> The World Economic Forum estimates that 90 percent of the plastic ending up in the oceans comes from 10 major rivers, and that currently there are 50 million tons of plastic in the world’s oceans."
from the WEF: researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean. Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger. [1]
It seems odd to mention that nearly all of the plastic waste comes from 10 major rivers and then not to name them (or mention that all of them are a world away from Canada).
It's not quite that simple to absolve Canada (and Europe and the US) from their responsibility for this problem. Quite a bit of the plastic that ends up in those rivers far away was exported "for recycling" to the countries where it gets miss-handled and ends up in the landscape.
People keep saying this, but is there any evidence for it? I'm curious where this comes from.
At first estimate we could just Google images of polluted rivers in Asia and Africa and look at the logos on the garbage.
From my priors, I'd estimate that the plastics would almost all be from locally-consumed products, simply thrown into the river as is common and accepted in such places.
My sense is that a lot of educated, wealthy Westerners don't realize:
1. How many people are in Asia and Africa.
2. How little effort they put into keeping their local environment clean. People just don't get how callous same cultures are about the environment; it cannot be believed until it's been experienced since it's so far outside of the wealthy Westerner's experience. (Plus, to believe such would also create cognitive dissonance with social justice creeds which are victim classes as inherently morally pure.)
> It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.
> In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.
> Globally, more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. In England, more than half a million more tons of plastics and other household garbage were burned last year. Australia’s recycling industry is facing a crisis as the country struggles to handle the 1.3 million-ton stockpile of recyclable waste it had previously shipped to China.
To hazard a guess, I would assume that the type of stuff stored in glass containers in the West tends to be stuff less “soiling” of the recyclable material, and the fact that people are probably more conditioned to rinse glass than plastic.
> People just don't get how callous same cultures are about the environment; it cannot be believed until it's been experienced since it's so far outside of the wealthy Westerner's experience
If Mad Men[0] is to be believed, there was plenty of littering in the US in the 1960s.[1] It took many public awareness campaigns by government and private industry, in a country far richer with nearly universal literacy, over multiple decades to make littering socially unacceptable. And I still see plenty of litter in the US today. Change takes time.
There was littering, yes. But in 1959 America you generally wouldn't see:
-Mothers supervising their kids as they defecate on a city sidewalk, or in the garbage bin in a busy train station.
-Dead mules left rotting and bloated in the sun for days right beside busy streets, with drinking water flowing nearby.
-Restaurant owners throwing garbage out the front door of their establishment onto the street right in front of the restaurant.
You're relating what I said to your own experience, which is Mad Men-style "littering". Only once you actually go outside your bubble can you understand that humans can do so much worse - and billions do.
I think to find a Western example you'd have to go back to horse and buggy days at least, and possibly to before widespread plumbing (e.g. late 1800's London cholera epidemics, the Thames literally full of shit).
> Only once you actually go outside your bubble can you understand that humans can do so much worse
I'm well aware of that. I grew up in India. I'm just asking you to place this behavior in the context of the prosperity and levels of education in the places where it happens. America, for all its advantages in material and human development, did not develop an anti-littering culture until very recently.
I just asked this question elsewhere in the thread. It seems that a lot of people just blindly believe it because it sounds good. But as you say between Asia and Africa we have over half the world's population. They're pretty far back in industrialization and they're bound to pollute way worse per person (divided by wealth on some way I'm sure).
Frankly I'm sick of people using environmentalism as their soap box like this. It doesn't make anything better to ignore reality because they want to condescend to the US and Canada and Europe. It's actively making it worse.
Humans live of mimetism almost entirely (very little true innovation out of our lives). Historically, the trend-setters have been western countries. If western countries don't clean their own shit, others won't follow (note that I can't for sure argue the opposite implication unfortunately).
My theory (no evidence) is that the whole recycling movement has been completely counter productive since most of that material has been shipping abroad to countries that are poorly regulated. Had we just stuffed it into landfill (we have no shortage of space to take care of it, despite what the media says), we would be fine.
I'd been idly wondering about the topic for years—specifically, WTF happened to all those environmental things schools & kids' nature magazines & cartoons had all the students worked up about back in the 90s? Are they fine now? Did it all go poorly so they gave up? You know, save the rainforest, we're running out of places to put trash, and so on.
The TL;DR on "ZOMG we're gonna drown in trash if we don't do something!" is that it was always basically bullshit—we didn't fix it, it was just a made-up problem to begin with. Other things the post covers are less rosy. The rainforest issue... yep, still going on, still very bad, we're just not talking about it as much.
Save the rainforest is still my main environmental mantra, thanks 5th grade. And I still think the pursuit of biodiversity is the best goal. Way more compelling to the average person than co2. And it it turns out that co2 reduction is necessary to save those lemurs, so be it. But do it for the biodiversity -- to save the rainforest. Not nearly as compelling to save the rainforest in order to reduce co2, or whatever.
> And it it turns out that co2 reduction is necessary to save those lemurs, so be it.
The threat to lemur habitats is 1) Malagasy people practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, exacerbated by a very high birthrate on the island which means there is ever more need for new agricultural land to exploit, 2) Madagascar’s poor using charcoal for cooking because they cannot afford something like kerosene, and 3) rampant logging so that the exotic wood can be shipped to China for the furniture industry. It has nothing to do with the CO2 crisis.
I'm curious how CO2 reduction is less compelling? Not to be blunt, but as an average American I'll likely never see the rainforest in person. I find it quite a bit more compelling to mitigate global warming, as that will drastically impact where I currently live. Sure, you can't use cute animals as mascots, but surely the people who live near coastlines should find the possibility of their homes being literally underwater more compelling than an environment they will never see.
