These stories rarely mention this for some reason but the bulk of the plastic junk in the ocean is discarded fishing nets, not consumer waste. Reducing the plastic waste you personally generate is still a good idea, of course, but if you really want to have an impact then stop eating fish.
Most of the plastic in the oceans is fishing nets[0]. Plastic isn't being shipped around the world to be dumped in the ocean, it's being dumped in the ocean by people fishing on the ocean.
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.
Well, I read recently that most of the plastic in the seas is from dumped fishing nets. Not so high-tech. That's from humans not wanting to stop/not knowing/caring? about eating fish and other sea animals.
This really angers me to some extent. Our oceans are not polluted because of use of plastic straws in the Western world. At the very least, they should look for the biggest sources of plastic in the Ocean, and try to reduce the influx there. This is also what software developers learn as a core principle: avoid premature optimization.
(those two numbers seem to contradict each other, unless 5% of fishing nets come from the rivers, but still - then they should focus on getting the right numbers, and then act on those numbers).
Even the case against plastic shopping bags is not so clear cut. Energy waste might be much higher for the alternatives. Assumptions that a non-plastic shopping bag can be used hundreds of times are overly optimistic. They get broken or lost much sooner.
Plastic packaging might be a huge boon to food hygiene. I don't think food manufacturers are doing it just for fun.
But no, we have to outlaw drinking straws. I'm sure that will save the planet.
I get it - drinking straws simply seem superfluous. So why not just regulate them away. But there is another fundamental issue here: why, indeed, simply regulate every detail of people's lives? There is a fundamentally anti-freedom attitude at work here.
Lastly, compared to global warming, plastic is not even a real issue. Earth itself probably doesn't care. Eventually, after a few hundred or thousand years, it will find a way to break down the plastic. Then again, maybe nature also doesn't care about global warming.
Using surface samples and aerial surveys, the group determined that at least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets.
One more reason to stop eating seafood. It’s not like there’s going to be any left soon at current rates of overfishing anyway.
Most of those are fishing nets. That seems easy enough to fix: Ban plastic fish nets!
We're overfishing the ocean anyway, so lowering the efficiency of fishing seems fine. (In the same way fishing with dynamite is illegal in most places.)
From what I've seen, the only oceanic activities that add much is fishing, which seems to be currently estimated to produce around 20% of global oceanic plastic waste. I believe the link may have mentioned this. If not, some of the references at the bottom will.
Citation needed. 8 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean every year. You're telling me there's 4 million tons (8 billion pounds) of fishing nets every year? Nope.
About half of the plastic in oceans is from plastic netting used fishing. And that netting causes the vast majority of ecological damage by entangling marine animals or dragging along ocean beds.
The real problem is excessive fishing and plastic waste from fishing, far more than using plastic for a cup or shopping bag.
I recall reading two years ago several reports which claimed that around 90% of all the plastic in the world's oceans flows there through just 10 rivers.
> "The shipping and fishing industries also play a part. In 2018 researchers found that, in terms of weight, almost half of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a notorious area of floating trash three times the size of France -- was made up of fishing nets. On the other hand, microplastics made up 94% of the estimated 1.8 trillion tiny pieces floating in the area."
Most of the time all the stats don't add up, but either way, humanity leaves a big mess and plastic is probably one of those materials we will regret inventing.
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/ocean-plastic-made-disca...
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
reply