61–70 of 91 posts
Edit: the ghost nets come from ships. We need to pinpoint the “fishing vessels who continue to dump their old nets into the sea with impunity.”
https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/pla....
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There are efforts to reduce the production of waste and to eliminate ocean dumping. There are thousands of such efforts. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. > Maybe I’m being too cynical? Yes. What’s the point in spreading negative falsehoods?
>> to reduce the production of waste and to eliminate ocean dumping. >> Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We need to stop conflating problems. Production of waste is different than disposal of waste. Reducing the volume of waste by a few percentage here and there isn't an efficient use of energies. Rather than teach developing countries to reduce/recycle, we need to get them to landfill garbage rather than dump…
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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…
Is there a principle or a name for how measurement leads to enhanced control?
What’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?
There's a great podcast called Plastisphere that had a lot of coverage of the most recent meeting in April: https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/
Waste 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.
Now the other day I went to my ethnic neigborhood store that I usually only buy veggies from but this time I got some imported roti breads and good lord, the amount of plastic they use is just insane. It opened my eyes to the fact that probably the vast majority of the world still packages their food like there's no tomorrow. Every roti was wrapped in 2 sheets of plastic, packaged in a bag of plastic. 5 rotis in bags in another bag, 5 bags of those in the large bag you see in the store. They tasted great but I'm not going to buy them again, it's just too much garbage, most of it isn't even recyclable where I am. It's completely unreasonable what we're doing here.
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I mean how much of that is because western countries take advantage of Vietnam and other countries in their region to cheaply produce their plastic crap?
The US produces plenty of plastic waste on its own, but it ends up in landfills because of modern garbage collection and street sweeping infrastructure. Before the development of landfills and garbage trucks, trash was a much bigger problem in the developed world - plastics just weren’t very common yet. Most developing countries don’t have that infrastructure so plastic pollution is everywhere, regardless of how much…
Kind 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.
One 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?
The ocean is a shared resource. Land isn't.
What’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?
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> 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.
The Sentinel-2 mission is doing that [0]: > Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56° S to 84° N, coastal waters, and all of the Mediterranean Sea The constellation is not complete yet though. Sentinel-2C is planned to launch in September [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 [1] https://www.satnow.com/launch-mission-details/sentinel-2c
Source: work in the industry