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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40077557

本文讨论了一个旨在扩大解决方案以减少塑料废物的研发项目，特别是通过自动化和大规模生产。作者认为，仅提高认识是不够的，需要采取行动解决水体中塑料造成的环境问题。中国对西方理念的采用以及社会分担成本和利润私有化的理念得到了认可。然而，人们对现有方法（例如定罪和政府资助）提出了批评。作者赞扬了一个最初作为海洋清理倡议但后来由于成本效益而将重点转向在河口拦截塑料的组织。尽管承认对微塑料及其潜在影响的担忧，但作者强调采取重大措施从水体中清除塑料碎片的重要性，并指出如果不加以控制，将对海洋生物造成毁灭性影响。此外，还提出了减少总体塑料生产并实施押金制度以鼓励妥善处置的建议。发言者最后对解决塑料废物问题的组织表示钦佩，并鼓励为此类事业做出贡献。

A commendable operation but sadly, this is a very small fraction of a percentage of the 8-10 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year.

The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats, and from living on a remote tropical island myself, at least 90% of the things you find washed up on the beach appear to be from Chinese fishing vessels. (there's usually Chinese characters on the bottles and plastic)

Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN to require all fishing vessels to bring back their trash to port to be weighed and processed, their nets counted.

They say theres about 10 rivers in the world that contribute the remainder of the ocean plastic, so if they can put these recovery systems on those next then we're half way towards solving the problem

Those percentages surprised me, so I did some research and it looks like the stat from their research is that 80% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing industry plastics. Not all ocean plastic, which is what the 8-10mil refer to. Ref: https://theoceancleanup.com/ocean-plastic/#other-sources-of-... . Plastics from rivers gets caught in currents that bring it near ocean coastlines/beaches, and takes a long while to make it out to free sea/GPGP. These plastics are mostly non-fishing related. (note: this link is actually a great write-up of why their mission is what it is, and their research backing it).

There are NGOs working on legislation/lobbying fixes to the problem; eg Ocean Conservancy. But those changes will take a looooong time to get through the system. And regardless, there's already plastic in the oceans that will have to be cleaned up regardless, causing damage right now. So starting on the cleanup at the same time seems reasonable to me.

The ocean cleanup also funds various research initiatives -- like the numbers you mentioned -- which lobbyists can use to help change legislation.

> The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats

They estimate that 75% of the ocean trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is from fishing boats.

> Imagine how much more cost effective it would be for these NGO's to lobby (bribe) politicians and the UN

It's not called a bribed, it's called a secondary financial incentive..

Consider this project the R&D towards a scalable solution, mass production reduces costs. Even more so with automated manufacturing that will soon be possible with the new robotics

What is the scientific argument pro-straw beyond "yeah sure it doesn't make any difference, but it sure raised awareness of the plastics in the oceans issue! Don't forget the turtle!"

Claiming the anti-straw is unscientific doesn't require that I supply a scientific argument to support using one.

Obviously there is demand for them otherwise capitalist fast food chains would have eliminated them long ago to cut costs. I don't think it's hard to see why they are useful.

China is just adopting western ideas. Socialize the cost and privatize the profit. The western solution which is to make criminals of business people doesnt work well enough. Epa superfund sites go unfixed for decades. Governments should just print money and hire cleanup companies. Its like a massive jobs program for when AI takes normal jobs.

Profit min-maxing precedes the west by a few millennia.

Ignoring morals to lower costs is so plainly obvious as a way to increase profits that it is almost an insult to insinuate that any one group of people didn't think of it themselves.

Any parent can see that "outsourcing externalities" is the default way of thinking of all humans.

Accounting for your externalities is something you have learn, and there is no guarantee individuals or societies learn it.

Credit to this organization from pivoting (AFAIK) from their original plan to scrape the plastic out of the water on the open ocean ("System 001"). Intercepting plastic at river mouths seems much more practical and cost effective.

Yes! This is one of the reasons I like them so much and support them.

They have been focused on the end goal, even if it meant having to kill the original idea that drove the initial fame and success. The automated, solar powered platform [1]

I try to remember them when I'm getting too emotionally attached to an idea. They remain pragmatic, focused on reducing the plastic in the optimal way. Even when that means doing it manually, by driving around in "dirty" ships, instead of the nice clean automated solar powered platforms they initially pitched.

