> The first source of oceans plastic is fishing nets
So apply what I wrote and you get: eat less fish.
Since this is HN, people will talk about pros and cons of eating fish, but there's only one reason people create fishing nets. If people consume less of things that damage the environment, we will produce less of it and therefore damage less of it. If some populations have to eat it, most can still eat less. I last ate fish in 1990.
An aside: why do those advocating for ways to improve the environment continue to land themselves in a place where their final answer to a problem is "simple: people should just do X instead of Y." These are not solutions, unless you explain how you are going to shift the behavior of billions of people to a point where it makes a real, sustainable difference. Nearly any other approach is more feasible to solving problems. If you are going to say such a thing, to be taken seriously you must articulate how you can re-align incentives to cause such a behavior change to happen at a large scale enough to move the needle. Your own experience doing so also does not move that argument forward in any way.
A system where people still consume as much fish as they please, and our technological and governmental structures lead to downstream processes that mitigate the environmental impact of that situation may not be a globally maximal solution compared to a world where we end fish consumption. But it does have one nice attribute: it may actually be possible to achieve. Personally, I do hold out hope for an even better solution, where we get to consume the foods we love but they are created without the need for animals to live and die to give it to us.
Many people misinterpret to think I'm saying this strategy will solve everything by itself.
Note that at the root, it's helping people live by their values. Polluting less doesn't create a worse life, however much people who haven't seriously tried fear it will. Nearly all of my guests who act report preferring acting, saving time and money, improving relationships, self-awareness, etc.
Your strategy still suffers from the unattractive aspect of behavior constraint. Human civilisation serves to enable us, not to constrain us. Regulation on the management of fishing nets is far more preferable to me than just advocating people constrain themselves by eating less fish.
The fetish of constraint seems to be popular among environmentalists, but it's certainly not the only way or even most preferable path forward.
It’s also as old as the dawn of technological civilization: there is always an imminent, existential crisis, and the only solution proposed by the least imaginative and most cynical of us is to give up on progress and start rolling back our modern lifestyle and all of its gifts, such as health, longevity, and less scarcity on nearly all fronts.
And yet, every single time, now for hundreds of years, the crisis is solved not through a culture change but through a mixture of regulation and technological progress.
Civilization is equally about regulating behavior that hurts others. Traffic lights, food labeling, laws against murder and theft, building codes, and so on all constrain us. You can punch the air as much as you want. My idea of civilization constrains you from punching someone in the face and you probably value the constraint on others to punch you in the face or steal your stuff.
Pollution hurts other people. Do you want no constraints on dioxin, PCBs, and mercury emissions?
> These are not solutions, unless you explain how you are going to shift the behavior of billions of people to a point where it makes a real, sustainable difference. Nearly any other approach is more feasible to solving problems. If you are going to say such a thing, to be taken seriously you must articulate how you can re-align incentives to cause such a behavior change to happen at a large scale enough to move the needle.
It’s not complicated. Tax the behaviors you want to discourage. Subsidize the behaviors you want to encourage.
You can’t solve all problems that way, because of black markets and other “non-linear” effects, but in this case it is a perfectly reasonable approach.
There's at least one way to get people to eat less meat/fish:
Make plant based alternatives cheaper than the real thing. I would definitely buy impossible meat if it were cheaper than real beef. As it stands it is several times more expensive than real beef. Same for impossible fish (if such a thing were to exist).
If impossible fish sticks taste nearly identical to real fish sticks, but it's cheaper and plant-based, why wouldn't your average consumer buy impossible fish sticks for their kids?
We already eat too much fish as it is and stocks all over the world in dire state, plastic or no plastic. Millions depend on them for their survival, but many of us don't and could eat less.
This type of thinking essentially amounts to planning an economy, but the currency is pollution instead of effort. This doesn’t work. Money does it infinitely better, and that’s what we need to use here, too: tax pollution appropriately and the actual pollutants will automatically surface. Money works extremely well for this, but we need to apply it correctly. Polluting is too cheap.
