Live data from Hacker News

Our biggest ever river catch?

theoceancleanup.com

101–110 of 190 posts

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#101
It looks like in the absence of functional trash hauling and landfill service people just use river for both.

Looks terrible but if you catch the trash in the end and burn it or landfill it nearby it becomes a kind of replacement for network of diesel trucks running around each day collecting trash.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#103

Whats the economics of burning it as fuel on site to generate power. Sounds bad but might be better than landfilling it and letting off methane.

I don't think there's a lot of methane from plastic trash.

They should burry it deep into the ground (in defunct mines?) basicslly returning the coal to the earth instead of putting it into the atmosphere.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#105
post #56

Why can’t we just start charging producers of waste a direct cost. If we charged producers (McDonald’s, coke, Pepsi, supermarket, uniliver etc) $1 for every plastic bottle they used, we’d have a budget for clean up and a change in motivations. Suddenly glass reuse programs are suddenly cost comparable etc

Plastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking. - It's a carbon sink, - it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions) - it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces - and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint. The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper d…

> This isn't Coke's fault

Maybe we can make it Coke's problem. For example by requiring them to collect and properly landfill weight in plastic of every bottle they intend to sell to customers?

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#106
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking. - It's a carbon sink, - it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions) - it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces - and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint. The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper d…

Calling plastics a carbon sink is dubious because you have to spend energy to get the oil out in the first place. How about calling it an oil sink?

Still good. Way better than burning it.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#107

I don't understand why people (Greenpeace) are so against The Ocean Cleanup - complaining that we need to fix the problem at the root instead of cleaning up the mess afterwards. Why can't we do both?

Probably because of the Shopping Cart Tragedy: The thinking that you can leave your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot because it's someone's job to collect them.

So people might throw trash into nature because they think that someone will collect it.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#108
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically yes. Petroleum burned produces CO2. Petroleum plasticized does not. The more market share that plastic packaging eats up, the lower emissions are.

Well it's certainly an unusual take

Times are unusual. Plastic is to humanity what coal was to carboniferous plants.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#109
post #82

A commendable operation but sadly, this is a very small fraction of a percentage of the 8-10 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year. The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats, and from living on a remote tropical island myself, at least 90% of the things you find washed up on the beach appear to be from Chinese fishing vessels. (there's usually Chinese…

> Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN

It's not called a bribed, it's called a secondary financial incentive..

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#110

I don't understand why people (Greenpeace) are so against The Ocean Cleanup - complaining that we need to fix the problem at the root instead of cleaning up the mess afterwards. Why can't we do both?

Don't forget that NGOs also need to justify the cause of their existence, if needed by undermining what they consider a "threat".

Fighting to fix the problem at the root is an effort that will take decades. Interfering with the clean-up in the mean time because it might change the perceived urgency of the problem tells you a lot about what you need to know.

Post reply on HN