Same with expanding to the rivers. Where their initial (and still working) platform is a automated and solar powered one, but recently they are just putting up fences/barriers and then manually scoping up the trash with (again, "dirty") excavators.

I wish them all the luck.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROW9F-c0kIQ

My understanding from last year is that they’re doing both prevention and cleanup. They have a good explanation on their website on microplastic sizes

This river cleanup is brilliant and effective.

Messing with the top meter of ocean water does its own kind of damage.

So much of the life in the ocean surface layer is going to be involved with the floating trash, like it or not.

Ocean surface sterilization seems incautious and worrisome. Never mind we don't like to see trash. Stripping the ocean surface water will have unforeseen consequences.

They have a lot of precautions in place to avoid damaging any wild life. They move slowly, and their nets have special channels to allow animals to pass through and avoid getting caught.

See the "managing environmental impact" section here: https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/

I imagine there must be _some_ non zero risk, but I imagine the benefits of removing the plastic outweigh the risk. Ie removing the plastic is better for the wildlife overall, despite the small potential risk.

How did you jump from cleanup to sterilization?

You do have a point that the impact on the ecosystem is a concern worth exploring, but your statement goes off the rails from there and assumes that they are sterilizing the ocean surface? You've got to expect pushback on such a leap unless you justify it.

As most people do, you are considering only fish and such. Things we can see. Not the bulk of all ocean life, the tiny microscopic creatures that dominate the ecosystem.

It's only the top surface, right? The ocean can be miles deep!

But the density of life in the ocean decreases geometrically with depth. By mass, the top inches contain more life than the entire balance of it. Because, sunlight.

Except the net completely transparent to microscopic organisms like plankton? The section "The System at Sea" on this site [1] goes into detail about the multitude of systems they have to prevent the impact on ocean life. There's some 9 image slides give information about it. With all those considered, am I missing something?

[1]: https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/

no parties of this exchange are missing anything here except for not one having been privy to the original and actual design of the system—which specific factors identified (i.e. surface microbiome, etc.), as everyone's comments demonstrate, are clearly worth having been taken, and continue to be worth taking into consideration with previous and future improvements and/or redesigns of such. no need for any of this standoffishness.

The life has, like it or not, integrated with the trash. Adhered to it; put spores on it; coated it. Remove the trash - remove some fraction of the life.

Not trying to be standoffish. Just being aware that the law of unintended consequences will bite you in the ass every time.

It's a concern, but it's orders of magnitude better to clean up the garbage than not clean up the garbage. Like, the entire foodchain being decimated by choking on floating garbage kind of difference. I mean, if you want to optimize for a soup of green goo and floating cottage cheese containers, that isn't exactly "leave no trace".

The 'garbage patch' is a soup of plastic flakes. Not like river trash; nothing at all like river trash.

To the degree this enterprise can remove pepper-sided particles of plastic floating near the surface, it will impact microscopic organisms almost exclusively. To the degree it does not clean at that level, it is not an ocean-cleanup device.

River garbage is, I think (and I began by saying) a brilliant solution. Keep it clean, rather than clean-up-after. Almost all the garbage comes from humans on land after all.

Hopefully this has already been researched to quantify the amount of life using plastic as a habitat. Intuitively though it just seems like it's going to be such a tiny, tiny fraction that the concern is basically not worth thinking about compared to the problems of ocean garbage...

The garbage patch is a soup of pepper-sized plastic flakes. You go there, you don't even know it's a problem until you take water samples and sieve them with a fine mesh.

Just as it's so easy to think of the ocean as fish and whales, it's easy to think of garbage on a human scale - yogurt cups, straws, shopping bags. That assumption leads us astray from the actual nature of the problem.

Keep it out, with this device, sieving rivers. A brilliant solution. Not so applicable to the open ocean. That's all I said, am saying, and am finished repeating.

I'm sure you, random Redditor, er, Orange Site Commenter, are an expert on both the topic and the design of the mechanism in question

If only Boyan Slat had thought to ask you first

It seems to me like removing a non negligible amount of biomass from the ocean would be infeasible, so it's difficult for me to see the impact this could possibly have.

