.1Mt of plastic waste to
> China

[https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/galleries/Task_Forces/TFGWM_R...](https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/galleries/Task_Forces/TFGWM_Report_GRM_Plastic_China_LR.pdf)

[http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTURBANDEVELOPMENT/Resou...](http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTURBANDEVELOPMENT/Resources/336387-1334852610766/Chap3.pdf)

[http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full](http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> This meme needs to die. Developed countries produce much more waste than
> developing countries.

Yes, but western countries also have better waste disposal infrastructure
(land fills, incinerators) that is actually used, so in this case that is not
very relevant.

> On top of that, a huge proportion of waste is exported by developed
> countries to developing countries.

This is because Chinese recycling companies underbid most of their western
(more local) competition, essentially putting them out of business.

I strongly believe there should have been much earlier trade intervention by
western (rather than Chinese) governments to prevent that. But on the other
hand, western countries didn't aim guns at China's head to make them take
their trash.

~~~
joe_the_user
_This is because Chinese recycling companies underbid most of their western
(more local) competition, essentially putting them out of business._

Because the Chinese do an inadequate job of disposing of the waste of Western
countries, so their costs are less, so this Western waste winds-up in the
oceans with stops in China and the folks in charge in the Western nations more
or less let this happen.

But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was
entirely at fault. A bit reflection should show the reader this isn't the
case.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was
> entirely at fault.

I did say that Western countries should have proactively prevented this
through trade restrictions. Free trade sucks when your trading partner doesn't
care about pooping in their own yard for some short term gain. Sometimes
developed western countries need to step up because the other country is being
irresponsible and just can't manage to do the right thing for their own
interests on their own.

~~~
Sabinus
Exactly. Free trade only works well if both countries are playing by the same
rules. Which I guess is why trade deals take years and hundreds of diplomat
hours to arrange.

~~~
Clubber
There is no motivation to stop it. China doesn't want to do it because they
would have to hike prices to offset the cost, thus making them less
competitive. US companies don't want to change anything because they don't
want to start paying for proper disposal either.

Also, free trade is freedom from regulations / tariffs, etc. I always thought
it was free to compete (i.e. anti-trusts / monopoly). Silly me.

So it could be said this is a direct result of free trade in it's classical
economic term.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade)

------
brundolf
In Austin, TX we've outlawed these kinds of bags. All grocery store bags are
required by law to be sturdy enough to be reusable. This results in a few
different things:

\- Bags are heavy enough to not get blown away in the wind

\- Half of the time, the bags are made of paper instead, meaning they're
recyclable and (presumably) at least partially biodegradable

\- The plastic bags that do exist are larger, robust enough to be brought with
you to the store again and again, and at least at HEB they cost 25 cents,
which discourages people from getting them unless they actually need them

Seeing things like this make me proud of my city.

~~~
pishpash
One of the worst ideas ever, spreading like a plague. All it results in is
stores becoming sellers of bags and finding ways to bundle bags into the sale
to capture the bag fee which they keep. Some stores didn't even use bags
previously.

The bags sold are not generally reusable as a practical matter, so it causes
more waste (more plastic weight over all being transacted). When they are
reusable they have caused sanitation issues.

Why would you incentivize stores to sell bags? Has any of the bag ban cities
seriously thought this one through?

~~~
always_good
The bags at the store are more like a forgetter's fee. Though I don't see how
they aren't reusable.

I don't understand your criticism when you can bring any reusable bag into the
store. Don't like the store's bags? Bring your own.

If the best criticism you can come up with for the reusable bag mandate is
that you need to bring your own, that's not very damning.

In fact, I wouldn't mind if stores sold the same shitty bags as before but for
10 cents. The real win is a cultural shift towards reusability, not a good
deal on plastic bags at the point-of-sale. Once again, just keep your favorite
reusable bags in your car.

~~~
pishpash
Wrong. The bags are a tax on the poor. Not everybody has a car, are they
supposed to carry several reusable bags on their person at all times? The poor
also reuse plastic bags to bag trash, now they need to buy garbage bags.

Wasting is a first-world problem. The "culture shift of reusability" is a rich
person's luxury, like those alarm clocks that shred money, except it is
mandated for everyone. I hope you see the absurdity and arrogance of it all.

~~~
detaro
What's the problem with bringing bags as needed if you know you might go buy
stuff?

------
twistedanimator
This inspired me to write a haiku:

    
    
      Maybe life's purpose
      is to trash its home planet
      then get the fuck out

~~~
colordrops
From George Carlin:

"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?" "Plastic... asshole."

