Kind of sad to imagine the satellites doing this are also surrounded by orbiting trash in space
Monitoring marine litter from space
41–50 of 91 posts
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#42One thing I find interesting is how much more traction the problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have. I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a wilderness, where litter doesn't belong, whereas we are very used to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?
Huh… rubbish lining the highways always stands out to me due to its rarity.
There are some stretches in the UK where rubbish collects by the roadside in large amounts, tangled in hedges etc, presumably because winds concentrate it there.
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#43One thing I find interesting is how much more traction the problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have. I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a wilderness, where litter doesn't belong, whereas we are very used to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?
Huh… rubbish lining the highways always stands out to me due to its rarity.
Even in my area, the most visible litter is along waterways. Regardless of where the trash originated, it will pretty much always find its way to waterways. Which might be part of why it's rare for you to see along the highways unless you have a very active group working off their community service hours.
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#44At some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest ocean plastic, and use it to produce energy .. and every time I see one of my favourite remote-beach Youtubers climb over piles of plastic rubble on some remote tropical island, I can't help get the feeling that there has to be some kind of way to make a portable, self-replicating 3D printer that can go out there and just reproduce itself. But I guess the ch…
> a giant hopper into which one can pile collected plastics from the environment A bit like Mr Fusion[0]? [0] https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion
As long as that means we also "don't need roads" too!
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#45One thing I find interesting is how much more traction the problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have. I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a wilderness, where litter doesn't belong, whereas we are very used to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?
What you are seeing is a ratio of awareness and ease of solving the problem. It’s a lot easier to stop throwing crap into the ocean than it is to replace a century of sunk cost in carbon emitting energy technology. We are plenty aware of climate change but almost don’t even want to face that challenge.
This is my feeling, too. I'm all for clean oceans, but we shouldn't think that this is the biggest threat right now.
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#46Kind of sad to imagine the satellites doing this are also surrounded by orbiting trash in space
How much space trash is there in total from less than a hundred years of space travel? How large is the surface of the earth? Would you really consider yourself "surrounded" by trash if there was one piece of trash a mile away from you? Your intuitions about this space trash problem are way, way off.
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#47What’s the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I’m being too cynical?
Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. There's a multi-trillion dollar startup just waiting for you to solve that problem.
In garbage disposal in South East Asia? Almost all plastic comes from a few countries.
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now in the UN, or at the next climate conference, people can actually say: "Look, Vietnam, you are somehow responsible for 12.2% of the marine plastic in the ocean, with only 1.23% of the world population. We are making this trade agreement or that international investment conditional on that number improving by 2028." Before, there was simply no way of monitoring these things. I had to invent that number. That is a…
> Using a six-year historical series of 300 000 satellite images, the team scanned the entire Mediterranean Sea every three days, at a spatial resolution of 10 metres, on the hunt for windrows. Indeed, but I'd assume it's also a long way to go from doing it for a small section of the world to doing it everywhere and with multiple countries participating.
> I'd assume it's also a long way to go from doing it for a small section of the world to doing it everywhere
This probably isn't a good assumption. It's likely more about it being much faster to iterate/validate the methodology on the smaller dataset of just the Mediterranean (2.5 million km^2) before spending the effort to run it on the entire ocean (361 million km^2, 144x larger data).
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#49Waste is a huge problem, clearly human made, clearly responsibility to address in every current generation. Cost of products sold must include recycling and waste management costs. Otherwise, the manufactures will keep making devices/items with built-in-obsolescence to make it 'fashionable' for consumers to replace them at the first opportunity.
In many countries it already often does. My guess is that in most of the biggest polluters it does not. Either due to corruption or lack of regulation.
Re: Monitoring marine litter from space
#50What’s the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I’m being too cynical?
> Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts
“Nice and all” is exactly what we’re going for. It’d cost us too much today (in terms of change to lifestyle and in terms of money) to stop the bleeding where it starts so we’re hoping that we can just fiddle around and that we die before the effect people have on the Earth gets really bad for us. We don’t care if it gets bad for other people though.