I'm calling for a moratorium on the river barricades until we can determine that it's not damaging to the environment. They were so occupied with whether they could they didn't stop to ask if they should. This is why they need to teach ethics in school next to engineering.

Messing with fragile systems like this is dangerous. Many studies show that blocking river flow causes the extinction of species. Until we can be sure that this is safe, we shouldn't do it.

We should first study it over a reasonable period of time (say 20 years) before doing anything like this. Humans think they can just modify the environment without consequences. That is the root of the issue. We need real change.

1) this organisation was founded in 2013; they've been thinking and researching into this for a while, this wasn't a rash intervention.

2) they didn't block the river flow! 100% that would be very dangerous. The have a capture device on the surface of the water. Wildlife and water travel freely under the surface.

3) the mission statement of this organisation is about helping wildlife, so I reckon they think a lot about the impacts that anything they do can have on wildlife.

How do you know they didn't stop to ask if they should? And concluded after, detailed and deep study, that yes, they should. Perhaps they (or someone else) already did studies of the impact of blocking rivers partially or totally? Are you, perhaps, making assumptions about what they did without first stopping to think if you should make such assumptions?

Thanks for pointing that out, it never occurred to me that it might be the same organisation!

The open ocean approach had always been far out in terms of good intentions but unrealistic expectations in my eyes, but with this pivot it's actually awesome: the fancy idea as an accidental Trojan horse to get the reasonable but not quite as exciting idea off the ground.

In hindsight this could have been the one best possible path, I doubt that they would be where they are if they had started out with the effective but boring (compared to their exiting off-shore fantasies!). And neither would they be where they are if they deliberately started with the Trojan horse, knowing of its nature. The best salespersons are always those who honestly fail to understand why the buyer might prefer something different than what they are selling.

I LOVE this company. We need more of them. Innovative, Solving world problems. Aware of their impact.

I am always encouraging people to donate. These are the kinds of projects that might save us.

I wish YC, and it's kin, would fund companies like this.

It's donation driven. Not sure if you were implying this, but I wouldn't call that unsustainable. Wikipedia, Internet Archive, and many other nonprofits are donation driven and have been around for decades.

Edit: I just watched their 2023 summary video, and it seems like they might also be doing more stuff with the plastic they extract that can be recycled/repurposed. That might be a potential revenue source, but not sure.

If they started charging for it, that would probably go a long way to end all cooperation with state authorities, very quickly. As in, have their right to deploy/maintain the retainers revoked, etc.

If those countries had the political will and financial resources to deal with the waste, they wouldn't need for an NGO to do it in the first place.

Why can’t we just start charging producers of waste a direct cost. If we charged producers (McDonald’s, coke, Pepsi, supermarket, uniliver etc) $1 for every plastic bottle they used, we’d have a budget for clean up and a change in motivations. Suddenly glass reuse programs are suddenly cost comparable etc

Same theory would apply - charge the producers of these products a cost - no matter a plastic bottle, a plastic nappy or a plastic medical device.

Plastic is very good for the environment relatively speaking.

- It's a carbon sink,

- it's lightweight (reducing transport emissions)

- it takes very little energy to produce compared to glass or metals which require furnaces

- and has very little carbon emissions during production unlike paper packaging which has a huge carbon footprint.

The only problem with plastic is that it doesn't always make it to the proper disposal place. This isn't Coke's fault, people can just as easily dump a paper carton in the street. I think you'd get more dividends by ensuring the public has the motive (stick or carrot) to not dump their garbage into waterways, and in very poor countries, funding sanitation infrastructure.

Calling plastics a carbon sink is dubious because you have to spend energy to get the oil out in the first place. How about calling it an oil sink?

You have to burn much more energy to get sand out of the ground (glass), bauxite out of the mine (aluminum), or trees out of the forest (paper).

It doesn't take much energy to get a ton of petroleum out, compared to a ton of sand, aluminum ore, or lumber.

Of course. However if not making plastic means extracting more to burn to haul around heavier glass then it better to make and landfill plastic.

We are in terrible situation and nothing is simple and even simple stuff is hard to implement and can turn out negative when we implemented.