Full quote: [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-
import...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-important-
everybody-s-going-to-save-something-now-save)

~~~
fpoling
So maybe the plastic is there to force humans out of this planet quicker and
spread life beound Earth...

------
cobbzilla
Since it's already at a trench, it will be among the first plastic to be
subducted into the mantle.

It's sad but it's not the most worrisome plastic in the ocean.

~~~
mbrumlow
That sounds like a perfect place doe waste. Just pump it I to the mantle. Put
this stuff back in the ground where it belongs. Better than in out air or
floating around our water.

~~~
BTinfinity
Surely this would result in the high temperatures of the mantle burning the
waste; the air pollution associated with this must make this a poor option for
waste disposal.

~~~
mbrumlow
From my understanding when things burn hot enough -- which I think the mantel
burns hot enough -- this sort of thing is not that big of an issue.

Also, I am not entirely sure this would raise the temperatures of something so
massive. In any case it would probably become the "global mantel worming"
debate.

~~~
mbrumlow
Noo! Not the worming! I meant to type warming. Again, no posting before coffee
next time!

Although a worming might be fun. Trimmers anybody?

------
spodek
There is no substitute for you, the person reading these words, to stop
accepting plastic bags and as much similar things -- coffee cups, utensils,
etc.

Each reduction makes the next easier and simpler. Eventually you work up to
fewer cars and bigger reductions.

Most importantly, you find the reductions improve your life. Most Americans
could probably cut 75% with zero problem. More likely increased self-
awareness, community, savings, health.

I cut out about 95% of packaged food about 3 years ago. The last time I had to
empty my trash was June 2017.

More importantly, I've never eaten more delicious (nor saved as much time and
money). The success led to reductions in other areas and I keep finding more
because I look because it improves my life. There's nothing special about me.
Anyone can do the same.

~~~
jdblair
I disagree that individual action will ever move the needle on use of plastic.
Policies set and enforced by governments is what is necessary. This can take
the form of rules and bans for packaging itself or taxes that drive up the
cost of plastic. So we can all do our part by advocating for these rules.

~~~
noobermin
Seriously. While certain local actions can help on a local level, serious
solutions to global problems require more than individual action.

~~~
seanp2k2
Also, making machines that do the work in bulk is IMO a much better use of
time than e.g. organizing beach cleanup efforts where a dozen people come out
with grabbers: [https://youtu.be/A_ESkZmbL2c](https://youtu.be/A_ESkZmbL2c)

What would also be neat would be something like an organization that operates
these on beaches across a state / country. Even better: get the government to
do it.

Even better than that: outlaw production of the kinds of junk that ends up on
beaches. Start doing takeaway food in glass lock containers and bags that are
actually reusable (not paper or thicker plastic or cotton) and charge deposits
for them. Sure, it creates other problems, but those are usually better
problems to be solving.

~~~
DanBC
That machine looks like an excellent way to take in macro plastic and convert
some of it into micro plastic, and then redistribute it onto the beach, where
it'll be impossible to remove.

------
sandworm101
The problem of ocean plastic isn't an issue of plastic use. It's about
disposal. That sandwich bag used at a California Whole Foods is going to a
landfill, not a deep sea trench. Landfill's aren't pretty or environmentally
good, but a bag in a landfill is infinitely better than one wrapped around a
baby turtle.

90+% of Ocean plastic comes from ten rivers, none of which are in north
America or Europe. (See 100s of articles based on a study published last
november.) This is a cultural issue. We don't need to stop using plastics in
the west. We need the east to stop throwing plastics into rivers. In that
sense, the problem is much easier. We don't need to invent new schemes or
hamper development. We just need people in some countries to do what other
have been doing for generations: stop treating waterways as trash disposals.
That is not a big ask.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's microplastics that are the main problem, and it's primarily not macro
physical impact (trapping creatures in plastic) it's biological and chemical
impact on the organisms affected; in part due to other chemicals carried with,
or accumulated with, the microplastics.

That bag in landfill can break down to small particulates that get washed away
to local rivers which are cleaned out in to the sea.

[https://eic.rsc.org/feature/the-massive-problem-of-
microplas...](https://eic.rsc.org/feature/the-massive-problem-of-
microplastics/2000127.article)

------
userbinator
I think the saddest part of this is that we've managed, as a species, to come
up with such a resilient and durable material, and yet we've come to simply
waste it in great quantities, treating it like it's useless rubbish. From the
picture posted in one of the comments here, that bag looks quite intact and
certainly could've been reused. It probably comes from a time when most
plastic bags were made with much better quality, thicker plastic than the ones
today.

------
muriithi
Kenya banned plastic bags last year and the difference is remarkable. A lot
less trash floating around.

[https://www.nema.go.ke/index.php?option=com_content&view=art...](https://www.nema.go.ke/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=106&Itemid=120)

------
vimy
There seems to be a movement now in the West to ban plastic bags and put
higher taxes on plastics among other things. This is pointless as the West is
only responsible for a tiny fraction of the plastic waste in our oceans.

The study linked in the article claims that "The 10 top-ranked rivers
transport 88−95% of the global load into the sea." Those rivers are: Chang
Jiang, Indus, Huang He, Hai He, Nile, Bramaputra, Zhujiang, Amur, Niger and
Mekong. Eight in Asia, two in Africa.

To put it bluntly, these are regions where most people don't know the meaning
of the word recycling. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.

[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368](https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b02368)

