Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

Maybe there could be some way to help sift things out more quickly? Something the regular beach cleaning / beautification staff could / would do without it adding an entirely new and extenuating task to their work days. My immediate thought was some sort of netting but as you said lots of the microplastics are invisible to the naked eye unless you realllly get down there. That type of net, beyond how expensive it would be having it cover any sort of significant percentage of US / World Beaches, would be pretty much only a nightmare for the majority of sea creatures of all sorts.

The big nets seem good to keep sharks and other nefarious / dangerous sea going animals that could harm humans because the nets are large enough to allow everything BUT those big baddies through. This would be the exact opposite which means literally everything that lives or occasionally travels toward the ocean's coastal areas would be in danger.

What I really want to see is somebody compile, with video, image, audio, and in person interviews with people with first hand accounts / stakes in the ocean's health / stakes in the world's health all of the different types of things like microplastics in the water / on the earth, ice caps melting and the fallout from that, any other evidence about how fast global warming is happening, what types of damage has already happened due to that global warming and obvious water level rise? I think if the average American / Human Earthling saw a video with a large collection of different real life scenarios that are already playing out / have already played out and have a serious, dangerous, and lasting effect on the planet and/or these people's lives / livelihood.

IMHO, doing a little to pick up trash in your local community--parks, rivers, waterways, lakes, beaches--goes a long way, not only for cosmetic reasons, but also to raise awareness.

My sincere belief is that cleaning the trash out of the Earth is something that everyone can get behind and is a monumental task that absolutely must be crowdsourced. The millions of tons of trash out there can really only be picked up and cleaned out by...millions of people.

We must ban plastics worldwide, we must recycle, and we must introduce proper waste management into areas where it is lacking, but we can't wait. Go pick some up!

Plastics should be banned, IMHO. But that can only happen step by step. To reach sustainability, we'll need to reduce plastic consumption by >90%. Taxes won't do that.

When we went scuba diving and swimming the consequences of their auto-dredging/sand spraying contraption were horrific, extensive and obvious to all. The organised diving trip to the local reef was to a mainly dead, slime covered reef.

Talking with the locals, who were the maintenance and wait staff, made it plain we'd chosen the "wrong" island for experiencing the Maldives.

It was that holiday and the stupidity we saw that significantly changed our environmental awareness and views.