Things backfire. People are buying plug-in hybrids but then they almost never charge them so material is wasted and de facto ice cars are unnecessarily heavier.

Depends on what you do with dug out oil instead of making plastic. If you do almost anything else it's worse than making plastic and landfilling it neatly at the end of useful life.

I’d call that being more neutral than a sink unless I’m misunderstanding you.

I consider paper a sink, because trees are actively sequestering atmospheric CO2.

Older trees fix less carbon than newer trees. Paper products are essentially made of carbon extracted from the air, and you just plant new trees in the farm afterwards.

Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint.

All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing due to the available area in the globe and the amount of excess carbon we need to get rid of.

  trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing

My god. I may have to leave this website for good.

Just cut down all the forests they said! It'll be better for the environment!

Plastic pollution is the pollution that is causing climate change. The process of producing plastic emits huge amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that's nearly 300x more potent than CO2.

"Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10-13 percent of the entire remaining carbon budget. "

- https://www.ciel.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Plastic-and-...

You can't evaluate plastic production in a vacuum because it's numbers are enormous and will scare anyone. There is a reason though why that article makes no comparisons though.

For reference, the two plastic plants mentioned in the article you linked can emit 3.65 million tons of CO2 per year (about 30% of the nations plastic production annual total). This is a little less than what the average natural gas power plant produces in a year.

And there are about 1000 gas plants in the US. And gas is the least emissive of the power fossil fuels.

So while strictly speaking plastic production does create greenhouse gases, you can basically offset an entire years worth of plastic production emissions with only a handful of wind and solar farms displacing fossil fuel power plants.

Also I don't count burning plastic in lifecycle assessments. That is trivial to outlaw and dramatically pumps emissions figures.

> orders of magnitude more manageable

Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute

But what happens to that carbon when the plastic decomposes, biodegrades, burns, is digested, or meets any other end? That once-below-ground carbon is now in the atmosphere, whether it takes a year or a decade to break down.

Even Orient disposed of plastic decomposes and biodegrades, and is often burned.

And recycling most common types of plastics actually releases more CO2 than creating new plastic products. There is no panacea one the carbon has been pumped out of the ground.

Only if plastic packaging ends up in a landfill, if we burn it we still release the carbon into the atmosphere. "Bioplastics" (ie made from atmospheric carbon captured by plants) are a better example, and if we landfill those they're a true carbon sink.

Rather than focusing on recycling plastic, we should be focusing on properly sequestering it.

Dig tunnels deep in the earth were it can sit for millions of years before breaking back down into whatever simpler hydrocarbons.

> This isn't Coke's fault

Maybe we can make it Coke's problem. For example by requiring them to collect and properly landfill weight in plastic of every bottle they intend to sell to customers?

“We” can - many states have relatively large (5-10 cents/bottle) charges for plastic bottles, that is ostensibly used for funding recycling and cleanup programs.

A bunch of 3rd world countries on the other hand?

The problem is that countries lack basic infrastructure such as sanitation. People and illegal dump trucks throw trash into the rivers or right beside it.

If the companies are making recyclable products then the problem is disposal. There are lots of glass bottles products solid in Latin America like coke that’s put directly into a bag and the store keeps the glass for a refund. It’s easier to put an incentive on the collection of the bottle.

> Because they would then trade those like carbon offsets or find away to ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage.

Isn't that the point?

I'm not arguing (or not arguing) for this solution, but charging people the cost of cleanup and allowing them to "ignore them/workaround them for a market advantage" seems like an improvement on the status quo? Because the local government collecting the tax would now have funds to put toward the solution. This is classic internalizing of what were externalities.

I'm curious how much effort is being put into avoiding this trash ending up in the rivers in the first place. Obviously it's important to catch it before it gets in the ocean, but if people are just dumping directly into the river far upstream, this feels like a Sisyphian task

Here’s how it works in Colombia, we separate our rubbish and recycling, put the bags out for the garbage truck in the morning. Homeless “recyclers” come around and pick through your trash looking for plastics they can sell to fund their crack addiction. Sometimes they just take the whole bag down to the river bank, cut it open and sort through the stuff they want discarding the rest on the bank. Next time it rains the plastic gets washed into the river and here we are.

