111–120 of 190 posts
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What do you mean it is a carbon sink? Extracting oil from underground then turning it into plastic above ground? Or do you mean something different?
Basically yes. Petroleum burned produces CO2. Petroleum plasticized does not. The more market share that plastic packaging eats up, the lower emissions are.
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.
You can make the same argument that you shouldn't clean your own house because that will just encourage others to make it dirty again. And thats obviously not how it works. Some people throw trash and some don't.
We should clean it up anyways.
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Here’s how it works in Colombia, we separate our rubbish and recycling, put the bags out for the garbage truck in the morning. Homeless “recyclers” come around and pick through your trash looking for plastics they can sell to fund their crack addiction. Sometimes they just take the whole bag down to the river bank, cut it open and sort through the stuff they want discarding the rest on the bank. Next time it rains th…
The western mind can definitely comprehend it. When it's garbage pickup day in my city, sometimes people are going by on bicycles rooting through trash bins (or recycling bins if it's recycling pickup day) and taking anything they can turn in for a recycling deposit. This is in Vancouver, Canada. It's probably not nearly as prevalent as in Colombia, but yeah... And yes, for sure, the root cause is the creation of pla…
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…
Irony off
Credit to this organization from pivoting (AFAIK) from their original plan to scrape the plastic out of the water on the open ocean ("System 001"). Intercepting plastic at river mouths seems much more practical and cost effective.
They have been focused on the end goal, even if it meant having to kill the original idea that drove the initial fame and success. The automated, solar powered platform [1]
I try to remember them when I'm getting too emotionally attached to an idea. They remain pragmatic, focused on reducing the plastic in the optimal way. Even when that means doing it manually, by driving around in "dirty" ships, instead of the nice clean automated solar powered platforms they initially pitched.
Same with expanding to the rivers. Where their initial (and still working) platform is a automated and solar powered one, but recently they are just putting up fences/barriers and then manually scoping up the trash with (again, "dirty") excavators.
I wish them all the luck.
Realizing that the oceans are the toilet of the world made it real easy to stop eating seafood.
I LOVE this company. We need more of them. Innovative, Solving world problems. Aware of their impact. I am always encouraging people to donate. These are the kinds of projects that might save us. I wish YC, and it's kin, would fund companies like this.
I got a choice of "Settings" and "Accept all cookies". I closed the tab.
The choices in settings were "Required" and "Optimal", with optimal being added tracking and adtech. Not sure if or why a NGO would need either of those.
> "The Foundation may also place tracking/marketing cookies, such as from Google Ads, LinkedIn, Bing, and Facebook. These cookies are placed once you give consent in the website cookie bar on your first website visit. The purpose of these cookies is to better assess the performance should we run ad campaigns and to include or exclude specific segments of people from seeing those ads depending on their interactions with the website.
So fund raising.
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I’d call that being more neutral than a sink unless I’m misunderstanding you. I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.
Standing trees will aways be more of a carbon sink than dead flat trees.
Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint.
All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.
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Does it have a sustainable revenue stream or is it more of a charity?
Charge the country for diverted trash, a la waste management companies would be a good place to start.
If those countries had the political will and financial resources to deal with the waste, they wouldn't need for an NGO to do it in the first place.