Go to virtually any parking lot and notice all the crap that's littered all over it. Most of it will end up in the ocean eventually. (not to mention all the crap in every street gutter)
Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
251–260 of 309 posts
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Girls need straws for lipstick, guys need straws for beards, elderly need straws for health concerns. They aren't "completely superfluous".
People don't need lipstick, lickstick is superfluous. I've never needed a straw while drinking and I facial hair, but I guess personal anecdotes are useless, and cleaning your face occasionally with a napkin(or a sleeve) is... forbidden? As for the elderly, if your health requires you to use a straw why are you relying on someone else to meet your needs? You should provide your own straws if drinking without a straw…
Agree, with enough dedication we can remove our reliance on anything. Coffee, tv, internet, phones, straws, bananas...
Still doesn't mean it is a good idea or that it will solve anything.
More in specific, we can remove straws from our life (you can also claim that all the noise about it raised public awareness), but when Starbucks solution is to use even more plastic in their lids, McDonald's solution are paper straws that cannot be recicled and raise a huge controversy for focusing on something silly I am not sure it was a net ecological win.
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#253I spend a day or two every year cleaning up a beach on a island off the coast of China. Its location relative to local sea currents makes it a natural garbage trap. It has been a radicalizing experience but maybe not in the way you would think. Anecdotally about a third of the trash I pick up is fishing related - some nets, some buoys, but mostly thousands of small plastic sardine sized fishing net floats. About a th…
My local recycling center (in the SF Bay Area) accepts styrofoam blocks (though the machine is down right now). Unfortunately, storing and transporting bulky styrofoam is cumbersome for individuals, so it's not very scalable.
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#254I spend a day or two every year cleaning up a beach on a island off the coast of China. Its location relative to local sea currents makes it a natural garbage trap. It has been a radicalizing experience but maybe not in the way you would think. Anecdotally about a third of the trash I pick up is fishing related - some nets, some buoys, but mostly thousands of small plastic sardine sized fishing net floats. About a th…
The fishing gets me. I used to fish from the shoreline a lot, but when I went snorkeling in a couple of beautiful places in the world all the lost tackle and line just made me angry at my past self. It's very hard to fish from the shoreline without leaving trash everywhere. It's hard to think that every dollar I spent on tackle was a dollar I spent polluting the shoreline. It was out of sight, so it was out of mind.…
This is why I prefer spear fishing (free diving style especially), yes it’s harder work, yes there are dangers; But it’s not only visually attractive but you can be much more selective about the fish you take and there is almost never anything left behind, unless you had to drop a weight belt in an emergency or something, which I’ve never actually needed to do though it happens.
Often I actually take tack home I find and dispose of it properly.
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you are genuinely trying to help solve the problem. However I think your plan of action is misguided, and is making things worse. Your ideas only appeal to certain personality types in rich countries. They make an enemy out of everybody else. Your framing of the solution as "Humans need to change from growth to enjoying what we have" is wrong. This is diametrically opposed to human nature--you're literally…
You're misguided if you think we can prevent the coming climate catastrophe without making any sacrifices. It's not technological solutions or make tough choices. It's both. Perhaps your path would work if we started down it in earnest 40 years ago, but it's too late now. We're not going to turn this ship around with half measures.
You are naive if you think your sacrifice will be enough, you need to convince others to join in, this is why so much of the funding focuses on reaching market viability.
If India and China will not join you every sacrifice you did was essentially worthless
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
When was the last time you saw someone re-use a plastic straw?
Last night the waiter topped off my iced tea three times and I continued to use the same plastic straw, whereas a single paper straw would not have lasted. It's a wetted time and solubility problem. Paper is water soluble--plastic is not.
I've used bad paper straws that didn't last through a single glass but any I've used in the last year has been much more robust. A better question than paper or plastic would be to ask why your iced tea needed a straw at all.