The western mind can’t comprehend the level of stratification in society that leads to problems like this. It’s not a case of bumper stickers and catchy slogans for school kids, it’s people trying to survive at a level below any societal cohesion.

The root cause as I see it, plastic. Everything is plastic wrapped in plastic as there’s cleanliness and trust issues in society. Want a bag of lollies? Plastic bag, individually wrapped lollies with an inner plastic wrap as well.

Swapping to trash that’s going to break down in the river is a much easier solution. Some places have started to do this in the last couple years, but it’s mostly virtue signaling fast food places that want to give a western feel to charge higher prices. So you get two layers of plastic on your vegetables but your McDonald’s straw dissolves in your coke.

The western mind can definitely comprehend it. When it's garbage pickup day in my city, sometimes people are going by on bicycles rooting through trash bins (or recycling bins if it's recycling pickup day) and taking anything they can turn in for a recycling deposit. This is in Vancouver, Canada. It's probably not nearly as prevalent as in Colombia, but yeah...

And yes, for sure, the root cause is the creation of plastic and its inclusion in nearly all commercial products. It's everywhere, and it's not the fault of you and I. We didn't choose it. I completely agree that having discard that is biodegradable (and perhaps can directly contribute to a compost pile) is a very worthwhile goal.

Oh yeah, a bunch of cities here banned plastic takeout bags, but it's implemented in such a poor way that it's now just a great profit center for fast food restaurants: they are _legally required_ to charge $0.25 for a bag, even if it's a paper bag. I'm sure McDonalds absolutely loves this new policy. They already gave out paper bags with takeout, but now they cost the customer $0.25! It's especially funny because now all the restaurants give you these thick "plastic fabric" bags (and charge you for them) which you'll get more use out of, but are not any better for the environment. I still get one every single time I get takeout from any sushi place. Now instead of a bag full of thin plastic bags in my closet, I have a bag full of just as many super-thick plastic/cloth bags in my closet! Good stuff. Some are recyclable, I have a huge stack of these from takeout: https://lppackaging.ca/collections/biodegradable-bags/produc... ... I wonder if I can just tell them I don't want a bag, and arrive with my own...

It's worth asking to use a bag you've brought. I do that all the time and businesses don't mind at all. Many are actually surprised and think it's a great idea.

For less planned purchases, I find it pretty easy to keep a bag in backpacks, jackets, etc. for ad hoc purchases (or carrying anything generally) to forgo one time use bags. The ones I use for everything are lightweight and foldable, and can easily fit in a pocket.

> I wonder if I can just tell them I don't want a bag, and arrive with my own...

I bet you can. I've recently discovered you can ask the cold cuts/cheese counter to pack things in containers you brought.

Admittedly I'm not sure that ends up as a net win (is washing liquid better than a gram of oil paper?) but it shows we have a lot of mental dark spots for reuse.

The point of more resilient bags is you take them back with you. Both of our cars has a cooler bag with a bunch of regular bags to get packed at the Supermarket. You just have to remind yourself to bring them in with you.

The reusable bag idea only really works for car owners where you can keep a bag stash or intentional, stand-alone grocery runs where you can take bags from your house ahead of time.

If you're just walking back home from some unrelated task and want to grab some groceries you will rarely have a bag on you, so you'll end up buying one anyway, it'll be then collecting dust at home for months before eventually being thrown away.

  > having discard that is biodegradable (and perhaps can directly contribute to a compost pile) is a very worthwhile goal.

No, biodegradable is far worse for the environment. Normal plastic sits on the Earth's surface for years, as an eyesore to remind us to clean up our act. Biodegradable plastic releases CO2 directly to the atmosphere quickly, contributing to climate change more quickly (albeit with less eyesore).

This is completely disregarding the impact of microplastics on the health of animals, plants and ecosystems (FWIW I am aware that bioplastics shed microplastics as well).

Actually, it is not.

For one thing, biodegradable plastics release microplastics, just sooner so there is less opportunity to collect them (as is done in TFA). And for another, even if it were not so, the looming climate catastrophe is a far greater danger to all species then is the microplastic concern.