~~~
andyjohnson0
> This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.

Its about poverty. Almost none of the communities that border these rivers
will have access to organised waste disposal, never mind recycling. So the
trash goes into the river. Thats bad, and I suspect that its known to be bad
by the people involved, but where are the alternatives?

Check out [1] for some pretty horrifying descriptions of what plastic
pollution is doing to coastal communities in Cambodia. Quote: _" according to
Water.Org, about four million people in Cambodia still lack access to safe
water, leaving them with no alternative but to buy endless bottled water,
perpetuating the environmentally destructive cycle. [...] this plastic waste
that all the people here live amongst is unavoidable- they are not about to
feed their babies the black muddy liquid that comes out of the taps, it’s
poison.”_

Clearly the solution involves people not throwing plastic into the rivers, but
labelling dirt-poor people in a poisoned environment as having a "cultural
problem" isn't going to help.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/mountains-
and-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/mountains-and-
mountains-of-plastic-life-on-cambodias-polluted-coast)

~~~
vimy
How is being poor an excuse for throwing your trash in the river? A cart, a
horse and you have a garbage truck. Add some plot of land where you can dump
the garbage and you have the mvp of a garbage management system. I'm having a
hard time believing these countries can't afford such a simple system.

Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused
helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if
everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.

~~~
andyjohnson0
> A cart, a horse and you have a garbage truck. Add some plot of land where
> you can dump the garbage and you have the mvp of a garbage management
> system. I'm having a hard time believing these countries can't afford such a
> simple system.

Who pays for it? Cambodia's per-capita GDP is just under UD$1300. A third of
the country earns less than US$1.90 a day. Its a poor country. From a
developed-word perspective it makes sense to collect the trash, but their
perspective may be very different.

> Naming the problem is step one in fixing it. Our efforts are better focused
> helping these countries fix their garbage problem. That won't happen if
> everyone here keeps thinking we are the origin of all that ocean plastic.

I agree.

~~~
ericd
Not trying to be callous, but that low GDP would mean that hiring a garbage
man would be correspondingly inexpensive.

------
jensv
I use plastic bags (from groceries) as a garbage can liner and always feel bad
because I suspect there might be a better or less wasteful way to reduce
plastic usage. Anyone have any ideas or tips?

I feel like I should use reusable grocery bags but then I have to clean the
garbage can (boohoo).

~~~
komali2
I think you must mean the smaller trash bins sprinkled throughout your house,
right? Because a kitchen (main) trash bin is typically too large for little
shopping bags? In any case, have you looked into compostable bags? I tried a
bunch of different brands and a lot were not very stiff/strong at all until I
got a 100pack of stuff that's almost indiscernible from a regular trash bag,
except green.

I'm not sure how it works in your house, but in mine the small trash cans
throughout rooms are almost entirely filled with compostables like paper
towels, tissues, floss, and tampons (I've gotten in arguments about whether
floss and tampons will actually compost - that experiment is currently running
in our backyard). So you could just Chuck those bags straight into the compost
bin, if your city has it. If it doesn't, maybe not a good idea cause the bags
will just disintegrate at the landfill and blow trash everywhere.

Really the answer here is convince local government to do recycling and
compost collection and make an effort to purchase and cook in such a way that
as little goes into the landfill bags as possible. I recently visited my
childhood home in Texas and felt super gross when my only option for a can of
Coke I had finished was chuck it straight into the bin... I've been thinking a
lot lately about how stuff just is accumulating in landfills. Maybe it's my SF
instincts screaming "that's a couple square miles of great real estate if it
wasn't full of trash!" Lol.

~~~
itdaniher
Floss is often / typically Nylon, which will take decades. If you accidentally
wound up with PTFE floss (which is apparently a thing) I'd expect millennia
unless it's in direct sun. Tampons should biodegrade at home, but I'm willing
to bet there are large swaths of the US where composting anything with human
fluids is illegal.

In any case, hat-tip for empiricism! Very pro composting, wish it was safer,
smaller, and easier to do at home.

