Just for comparison 6kg of plastic in a 60 ton animal is the same as 6g of plastic in a 60kg organism (or a little above one teaspoon of plastic ingested by a teenager).
I recently came back from Padang, Sumatra, was really impacted by the level of pollution and did quite a bit of research.
- It is too simplistic to just say it's all about education. Yes it needs work however there is just not the infrastructure to manage the level of rubbish. Jakarta has a giant landfill that receives 9000 tonnes of rubbish a day. It had a landslide in 2005 that killed 143 people [1]. Indonesia are working with Sweden around waste to energy technologies but it seems locked up with other environmental concerns. This would be a great area for R&D spend - making efficient / environmentally sound waste to energy systems that are cost effective (and robust enough) for this part of the world [2].
- So much of the rubbish I saw was from single serve items, particularly snacks and toiletries. Reducing plastic bags would help but I think it's not focussed on the primary issue. I think pressure on companies like Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Unilever etc to move towards biodegradable single serve packaging would go a long way - perhaps pragmatically this is a much better place for governments to provide subsidies??
- As can be seen with the Sulawesi earthquake other countries cannot just show up and expect Indonesia to welcome them with open arms. It has to very much be a partnership not a 'we know best' colonial spirit - Perhaps an effective thing for universities to do is increase scholarships in these key areas for Indonesian students.
[1] https://geoenvironmental-disasters.springeropen.com/articles...
[2] https://www.infrastructureasiaonline.com/strategic-partnersh...
A lot of doom and gloom here. I feel ya but I want to point out we have the necessary solutions to save ourselves if we just notice and apply them. For example, olivine just might "cure" atmospheric CO2. [1]
The primary things to look to are: Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution"; applied ecology (aka Permaculture); and Neurolinguistic Programming to help us get over our BS.
> pieces of string (3.26kg)
Over half of it was string? Is this from fishing or something?
Just today the Ocean Cleanup Project posted the first results on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RcRIE98y_UM
This is something I have been thinking about (and mindfully being unattached to either side). We know what it's like for society to go through an economic depression and how poverty effects developing countries, and I think it's pretty clear if we start wiping out the economy (which is the core of the problem besides over population) the save the planet, we will create one.
How many jobs exist/created from engineering, manufacturing, selling, marketing, transporting, and managing crap that we don't need? What would the world look like if we wiped out all of those jobs? How will developing countries be affected when their income from manufacturing these products is drastically reduced?
What do we have that replaces plastic for transporting and storing goods/food? Sand (silica?) is expected to become low in supply (e.g. for glass). How many trees would we have to cut down to replace plastic?
Part of me is wondering if the route we are currently taking is the best one, because change will happen gradually, giving us time to adapt. A sudden kick to the balls of our the global economy, on the other hand, would have an immediate, devastating impact; especially on developing countries.
Callum Roberts wrote “The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea” in 2013.
Everyone should read it. This article is discussing issues that are not at all new. That we treat it as new information is a symptom of the problem.
Are there any clean up projects going on at the major gyres shown in the article? Seems like that would be a good place to start.
> Items found included 115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops.
How many straws though?
93% of plastic polluting the world's oceans comes from 10 rivers.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
Yangtze - East China Sea (Asia)
Indus - Arabian Sea (Asia)
Yellow River - Yellow Sea (Asia)
Hai He - Yellow Sea (Asia)
Nile - Mediterranean (Africa)
Ganges - Bay of Bengal (Asia)
Pearl River - South China Sea (Asia)
Amur - Sea of Okhotsk (Asia)
Niger - Gulf of Guinea (Africa)
Mekong - South China Sea (Asia)
Is it weird that this headline makes me think of Jon Bon Jovi?
This is so sad. Something has to be done with all the plastic if it can't be recycled.
'see? nature's taking care of itself!' - plastic peddler
So you're saying whales can be used to conveniently filter plastic from the sea?
How many whales do we need to deploy to get an entirely clean ocean?
If you can't convince Indians not to shit on the streets, good luck explaining to them what throwing plastic bags in the river does to the planet as a whole.
With this I'm not saying that Indians will always be dirty, but a loooong time will pass until reeducation is successful, so we have to think of other, more direct (and aggressive) ways.
Reasons to switch from oil based plastic to hemp oil based plastics.
We need to get our heads out of our asses. I don't want to be that guy but... we either need to radically change the way we live or 90% of us just need to immediately cease to exist although I'm sure the remaining 750 million people would still find ways to sabotage our planet. 'SHTF' fiction and science fiction often turns to a pandemic wiping out large chunks of the population... that would be bad for you, for me, for most people but we aren't the only life on earth. We need to realize this, NOW. We need to grow up and start being responsible for ourselves as individuals and as a species. As far as we know we have exactly one habitable world in all of the universe and certainly only one habitable world within our current technological means. Come on people!
We're ruining this planet multiple ways for not only ourselves but nearly all other species. Nearly 40 gigatonsof carbon this year, microplastics are now in the water and air the world around and has even been found in human feces on multiple continents, at least one factory in China is using CFCs again, we're doing all sorts of environmental damage strip mining resources for our throw-away phones and MacBooks, we are depleting groundwater the world around at alarming rates, we're losing our social abilities by staring at screens, we are using an alarming amount of electricity just to speculate on cryptocurrency, we drive 100-200 species extinct on average DAILY, we wage wars over religion and oil and where an imaginary line should divide a group of people, we murder each other for sneakers and pocket change or because someone beat us in a video game, we die in internet cafes throwing our lives away on virtual characters trying to get the latest super epic bind on pickup gear while people starve to death, suicide rates rise as people feel overwhelmed and trapped and that there is no hope and that they'll have to work until they die, we chase billion dollar exits on our iPad fruit of the month SAAS app as we walk by homeless people outside of our offices, we ship produce halfway around the world to eat out of season and throw away enough spoiled food to feed every hungry mouth on the planet... we are a scourge on the earth, but we needn't be. We can sacrifice, we can make immediate changes to the way we go about things to slow the damage we are doing, to buy ourselves some time to not only stop but reverse it.
Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't care.
Maybe we will get lucky and some advanced species will fill our skies with their ships and temporarily take control of the situation. More likely, we'll destroy ourselves like probably countless other intelligent species that the universe has seen come and go.
It's depressing.
Over the past few months I have been trying to figure out a solution for environmental issues in developing countries (like India where I'm from). Conclusion is, because of the democracy, the change is not possible from inside, some external force has to be there.
Here governments take decision for the short term because they have to please the common (& uneducated) men for the next election. Hence the agenda of environment doesn't get much attention. That's why have poor plastic management.
Educating people about these issues will take decades (& it will be too late). Only way forward could be if some constant external pressure is put on their governments using agreements/accords (like Paris Agreement) and some system is setup which will monitor issues like plastic management and carbon-emission. If countries are not following some standard they should be penalized.
Countries like US, Canada, Germany can take initiatives in doing so. Its not only about their carbon-emission & plastic-management, its about the whole planet.
Developing countries should be pressurized(!!) for reducing their population as well. In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control population (which is the root of all the problems here). With some external pressure this could also be done I guess.
And most importantly, large & impactful countries like US and China shouldn't waste their time on petty issues like trade-war & focus on big issue here!