Having been to Guatemala, the culture is to throw most trash on the ground. The trash is then washed into the rivers during heavy rains. It's sad to see. The country has a lot of natural beauty, but there is trash everywhere.

The country lacks any real garbage collection infrastructure. And I'm not just talking about ritzy landfill/recycling/compost bin sets every few hundred feet on the sidewalk, emptied by the municipality, I mean there's literally nowhere for any service to actually take the trash if it was in a bin and not on the ground.

Most cities don't even have a functioning, modern landfill, just clandestine piles served by dump truck. Much of the trash picked up by this effort may have literally already been collected and dumped by a truck in a pile by the river.

There's a big "broken windows" element to the continuation of the problem. It's going to take altruistically motivated, powerful regulators and a lot of money to fix, and neither is not easy to come by in Guatemala.

"After trash is removed from the Interceptor Barricade using excavators, it is weighed on-site to determine the total catch quantity and passed to local partners and waste management authorities for processing."

Caption to the first photo in TFA.

One would hope that specifically-contracted partners and authorities wouldn't be engaged in such activities, though Ocean Cleanup's site is ... somewhat vague on this point.

Might make for a useful pointed inquiry, as such gaps and loopholes are a stubbornly pervasive aspect of similar initiatives.

you'll make your progeny exceedingly wealthy beyond even your wildest dreams and for generations to come if you can answer the first question. but you're obviously just being sarcastic given the second, so no, that's not likely what they intend to do with it.

very, very well said.

just from one language learner to another, so i hope you can appreciate this small grammatical correction:

> and neither is not easy to come by in Guatemala.

...the infamous 'double negative' que es correcto en español y otros, ¡pero es incorrecto en inglés!

it would seem to be true, and i would certainly defer to you, that altruistic minded and not toothless regulators, plus a whole lot of money are both necessary—and *neither is easy to come by in Guatemala.

again, great explanation of what might be difficult to comprehend from the perspective of others in this modern, interconnected world.

If there's no refuse collection service, then people dispose of it themselves. In this instance, it makes rational sense for the individual to dispose of refuse continuously/immediately (dump) rather than aggregating it (collect). And if everyone around you is doing that....culture.

on a smaller scale, I've been involved in many outdoor events with large number of attendees. if you put a trash can further apart than every 10', people will think it is too far and choose to not bother. it's one of those weird things seeing the seemingly large number of trash cans placed around before the crowds.

so i can totally see how it would happen if a country just doesn't have the proper infrastructure to start

No Ladybird Johnson like figure driving public policy in the 1960s, melding the hippies and government together?

The TV was inundated with public service announcements shaming trash throwers in the USA for maybe 15 years. It made a difference.

Having seen similar "just throw it on the ground" behavior in India and china, I think that it may be a natural response in a rural culture that needs to be changed once it is in a city and non degrading packaging is used

"Individual responsibility" anti-littering campaigns, most notoriously the 1971 "crying indian" advert, were strongly driven by industries associated with single-use packaging and products which overwhelmingly constituted such pollution. By putting the onus on individual "consumers", the producers were off the hook for responsibility.

Create an economy in which there is nothing to throw away, or in which costs of recovery and recycling are built in to the products themselves and effectively incentivise round-trip material flows, and the problem largely solves itself. Market dynamics tend strongly away from such mechanisms.

Free-market advocates like to point to the general success of anti-pollution, clean air, clean water, safety, and other similar measures in rich Western countries, without acceding in the least that overwhelmingly such progress has come through courts, legal processes, and social advocacy, rather than market mechanisms. Wealth overwhelmingly has shown that it is self-serving power, as Adam Smith noted nearly 250 years ago.

There's a 1967 interview of Ralph Nader by Studs Terkel I've recently run across, and which describes very much what's happening now as it did the circumstances of nearly 60 years ago, though the industries addressed have shifted somewhat. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...>

Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)

The "Don't mess with Texas" campaign is supposed to have been fairly effective. I just don't know who is making that determination. If it has been effective, I would hate to see what it without. I'm just not sure where the "learning" is established that some people get it and others don't

I have personally witnessed people in the Philippines who live next to the ocean quite literally taking out the trash from their bins, then tossing it directly into the ocean current to be taken away. No functioning garbage collection service there either.