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#257This is known. The number I have heard floated around is 45%. So, commercial fishing nets are a big problem when it comes to plastic in the oceans. And here we are "saving the planet", by reducing the plastic straw consumption: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/18/anti-straw-mo... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-07/plasti... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-b...…
Looking at elements loses sight of the system. The boats are there as part of a system driven by growth in GDP and population, externalizing costs, and related goals. We can say it's not us tossing the bottle overboard, but buying things the boats transport supports the system. Among the most important leverage points for changing a system are its goals and values. Changing from growth to enjoying what we have and fr…
> If we avoid straws and stop there, the action doesn't add up.
Ehh, not much point in doing this without also tossing some execs in prison. People won’t see the justice in it otherwise and it will continue to fail catastrophically.
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fishing gets me. I used to fish from the shoreline a lot, but when I went snorkeling in a couple of beautiful places in the world all the lost tackle and line just made me angry at my past self. It's very hard to fish from the shoreline without leaving trash everywhere. It's hard to think that every dollar I spent on tackle was a dollar I spent polluting the shoreline. It was out of sight, so it was out of mind.…
It's thinking like this that led me down the path of rejecting money/currency for the most part. Every dollar I spent is a vote for producing more of whatever I'm buying, directly correlated with habitat loss (for humans included) and animal deaths. And each transaction is like a curtain from behind which the finished product appears, handed to you with no information about its origin.
Yes, finished products abstract away how they were made. But that's why we have labels. Also, taxing the inputs if they're harmful.
Politics can change the rules, having impact that individual purchase decisions can't, because we don't have the information.
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you are genuinely trying to help solve the problem. However I think your plan of action is misguided, and is making things worse. Your ideas only appeal to certain personality types in rich countries. They make an enemy out of everybody else. Your framing of the solution as "Humans need to change from growth to enjoying what we have" is wrong. This is diametrically opposed to human nature--you're literally…
You're misguided if you think we can prevent the coming climate catastrophe without making any sacrifices. It's not technological solutions or make tough choices. It's both. Perhaps your path would work if we started down it in earnest 40 years ago, but it's too late now. We're not going to turn this ship around with half measures.
I fully agree, ideally we would be doing both! But due to obvious realities of humans, any time or money spent trying to tell people to stop doing what they are instinctively motivated to do is a waste.
Americans love to fool themselves into these naive, moralistic tirades that lead nowhere. Take the issue of teen pregnancy, for example.
For decades, the American approach was to wag their fingers at teenagers and tell them to not have sex (similar to how we currently wag our fingers at the developing world and their use of oil). Meanwhile, in Northern Europe, they focused on making contraception widely available for teen girls via state run healthcare programs.
Fast forward 50 years and the US has 6X as many teen pregnancies per capita as a country like the Netherlands. Ignoring human nature and focusing on moral appeals doesn't work for sex, and it won't work for consumption either:
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adolescent-pregnancy-a...
Re: Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Straws are a very small part of that and a weird thing to fixate on relative to all the other one time use food waste we generate. Straws are completely superfluous. If you take away my straw I can continue drinking the beverage. Chips need a container, sure I'd prefer more bulk bins and recycled containers, but if we banned plastic containers for chips you interfere mightily in someone enjoying their product. ANYWA…
Most people's teeth are sensitive to cold. They like to use straws to be able skip the teeth while ingesting a cold beverage. This is why the straw was invented -- to make it easy to consume icy cold drinks. Very strange that this must be explained to people who think straws are completely superfluous. If they were superfluous, people wouldn't be using them. This is a great example of Chesterton's Fence. https://en.w…
You are wrong regarding disposal of plastic. Most of developed world does not recycle its plastic, we ship it to China or Philippines, where its sorted by hand, or illegally burned and land filled.
Often it is shipped there illegally by our own governments.
Recently China stopped taking contaminated plastic, and much more of it now ends up in even poorer countries.
Many kinds of plastic are 'unrecycleable' at all, like most plastic bags and films. Some are recyclable (like plastic bottles) but uneconomic to sort from the grades of plastic that aren't, from each-other, and from random food contamination. No country in the world has achieved good track record of recycling plastic, and it probably impossible without very tight control and discipline.
Unrecycleable plastic in single use items should be illegal.
www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-asia-48455440