Case in point: farmed fish doesn’t require fishing nets.* Adjust it again, “don’t eat wild fish.” Until they release a new type of hemp net that is bio degradable, or a new type of fyke that doesn’t tear. Now you need to update it again. Meanwhile you’re always behind, and the real polluters will remain one step ahead. You’re playing a never ending game of whack-a-mole that money has been designed to solve.
* edit: Reading some sibling comments this comes with many caveats. Which, in a way, further proves the point.
Sustainable, low emission recirculating aquaculture comes at a price. It is not yet clear whether customers are willing to pay the premium for products from a good solution.
At the time fishmeal and fish oil are neccessary to supply certain nutrients, lysin and methionine for example, but suppliers have been successfully reducing the amount of fishmeal and oil in recent times.
The goal is to reduce it to a minimum.
Not all fishmeal is unsustainable. The slaughtering residue from wild catch and from aquaculture as well as the bycatch are ressources for fish feed that we should not waste.
Curiously, overfishing used to be a serious environmental problem before global warming and plastic took over public awareness. It's done far more harm to fish numbers than those other things are predicted to, but people still weren't convinced enough to eat less fish.
Or eat line&pole caught fish. It's much more expensive, especially the canned tuna, but I feel like if I can afford the more sustainable option then it's my responsibility
Searching for "pole and line caught tuna" will turn up a bunch. If you are in the US, Wild Planet probably has the best grocery store distribution. Raincoast seems bigger in Canada, but has some US distribution. American Tuna sells on Amazon and is great.
One of the other differences that most of the line caught tuna brands cook the raw tuna directly in the can, rather than cooking first and then canning. This results in much better texture. Other than price, it's a superior product in almost every way.
Don't forget that about half of world's fish and seafood come from aquaculture, it's a very doubtful advice.
In general, advices to reduce consumption of anything to solve environmental problems are missing the point. Goal is not to get back to the stone age and thus clear up the environment (even that won't work: stone age people destroyed environment even worse than us, they eradicated whole lot of species of big animals and destroyed the tundro-steppe by disturbing the nitrogen cycle - however destructive we are now we didn't manage to destroy a single whole biome, yet). Goal is to make more with less. Increase consumption of everything, while fixing environmental issues. This is what will happen anyway: majority of the world is still poor and they are catching up. It will be absolutely awful and elitist to say them: no you can't catch up pals, you will ruin the environment if you try! They want and they will catch up with the Western world. And the Western world also can't go back to their level: someone has to move technologies ahead...
Since I live next to the Baltic Sea and is regular reminded how fertilizer runoff from surrounding agricultural is causing environmental catastrophe, maybe people should consume less products that use fertilizers. If the current trend continue we will see the Baltic sea turning into the dead sea in just a few decades. Fishing has almost already ceased to exist here because there just aren't any living things left, and the dead zones are expanding fast every year from a lack of oxygen.
Getting the world population to start eat food which is not actively harming the environment is not going to easy.
If people consume less of things that damage the environment, we will produce less of it and therefore damage less of it.
Fish don't damage the environment. Fishing nets do, when thrown into the ocean by irresponsible fishermen. Eating less fish would punish all fishermen, including the environmentally-responsible ones. What we need instead is a better enforcement of existing laws against env. pollution.
Do discarded fishing nets really cause more harm to fish than actively used ones? The whole job of fishermen is to kill fish. How can you say they're environmentally responsible for not losing their nets? The environmental problems caused by fishing already exist and are far more severe than those caused by plastic which so far are mostly only theoretical or imaginary. The UN says that "half the world's fishing fleet could be scrapped with no change in catch." That's how much overfishing they're doing. It's not environmentally responsible.
Everything you consume in a non-sustainable society is going to damage environment. The pressure to find a solution is not solely on the consumer. It is on the producers as well.
Fishing does not require that fishing nets be abandonned in the sea. I suspect it would take not a lot of innovation nor a lot of costs to cut this pollution dramatically.
So apply what I wrote and you get: eat less fish.
Since this is HN, people will talk about pros and cons of eating fish, but there's only one reason people create fishing nets. If people consume less of things that damage the environment, we will produce less of it and therefore damage less of it. If some populations have to eat it, most can still eat less. I last ate fish in 1990.