Nice bit of auto playing video at the bottom of the article (picture worth a thousand words) or could have been an GIF.
My first thought was it looks like a great problem for some robots — they need a small fleet of floating Rhombas.
Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
121–130 of 150 posts
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
This statistic shows that as NA or EU residents, what we do basically does not matter. The plastic waste of Asia will only grow. What we can do is focus on the cleanliness of our local communities as that is the only place where we can have an effect. But on the global scale, unless if we manage to strongarm Asia into behaving, it's borderline meaningless.
What would help is to develop a material that is just as good as plastic (or better), degrades easily and is cheaper as well, and then wait for them to copy. Germany basically did this for solar energy.
The point of plastic is that it doesn't degrade. How could you make a bottle that maintains its integrity when storing lemonade but dissolves once it hits the ocean or a lake? There is no useful signal that separates the situations. You could try continuous disintegration, but this requires people accepting part of a dissolving bottle in their drinks.
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#123I'm curious. Quotes from the article: -- “It happens pretty much all the time if there is a strong rainfall or a storm,” The phenomenon is not confined to the Dominican Republic, he said, and can be seen in many developing nations with a coastline. “Everybody uses the rivers and the beaches as dump sites.” -- So we're being told that ocean's plastic garbage patch is somehow made out of the contents of landfills aroun…
Who is telling you all the ocean's garbage /plastic patches are from landfills? I haven't read that personally. The evidence I've seen points to general litter, things falling from garbage receptacles, and in addition developing nations with very lax cultural norms around garbage. I don't think landfills are in the picture as one of the top factors.
It's definitely a belief that's out there. I've argued with people about it before. For example, jdavis703 and
Reason077 seem to believe that material sent to the landfill will end up in the ocean. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17410483
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw that on the Malaysian peninsula. Chinese fishing villages that still speak an old dialect of Cantonese. It's worse in what looks to be the dry season and low tide like you have there. The other issue is that it's not important to them to clean it up - as it was explained to me. I talked to a local while there and she explained that growing up she never saw it, but years away and she doesn't like it now but know…
I live in Seattle, one of the most expensive cities in the US. Most of the houseboats on Lake Washington and Lake Union dumped their sewage straight into the lakes until the late 60s. It was only this year that we passed an ordinance prohibiting dumping treated sewage from boats into Puget Sound and the lakes. That's a shudder-inducing thought when you consider that many of the delicious oysters we have here are dire…
> Most of human history has involved treating bodies of water like magical devices that teleport waste away forever.
For much of human history, bodies of water effectively did magically dispose of any waste. If you're a small family group or a small tribe, you can pretty much dump anything down a river with no ill consequences.
It was only once extremely large populations gathered around bodies of water for many generations while creating much more and much more toxic waste did it become a problem.
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human nature being what it is, it's inevitable. Making it about personal responsibility to recycle and dispose tidily is guaranteeing a tragedy of the commons. This frees manufacturers to create ever more packaging crap and chase an extra fraction of a cent. Only way to stop it is to go back to packaging that decomposes or is inert like glass which soon loses the sharp edges.
We need to get back to paper/cardboard packaging. Trees can be and are farmed. You can use as much paper as you want and never run out of trees.
No we do not. We need to do this instead:
1. Reduce 2. Re-use 3. Recycle
In that order.
Stop making crap that breaks. Stop buying crap we don't need.
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#126It reminds me of George Carlin save the planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How hard is it to carry a metal straw with you? You hear news about the ban, and you put a couple plastic ones in your bag until the metal one from amazon arrives. Metal straws are dangerous due to for many disabled people due to the risk of injuring themselves by biting down involuntarily because of the same disabilities which necessitate their use of straws in the first place. For many others, the inflexibility o…
If we were to answer every use case every time we need to make a societal change, then nothing would get done. The scope of people you mention with that disability is very very small. And still, they could work around metal by using a piece of rubber on the tip. Hell, someone could invent a special straw just for disabled people (we could make it longer and more flexible, you might call it a tube!). Instead of rippin…
Any issue can be explained away by claiming it is "very very small" - including the matter of straws. I'm skeptical that use of plastic straws by developed countries will ultimately cause enough climate change to kill disabled people as your comment implies. Let's not confuse litter and climate change. That kind of hyperbole does not help.
Environmentalism would be better served if environmentalists focused on deeper solutions and did not waste societal attention and resources on distractions of negligible outcome. Black-and-white thinking and choosing to die on every hill only serves to breed false self-satisfaction and alienate potential supporters.
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ocean is not a soil environment; so it degrading well in soil doesn't necessarily help if it is a waste stream that ends up in the ocean.
The article references starch-based bioplastics - and the ocean is quite an environment, filled with micro-organisms and minerals which readily decompose other organic materials. I don't see a reason we cannot create something that works in that environment too - however, the overwhelming majority of our plastic waste isn't going into the ocean; rather, it's going into landfills where it will sit for thousands of yea…
Things sitting in landfills are not a problem for the environment. It is producing them in the first place that causes environmental damage. Imagine everything going into a landfill as a resource our ancestors can mine in the future.
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the methane at landfills is either burned off or used to generate electricity. There's a retired landfill not far from my childhood home which was covered with grass and the area turned into a park. It had vent pipes dotting the large hill colloquially referred to as "mount trashmore", but nothing else was done to manage the vented gases. Perhaps you meant "may be", rather than "is". Especially if we're talking…
As with everything, it’s nuanced. The EPA regulations requiring methane management are fairly recent, although some waste management orgs have been more progressive than others historically (and there’s money to be made in piping or burning that methane). With that said, it’s entirely possible there are older landfills that are simply exhausting methane into the atmosphere. I expect their numbers to fall over time, a…
According to their fact sheet, the majority of active and recently close landfills aren't collecting methane.
It also implies that a modest majority of landfills where collection is economically viable are collecting, but there's apparently ~1400 landfills where it isn't gonna happen.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-08/documents...
Re: Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
#130Why can't they organize a weekly trash service and tell all people to stack the trash at the end of the road?
Culture, Money, and Infrastructure (the latter of which requires a combination of Money and Time).