
The great Pacific garbage patch is largely abandoned fishing gear - sohkamyung
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/
======
roseburg
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](https://imgur.com/12U4FXg)

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-...](http://www.fox8live.com/story/37529263/its-huge-40-ton-mass-of-
fishing-nets-washes-ashore-on-big-
island?clienttype=generic&utm_content=buffere2764&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

~~~
masklinn
So this is basically a shower drain hairs clog, except made up of fishing nets
& lines?

I can believe that's heavy and hard work, hair clogs are already surprisingly
difficult to get out & untangle (aside from being disgusting).

The tangle looks surprisingly clean though, are they mostly recent disposals?

~~~
anonymous5133
It could be old. Rope doesnt break down quickly is why.

~~~
masklinn
It's more buildup on it I would be expecting.

------
headmelted
This is actually somewhat encouraging.

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:

Guardian:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/12/micropla...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/12/microplastic-
pollution-in-oceans-is-far-greater-than-thought-say-scientists)

CNN: [http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-
plas...](http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/world/midway-plastic-
island/)

On the right:

Daily Mail:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5491469/Micro...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5491469/Microplastics-
flushed-oceans-far-faster-thought.html)

Fox News: [http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2018/03/16/93-percent-
bott...](http://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/2018/03/16/93-percent-bottled-
water-contains-microplastics-study-says.html)

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.

~~~
Spooky23
It's conveniently acknowledged, because you can always blame others and it's
impossible to take actions because it happens in international waters.

------
SlowBro
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.

~~~
bootlooped
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.

~~~
pc2g4d
I watched a whole movie about garbage pickers in a Brazilian waste dump:
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1268204/)

~~~
bootlooped
If you liked that there is another one about garbage pickers in Cairo called
Garbage Dreams.

------
pietroglyph
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?

~~~
dmurray
> 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.

~~~
nmca
Have you ever shaken a tube full of sand containing a marble?

------
jesperlang
key sentence:

> 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..

~~~
adrianN
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.

~~~
girvo
Don’t those large chunks contribute to the micro plastic problem though, as UV
rays and water movement break up the particles? Genuine question.

------
darklajid
Careful: Autoplays a video with sound for me. Muting the video and scrolling
the page unmutes the video.

Firefox Nightly, Windows. My coworkers didn't like the music, I think.

~~~
sohkamyung
If you want to disable video autoplaying permanently, enter about:config in
the URL bar, search for media.autoplay.enable and set it's value to false

~~~
headmelted
Thank you kind stranger!

Done.

------
monk_e_boy
Here's a video of micro plastic on my local beach.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAojzv8V84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAojzv8V84)

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.

~~~
drawkbox
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]

[1] [https://www.popsci.com/waste-shark-is-garbage-collecting-
sea...](https://www.popsci.com/waste-shark-is-garbage-collecting-sea-drone)

[2]
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29631332](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29631332)

[3] [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-
wheels-...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-wheels-
professor-trash-wheels-baltimore-harbor-ocean-trash-pickup/)

------
hudibras
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.

~~~
mc32
Yeah, when you read the article it's clear they mean it's in the plurality. In
a title it's ambiguous without the context, but not overly deceptive.

It's not downplaying it, it's only stating that claims of its being "the size
of Texas" and "you can see it from space" are exaggerated.

~~~
hudibras
But it's also saying that "the 79,000 tons was four to 16 times larger than
has been previously estimated for the patch."

------
Gravityloss
Artificial proteins could reduce the need to trawl.

------
spodek
Cleaning it up doesn't fix the problem: we're producing disposable garbage.

We can stop buying disposable stuff -- plastic bags, coffee cups, stupid gifts
people use for thirty seconds before throwing it away, etc.

How much stuff within your reach or eyesight will be used for under a month
then never again that you could have not bought?

It's a start that will improve your life not to get the stuff. Yes we can do
more, but let's at least start with what we immediately control.

~~~
danmaz74
1-use plastic bags that don't decompose are already banned in the eu. Would be
nice if the US adopted the same approach

~~~
headmelted
This is not true.

Here in the UK (EU, for now) single-use plastic bags are still depressingly
common.

A levy of 5p per bag was introduced a couple of years back, but nothing that
even remotely resembles a proper ban.

~~~
danmaz74
I stand corrected, how to curb their usage is left to the member states
They're banned here in Italy (and in France), I thought the ban was EU wide.

[https://ec.europa.eu/environment/efe/themes/waste/breaking-b...](https://ec.europa.eu/environment/efe/themes/waste/breaking-
bag-habits_en)

~~~
JPLeRouzic
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.

~~~
danmaz74
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).

~~~
Steve44
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.

~~~
danmaz74
I checked, and in Italy the actual material is this one:
[http://materbi.com/en/wp-
content/uploads/sites/2/2015/12/Sch...](http://materbi.com/en/wp-
content/uploads/sites/2/2015/12/Scheda-biodegradazione-marina_EN_MR.pdf)

I would be curious how this compares to PLA. If you have any idea about that,
let me know.

~~~
Steve44
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.

~~~
danmaz74
You're welcome. It's quite used here in Italy, I have no idea if it has the
merits they talk about.

------
_bxg1
It's worth noting that National Geographic is now owned by the same parent
company as Fox News: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/national-
geog...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/national-geographic-
magazine-shifts-to-for-profit-status-with-fox-
partnership/2015/09/09/7c9f034e-56f0-11e5-8bb1-b488d231bba2_story.html?utm_term=.e78c06f034f1)

~~~
todd3834
What significance does that have with the content of this article?

~~~
_bxg1
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.

~~~
kwoff
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.)

One might also want to check the linked article and its source,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports)
(I also don't mean to imply anything about that.)

~~~
_bxg1
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.