Well, lack of "garbage collection infrastructure" better explains what's going on in SE Asia, India. When there is no such infrastructure, where else people dump?

Saigon is a massive city and has garbage collection infrastructure, yet people still dump trash into the rivers that run through the cities. It is actual culture to just toss trash onto the streets, into the gutters and into the rivers.

I used to live alongside Truong Sa river and watched people dump their trash into it all day long. There is even a govt run group that goes up and down the river all day long picking up trash.

I've been following this group for a while now... they do cleanups all the time...

https://www.instagram.com/sai_gonxanh/

I have worked with people who grew up in Central America and just drop garbage on the ground when done with something. Even if the trash is 20 feet away.

It's hard to shake natural habits from your youth, especially if you don't even care that much.

My experience is that it isn't about not caring.

It is that people who have very little (or come from very little) care about different things, like putting food on the table, today. It is survival instinct only.

Quality of education goes a long way too. Do they teach sustainability in schools there? Even if they did, how many generations of kids do we have to go through before they teach these things to their kids?

There is no concept of a week or a month or 10 years from now. When you're lacking that, you have no care for the future or how your actions today, will affect things down the road.

It really was eye opening taking myself out of my nurture and actually living in a place like SE Asia.

Ironically this is what people said when they were focusing on cleaning the ocean: "they should focus on rivers, that's how most trash gets into the ocean".

Well, if you watch their videos most of what is caught is from the fishing industry, but it's probably a difference in durability. Plastic from rivers etc. are going to fairly quickly break down into (polluting) microplastics because the plastic is pretty thin, so it's best to stop that at the rivers, while a lot of what they are catching in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry because it's all made of thicker plastic and would take a lot longer to break down.

This organisation is more specifically focused on river/ocean plastic removal right now. The ocean conservancy is another organisation that, amongst a wide variety of ocean-related efforts, also deals with trying to improve legislation/etc further upstream (pun intended :P).

Both do pretty impressive work! I personally find The Ocean Cleanup's more narrow focus at times useful, since it makes them a bit more defensible. Meanwhile finding exactly what the ocean conservancy is even doing is a little difficult because they touch a ton of ocean related things.

Uninformed guess here but collecting at the river end feels much more efficient than creating culture change in thousands of third world villages...

To me it seems like this would potentially encourage more of the behavior that lead to all this trash in the river, since now people may know it is not going to the ocean.

That's a potential risk, but I think working on both is ok. Organisations like the ocean conservancy deal with trying to change more upstream things like legislation. Even when we do fix the source of the problem we'll have A LOT of ocean plastic to clean up, so starting now seems reasonable. Again, so long as people are also working on the source further upstream, which they are!

Thank god! An example of human ingenuity going to clean up our human impact on the natural world INSTEAD of YAStory of boiling the ocean to generate the perfect cat meme.

I don't understand why people (Greenpeace) are so against The Ocean Cleanup - complaining that we need to fix the problem at the root instead of cleaning up the mess afterwards. Why can't we do both?

Probably because of the Shopping Cart Tragedy: The thinking that you can leave your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot because it's someone's job to collect them.

So people might throw trash into nature because they think that someone will collect it.

I think we're at the point where the people who are going to throw trash are going to throw trash, and I don't believe something like the ocean cleanup will increase how much trash people throw into nature.

You can make the same argument that you shouldn't clean your own house because that will just encourage others to make it dirty again. And thats obviously not how it works. Some people throw trash and some don't.

We should clean it up anyways.

I wish it was as simple to solve as the Shopping Cart Tragedy. If you have an Aldi near you, you know that they never have problems with anyone leaving carts in the lot. A simple case of misaligned incentives that is easily solved with an effective solution. Shame that no other vendor in the States does it.

For those not familiar with Aldi in the States, they have a very rudimentary analog system that locks the carts up, and you put a US quarter in the lock to unlock the cart. You shop, put your groceries away, and when you go to lock the cart back up you get your quarter back. A quarter is basically nothing in today's modern age, but the mental desire to get it back is apparently powerful enough to incentivize people to walk the cart the 10 meters or so back to where it belongs. I haven't been to the Aldi's in Germany but I assume they work the same way.