But they see rainforests and lemurs on TV. Two cute cuddly eyes. To empathize with. The equivalent for co2 might be disaster movies (or Al Gore), which arguably are counter productive.
The people living on coast lines are generally rich, which gives them the expectation that they will be ok.
Recycling is done by all major governments because all the science and research suggests it is beneficial (in terms of carbon, energy, cost/profit).
It's really weird that this little micro version of climate change denial (promoted by all the same sources) is still socially acceptable in certain circles when the arguments for it are so laughably weak. To see him praise John Tierney's articles is mind boggling to me, I thought his whole schtick was about rationality.
> The TL;DR on "ZOMG we're gonna drown in trash if we don't do something!" is that it was always basically bullshit—we didn't fix it, it was just a made-up problem to begin with.
Er, we sent all the trash to other countries, and they dumped it in the ocean.
This just sounds like an even more stretched "scientists used to think the globe was cooling" to me. (I've just noticed someone unironically referencing global cooling in another comment)
Most other nations just did a cost benefit calculation and quietly got on with recycling. America, which has lots of space comparatively, also did the same cost benefit calculation, mostly got on with recycling, but with a vocal chorus of detractors whose arguments seems to bizarrely return (across decades!) to what we teach small children not being 100% accurate.
Is this really the level of argument we're looking for in economic topics? Or is using these arguments basically an admission that we've lost and are fighting a desperate retreat using whatever emotionally salient arguments we can muster.
A lot of our environmental issues have gone out of vogue because they tend to clash with the trendier value of immigration. It's easier for politicians to grandstand about carbon taxes and straws than face the real problems.
The poster doesn't seem to know much about any of the technical problems he's touching, and he's completely out of touch in some cases. I wouldn't pay any attention to his conclusions.
About "6. Peak Resource", which is the topic I feel most comfortable debunking :
- Peak oil is happening right now in many regions of the globe, the North sea passed its peak oil a decade ago, and he doesn't mention it. This peak oil/gas is currently putting Germany at a political risk, being more and more dependent on Russian gas.
- He puts up the price of oil as an indicator of resource scarcity. This might sound true to our small minds used to the "supply-demand" paradigm. But the price indicated is mostly controlled by politics rather than supply and demand. E.g. Gulf states trying to take other countries out of the oil market by artificially deflating prices thanks to their larger supplies.
- He mentions fracking/shale oil as a revolutionary new technique, although it was already researched at the times. He also fails to mention that fracking in the USA is awfully subsidized, not profitable and has not ever been. He also doesn't mention the new environmental impacts caused by this technique. The fracking companies are legally entitled to clean up their mess, but when they go bankrupt, not much they can do...
Sure, everyone needs to do their part. But people hear about the pacific garbage patch, and they might think that laws like this will materially affect phenomena like this. But it's possible (I'm not an expert) that a law like this would have very little impact because the vast majority of the trash comes from different regions.
I find it's best to look at laws like this as social trends. Look at the way that same sex marriage or legal marijuana spreads through the united states. One or two progressive states adopt the policy, it gains steam, and soon it's the new norm nationwide.
I like to think that the same thing can happen on a global scale.
Aside: as far as I can tell, the factoid as usually stated is not true. It should be "90% of Ocean plastic that comes from rivers comes from just 10 rivers" and not "90% of all ocean plastic comes from rivers."
Maybe we could have a country-specific tag on plastic, like doping the plastic of the 10 largest countries per GDP. We would find out within a year where things are going and from whom. Not that it really matters in the end, but politicians and blame games going hand in hand, that be 'entertaining'...
You either are or aren't dumping waste into moving bodies of water. Whether you're efficient about it ("per capita") is of little concern.
Use economic incentives to penalize countries that allow dumping into their rivers. The first world is no longer able to export their "recyclables" to Asia, and as such, are landfilling/incinerating it. It's time for Asia to clean up its act (regardless of how poor of a country you are).
You can't enforce tariffs or visas against a river.
You'd need to apportion the blame to political entities, and then give them some kind of score or grade to decide which ones to punish more harshly based on how much they were contributing.
That score or grade would almost certainly be primarily per capita or it would be meaningless and simply punish larger/ more populous countries.
According to [1], it seems that about half of the third world is taking this issue a bit more seriously than North America.
I mean, I'm all for tariffs, visa quota reductions, and closed borders with countries that pollute, but that would require us to look in the mirror, first. [2]
Please don't move the goal posts with CO2 output versus plastics pollution. They are two distinct issues. If you can apply pressure on CO2 and methane emitters to push down their emissions, I strongly encourage you to do so. First world countries have astoundingly good waste management systems though.
Whether the third world outlaws single use light weight plastic bags doesn't impact their poor waste management infrastructure. People will still throw garbage (plastic bottles, bottle caps, straws, plastic containers, plastic cutlery) in their rivers. Stop people from throwing garbage in rivers, regardless of composition. You're not going to be able to outlaw everything thrown into the rivers.
"Last year, a third of the 1.67 million tons of domestic waste disposed in Singapore consisted of packaging waste, primarily plastic bags and food packaging. The amount is enough to fill more than 1,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, according to a Channel News Asia report."
“Six million tons of non-durable plastics -- basically cutlery -- gets discarded every year. It is estimated that by the year 2050, plastic in the ocean will outweigh fish," he adds.
If you're going to outlaw single use plastic, outlaw all of it and mandate paper bags or other fiber products; you're still going to need to implement waste management, landfilling, etc.
from the WEF: researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean. Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger. [1]
It seems odd to mention that nearly all of the plastic waste comes from 10 major rivers and then not to name them (or mention that all of them are a world away from Canada).
1: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...