A little more than half of the plastic found in the ocean and large enough to be recognizable comes from fishing nets. Those are enormous and are used very aggressively: raking the floor, pulling hard even when it’s stuck against rocks, etc. It’s cheaper to carry spares on the way out at sea than to care about not losing them: those will go gone soon enough and replaced by fish on the way back anyway.
If you care about that, there are ways to get fish that isn’t caught with industrial trawlers like this, but it requires meaningful attention. Be conscious fishmongers will lie to your face, so traceability is critical. They routinely lied to my dad when they knew him personally; they knew he was in charge of fish stocks too, and he wasn’t shy about his ability to differentiate species. And not white lies, like misplacing the species with something equivalent or from the wrong part of the same bay: he was routinely told they were selling fish that was banned from sale after he had pointed out it wasn’t the right species, that species was extinct in that country, and the only stock available was farmed…
All that to say: you can help, but it’s a big uphill battle. I guess that half counts as industrial that you don’t touch.
The other half (of the plastic found in the ocean) is from countries without sufficient garbage collection. There was an effort to collect it around the “Team Rivers” effort (after “Team Trees”) from a couple of YouTubers.
I remember someone criticizing the effort as whitewashing the reality: there were draft laws to collect garbage. However, in budget-constraint countries without an omnipresent tax collection capacity, that depends on financing it by collecting a fee from known brands using plastic packaging. Lobbyists from well-known international brands opposed the laws to protect margins. I couldn’t find that reaction with minimal effort, but I can try harder to track it if you are interested.
There is plastic thrown out by pigs in Western countries. It flies in the wind and gets into rivers and the ocean, but that’s materially less overall. I’d still blame the same well-known brands for not using glass or metallic bottles, though.
So, in that second case, you do touch it and the culprits are well-known sugary water vendors.
You're forgetting two absolutely massive and completely endemic plastic vectors:
1. Car tires.
2. And literally all clothes that aren't natural fibers. Which is a huge, absolutely huge percentage.
Neither of these get any better by preventing littering. Driving and clothes washing and drying is spewing your plastic mist into the air 24 hours a day.
A lot of synthetic fibers during clothing washing goes into sewage and after a treatment (which doesn’t remove micro plastics) into the environment. I wonder why home washing machines are not equipped with mesh filters so it would go to a landfill instead of waterways.
>However, in budget-constraint countries without an omnipresent tax collection capacity, that depends on financing it by collecting a fee from known brands using plastic packaging. Lobbyists from well-known international brands opposed the laws to protect margins.
This is very much the answer. The producers of a product must pay the *full cost, including all externalities,* of recycling it. This will incenctivise them to e.g. find packaging which is easier to recycle. Otherwise why bother? Wrap things in plastic inside of paper inside of plastic inside of cardboard, who cares, it's dirt cheap and you don't have to pay for the harmful effects of its improper disposal!
If you care about that, there are ways to get fish that isn’t caught with industrial trawlers like this, but it requires meaningful attention. Be conscious fishmongers will lie to your face, so traceability is critical. They routinely lied to my dad when they knew him personally; they knew he was in charge of fish stocks too, and he wasn’t shy about his ability to differentiate species. And not white lies, like misplacing the species with something equivalent or from the wrong part of the same bay: he was routinely told they were selling fish that was banned from sale after he had pointed out it wasn’t the right species, that species was extinct in that country, and the only stock available was farmed…
All that to say: you can help, but it’s a big uphill battle. I guess that half counts as industrial that you don’t touch.
The other half (of the plastic found in the ocean) is from countries without sufficient garbage collection. There was an effort to collect it around the “Team Rivers” effort (after “Team Trees”) from a couple of YouTubers.
I remember someone criticizing the effort as whitewashing the reality: there were draft laws to collect garbage. However, in budget-constraint countries without an omnipresent tax collection capacity, that depends on financing it by collecting a fee from known brands using plastic packaging. Lobbyists from well-known international brands opposed the laws to protect margins. I couldn’t find that reaction with minimal effort, but I can try harder to track it if you are interested.
There is plastic thrown out by pigs in Western countries. It flies in the wind and gets into rivers and the ocean, but that’s materially less overall. I’d still blame the same well-known brands for not using glass or metallic bottles, though.
So, in that second case, you do touch it and the culprits are well-known sugary water vendors.
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