~~~
astura
Unless they are the fancy unbleached 100% cotton organic tampons, I doubt they
would compost. Tampons and other menstrual products aren't required to have an
ingredients list, so who knows what's in there. I believe most tampons have
synthetic as well as natural fibers. we

Personally, my menstrual cycle has been 100% reusable since 2003, and I much
prefer reusables to disposables on a comfort level. I mostly use cloth pads,
but I use a cup sometimes also. I used to be the opposite - mostly cup,
sometimes cloth pads.

------
JTbane
One can only hope that eventually a solution will be developed that fixes the
long-lived problems that plastics cause- perhaps a bacteria or chemical that
breaks them down. In the meantime plastic waste is here to stay.

~~~
titzer
I know that it's a natural reaction to try to think of a technical solution to
a massive problem like this, but to be completely and brutally honest I think
humans, as a race, are now obligated to get off our fat asses and pick up some
trash. Hands and knees, trash bags, buckets, shovels. A single person can
easily pick up 10kg of trash an hour. The 8 million metric tons that will
likely end up in the ocean this year, if it were instead collected by people
(on land, before it gets in the ocean) at 10kg/hr, 2000hrs/yr, that's 400,000
people. That's really not many when spread across dozens of countries. Also,
it's way easier and cheaper to just put garbage in the garbage bin. So in
reality it could be far less than this number that are all that is needed to
keep the planet free of trash.

Also, robots. But mostly we just need to get off our asses and pick up some
trash!

~~~
curun1r
I'm not sure that's the answer. I got an eye-opening view of the problem when
I took a trip to Southeast Asia a couple years ago. Being in the third world,
there's very few recycling plants to process plastic waste. The next best
option, as you've implied, is landfills to sequester plastic waste...sacrifice
that land to keep the rest of our planet clean(er). But even that's hard in
many places.

On many of the islands I visited, people did make a conscientious effort to
throw their plastic garbage in bins and do the right thing. And that worked
great, up until one of the massive deluges of rain that the area gets would
come. And since they had no landfill area that was far enough from the water,
the rains would wash the entire landfills out to sea in a massive river of
plastic waste. It was one of the most depressing sights I've ever seen. On one
of the scuba dives I went on, we found ourselves surfacing in a debris field
that had washed out to sea and it was astonishing to see the magnitude of it.
Collecting everything together, as in your suggestion, just led to a massive
batch dump into the ocean and it didn't do anything to keep the waste out of
the ocean.

What we really need is a way to simply produce less plastic products.
Increased use of glass, increased emphasis on reusing what plastic we do have
and, yes, new technology to replace plastics with materials that break down
faster so that when they do end up in the oceans, which in much of the world
is inevitable from the moment of creation, they don't cause the amount of
damage that plastics do.

~~~
titzer
Absolutely +1 to producing less plastic waste. There is some reason to hope
that high temperature plasma incinerators can burn plastic waste and generate
power with little residual pollution. That might be an option for areas
without recycling and landfill capacity.

------
christophilus
> ... by 2015, humans had produced 6.3 billion metric tons of plastic waste

That's about 0.86 metric tons (or 859 kg or 1895 lbs) per person. Crazy.

~~~
njarboe
Or a cube of solid plastic about 1.5 miles on a side. It would be cool if some
country took the West's plastic and recycled it by creating a series of
kilometer sized geometric objects in a desert somewhere.

~~~
Freestyler_3
> took the West's plastic

Does it have to be the west's?

Why do so many people blame the west solely, because other countries can't
help it, or because other countries export to the west, or because the west
exports an amount of trash to other countries? Not even a Billion people in
the west, those other 6 had nothing to do with it? It seems like many here are
making excuses why only the west is at fault. While most trash going in the
ocean happens not in the west.

~~~
njarboe
I used that phrase because of a recent policy change by China where they will
no longer be the place where the West "recycles" its plastic garbage. The
plastic that people in the West clean diligently and sort into the recycle
bin, in a kind of ritual of forgiveness for consumption, must now find another
final resting place. I just did not believe other countries feel the need for
the ritual of recycling yet. If they just get plastic into a landfill after
use, that is all that is really necessary for the environment.