Don't forget that NGOs also need to justify the cause of their existence, if needed by undermining what they consider a "threat".

Fighting to fix the problem at the root is an effort that will take decades. Interfering with the clean-up in the mean time because it might change the perceived urgency of the problem tells you a lot about what you need to know.

i'm curious about the split between capital versus philanthropic funding for an operation like this.

i feel certain that this relatively new (sub?)industry—waterway/ocean waste management—is here to stay for a very long time. but i struggle to see how it could ever turn a profit, unless and until they're able to generate revenue/s from the waste they're retrieving. it all feels like a fascinatingly super long play.

Sorry for the offtopicness - would you mind putting an email address in your profile so we can send you repost invites? I was able to re-up* the current thread but it was right on the cusp of being too old for that system to work; in which case I would have tried (but failed) to email you a repost link! (Btw the email field in user profiles is only seen by admins.)

* System described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998309 and links back from there

I imagine that it is not onerously expensive to run, and it's a good way for larger companies to look like they care by throwing a few nickels their way.

Further, I imagine that for some cities, the potential increase in tourism from having clean waters might be worth the investment.

This isn't meant to be an industry; the founder, Boyan Slat, has said a few times that the goal of this organisation is to no longer be needed in the future, iirc. But at the same time: there's a lot of plastic in the ocean!

It's a non profit org, although they did have an effort a few years ago where they created fancy sunglasses from the plastic they removed, and raised more money from there. The Wikipedia page lists a number of big donation campaigns/big partners who provide funding.

They're clearly doing something concrete and good and less ephemeral than most charities, so I say go for it. I did for ages and they never spammed me. Only stopped because my payment details changed and I never quite got around to updating them.

My only complaint is their use of kg instead of tonnes to let them use big sounding numbers. You don't need to do that guys. It's lame. We can see the photos. It's clearly worthwhile even if it is only a small part of global waste.

Inspiring stuff. I love to donate to orgs like this in lieu of giving gifts to people who have the resources and inclination to buy anything they want already.

In the EU, opting out must be as easy as opting in. Apparently "The Ocean Cleanup" is based in the Netherlands, which is in the EU. So they're breaking the law.

In fact, I found opting out to be as easy as it would have been to click "Accept"; but that prevented me reading the article.

From their cookie policy:

> "The Foundation may also place tracking/marketing cookies, such as from Google Ads, LinkedIn, Bing, and Facebook. These cookies are placed once you give consent in the website cookie bar on your first website visit. The purpose of these cookies is to better assess the performance should we run ad campaigns and to include or exclude specific segments of people from seeing those ads depending on their interactions with the website.

So fund raising.

They're a non profit that appears to be funded by various types of donations.

- initially funded via crowdfunding

- individual donations

- a few big partner/company donations

- occasional fundraising campaigns for donations

- occasional awards

- a while back they made fancy sunglasses from the plastic they removed, and sold those. Not sure if that's still a thing though.

Wikipedia has a good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup#Funding

I don't think there's a lot of methane from plastic trash.

They should burry it deep into the ground (in defunct mines?) basicslly returning the coal to the earth instead of putting it into the atmosphere.

Possibly dumb question. Where does all this collected trash go?

I see on their FAQ that they try to recycle the plastics, but they catch a lot more than plastics.

It looks like in the absence of functional trash hauling and landfill service people just use river for both.

Looks terrible but if you catch the trash in the end and burn it or landfill it nearby it becomes a kind of replacement for network of diesel trucks running around each day collecting trash.

This is the kind of effort that money should be directed towards. Not the ad infested crap on eyeballs.

The ROI is literally cleaner environment. If there was only a way to tax proportional to emissions producers.

The 'plastic problem' seems like it could be easily solved with a weight-based deposit system. Start paying people $1/lb for plastic rubbish and you won't be able to find any laying around. Plastic isn't very dense, so you might need to up the price per lb, but paying people for their waste means municipalities don't have to send people around to collect it in the first place and you don't have to fund cleanup efforts.

In my state, the fee for plastic grocery bags comes out to a couple bucks per pound but anecdotally it hasn't made a huge difference in the amount of litter

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