It would be almost impossible to calculate, but I would guess 98% of plastic
reuse is an environmental net negative. Reduce and reuse. Then bury it. Maybe
burning it for electricity generation would help if it would offset coal
burning power plants.

~~~
njarboe
Edit: 98% of plastic recycling

------
revel
I like the "Where did the plastic come from?" section in this article. Pretty
sure it was a fish that carelessly tossed away the bag after going grocery
shopping.

------
Maro
I'm not pro-plastic waste (obvously), but it'd be interesting to see a pro-con
analysis. What is all this plastic use getting us, how could we replace it
with sth else, and what would it cost.

Also, based on the article 40% of the waste here is from discarded shipping
equipment. So it seems to me this can't be that must waste actually, compared
to what we produce and presumably store on/in land [presumably that's a lot
more than fishing equipment]. Or I'm reading it wrong.

~~~
lloydde
It is that much waste. I suspect you underestimate the size of the fishing
industry and fleets of boats. In 2004 the estimate of commercial fishing boats
was over 4 million. As an example of the impact of their waste consider the
great pacific garbage patch: “the patch is 1.6 million square kilometers and
has a concentration of 10-100 kg per square kilometers. They estimate there to
be 80.000 metric tonnes in the patch, with 1.8 trillion plastic pieces, out of
which 92% of the mass is to be found in objects larger than 0.5 centimeters.”
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch)
Obviously, it is not all fishing vessel waste, the belief is that the majority
is, particularly discarding fishing net creating the body that all the other
waste gets trapped in.

~~~
SaltyBackendGuy
> the patch is 1.6 million square kilometers

Haven't really thought about how big that actually is until now.

Basically the size of Mongolia[0]

[0] - [http://www.nationmaster.com/country-
info/stats/Geography/Lan...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country-
info/stats/Geography/Land-area/Square-miles)

~~~
lostcolony
Or for the Americans with little concept of the rest of the world (no
judgement; I'm one of them), over twice the size of Texas (which is just under
700k square kilometers).

------
notadoc
Not even slightly surprising given the shear volume of trash on most beaches
and reefs in the world. As any fishermen, diver, or snorkeler knows, the ocean
is literally full of garbage, and the problem has gotten exponentially worse
over the last few decades. Tourists often don't see it because most tourist
destinations have workers (or volunteers) raking up the daily trash load from
the sand in the early mornings before everyone else wakes up, but if you get
up at say 4am and take a peak outside your hotel, whether in the Caribbean or
most pacific islands, you'll see the people raking the beaches for trash.

And then if you travel to developing Asia in particular, you see why it's such
a problem to begin with. There is trash literally everywhere, their
landscapes, streets, creeks, rivers, are like a never ending open garbage dump
or landfill. Not that the rest of the developing world is much better, and
frankly much of the USA is increasingly full of garbage, litter, and detritus
too, though not nearly to the extent of China, India, Indonesia, Philippines,
etc. But just yesterday I watched a group of US tourists visiting a stunning
scenic vista and proceed to toss multiple bags of fast food wrappers and
garbage out of their Range Rover, they must think the litter magically takes
care of itself.

------
mimac
I propose to put a plastic bag on the Moon. Just to make a statement and make
people think.

~~~
robotresearcher
It’s likely we already did, along with boxes, cables, half of each of the moon
landers, an electric car and a few American flags.

~~~
mimac
That is true, but nothing is as iconic as a plastic shopping bag.

------
mehly
Whats next? A plastic bag beats humans to Mars?

------
foxhop
[https://upcyclesantafe.org/you-can-upcycle/plastics-and-
synt...](https://upcyclesantafe.org/you-can-upcycle/plastics-and-
synthetics/ecobrick-it/)

------
chiefalchemist
Not a surprise. Sadly.

That said, what other unknowns might we find there from previous
civilizations. __That__ could be surprising.

------
swerveonem
I hope they find one with the logo of a major retailer.

------
asab
How long did it take to sink to the bottom?

------
BurningFrog
Other than disturbing the beauty sense of _homo sapiens_ , do stray plastic
bags cause any real damage to eco systems?

~~~
always_good
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics#Potential_effect...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics#Potential_effects_on_the_environment)

------
chicob
Pollution just hit a new low.

------
agumonkey
What a lucky plastic bag.

------
bitCromwell
a problem but also a profound solition for storage of some kimd?

------
madman2890
Horrible

------
paulcole
It's always in the last place you look.

