Study: 8 Million Metric Tons of Plastic Dumped Into Oceans Annually 121
hypnosec writes: According to a new study (abstract) that tracked marine debris from its source, roughly 8 million metric tons of plastic gets dumped into the world's oceans annually. Plastic waste is a global problem, and until now, there wasn't a comprehensive study that highlighted how much plastic waste was making it into the oceans. "The research also lists the world's 20 worst plastic polluters, from China to the United States, based on such factors as size of coastal population and national plastic production. According to the estimate, China tops the list, producing as much as 3.5 million metric tons of marine debris each year. The United States, which generates as much as 110,000 metric tons of marine debris a year, came in at No. 20."
Sounds like a business opportunity... (Score:3, Insightful)
...go trolling for plastic, turn it into fuel or something else. We probably are reaching a point where oil exploration is going to remain diminished... a glut of current supply. With so much waste in our landfills and in the environment, we can just mine our waste for resources for a while.
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Actually your thought is a very good one, but if we miss that opportunity, and not convert the former "crudeoil" into CO2 ;)
landfill
But the landfills are actually unused energy reserves however during the last 40yrs. you will find there "Teflon" like compounds that when burnt will react to HF (fluoridic acid) which is very nasty stuff as it will etch your plastic to fuel machinery
And that's the problem.
(most "plastic" which could be PVC, PE, PP, etc.. is made from oil - in future it can be made from ethano
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The real problem *is* money.
There's a fairly new technology out that uses plasma to melt and reduce landfill garbage into a non-toxic sludge which can then be processed into more useful stuff, the resulting heat from which can sustain the plasma reaction once it's started. The problem is it costs a lot to purchase and install. Landfills are *extremely* profitable businesses. I read not long ago that each truckload of waste driving out of manhattan is worth well over $10,000 in profit. One truck can probably
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is, yet again, a great example how every little thing in a society shouldn't be run on profit motive only. There are lots of things worth doing for the good of everyone that might lead to a fat cat getting a little less money but are still worth doing.
re: profit motive (Score:3)
Except usually, it requires someone who ALREADY HAD a profit motive and was successful in some way, to be in the position to opt to do these "costly, but for the good of everyone" things.
And really, they do happen all the time. Most big businesses I can think of sponsor all sorts of things for their communities. The entire tax code is designed to encourage you to make charitable contributions.
The alternative to this is the classic "big government" advocate, who wishes government to act as forced charity, ta
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Which is, yet again, a great example how every little thing in a society shouldn't be run on profit motive only. There are lots of things worth doing for the good of everyone that might lead to a fat cat getting a little less money but are still worth doing.
...which explains why a pleasant number of fat cats actually give back to society, eh? (see also Carnegie, Gates, etc.)
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...which explains why a pleasant number of fat cats actually give back to society, eh? (see also Carnegie, Gates, etc.)
What's pleasant about a vanishing number of fat cats giving back a tiny percentage of their ill-gotten gains? They stole, then they gave some of what they stole back, and now you want to pat them on the back? Carnegie was provably engaging only in public relations. I would argue that there's plenty of evidence that the same is true of Gates.
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Seriously, "eat the rich"?
I don't care *why* they give back, the fact remains that they do. Besides, it's their money - not mine, not yours.
I won't say that society should run on profit only - in fact I provided two examples of how it doesn't. As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them? Answer that question, and you have the reason why society doesn't just run on mere profit.
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I don't care *why* they give back, the fact remains that they do. Besides, it's their money - not mine, not yours.
It was our money, until they got their hands on it through crime. Remember, Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly position, they were simply let off the hook by Ashcroft under Bush. That is not Bill Gates' money.
As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them?
Because Eat the Rich. How can you have the answer right there and still not know what it is? History shows us that greedy fucks will accumulate wealth at any cost (including the suffering of others) all the way to the guillotine.
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It was our money, until they got their hands on it through crime. Remember, Microsoft was convicted of abusing its monopoly position, they were simply let off the hook by Ashcroft under Bush. That is not Bill Gates' money.
Microsoft also wound up being fined for that action. The money was given to his company freely by its customers, his company in turn paid him. They didn't break into your house and steal it (leaving behind a copy of Windows 95 on their way out...)
As for the "public relations" angle, ask yourself this: why are retired people with more money than most small countries give a damn what the public thinks of them?
Because Eat the Rich
Envy and anger are not reasons. Let me lead you to what I was getting at: I sincerely doubt that Bill Gates fears being executed by a mob of angry revolutionaries, insomuch as he fears that as Microsoft the company ages, public opinion may turn against said company
Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's been over a decade since I first saw thermal polymerization [slashdot.org] mentioned here. I've often wondered if it would be economical to build a ship around such a contraption in order to trawl through the great ocean gyres, [wikipedia.org] scooping up plastic garbage, squeezing out the water, and rendering it down into some kind of fuel. I reckon the process could be made energy-positive, but whether it would be enough to turn a profit is a tougher question.
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I've often wondered if it would be economical to build a ship around such a contraption in order to trawl through the great ocean gyres, [wikipedia.org] scooping up plastic garbage
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Absolutely not. Not even close.
The amount of fuel you would consume would exceed the amount of plastic collected by several orders of magnitude. There has been a lot of alarmism about the "giant island of garbage" in the Pacific Gyre. But if you actually went there, you would see nothing but empty water. If you strained with a fine net, you would find some flecks of plastic suspended in the water. To collect a kg of plastic, you would need to process roughly 20 millions
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Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I admit I'd been misled by photographs of visible "floating islands" of debris, but after reading my own Wikipedia link I see that you are right. That is a bummer.
Why do people dump trash in the ocean, anyway? I've always found that puzzling.
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Why do people dump trash in the ocean, anyway? I've always found that puzzling.
Because it is easy and cheap. Rich countries can afford more expensive waste disposal, but poor countries can not. But the trends are positive. Rich countries are doing much better, and poor countries will adopt better practices are their economies improve. China and America use about the same amount of plastic, but China dumps 30 times as much into the ocean. So there is plenty of room for improvement. China is actually ahead of America on some policies. They already ban free plastic bags, which enc
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We need biodegradable plastics for common, 'temporary' uses, such as shopping bags.
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Imagine if someone made bags out of paper!
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Sure, but beside the point. At any given time, there's "luxury" plastic, the kind we might make the case of a laptop out of, and there's "temporary" plastic, like packaging material, that we throw away after use. The second kind is more likely to leak from the disposal pipeline into the oceans, and a candidate for biodegradability.
Not that much (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not that much (Score:4, Informative)
Assumption based on uniform distribution.
Plastic distribution in the ocean is not homogeneous.
Please read up on the "gyres" in the ocean. Places where a large corriolis current causes mechanical concentration of suspened particulates in the oceans. The concentration of suspended microparticles of decaying plastic are sufficiently high in these locations that it is affecting bottom-tier filter feeders, which suck in the plastic particles as if it were plankton, then concentrate it further inside their bodies, which are then consumed by higher trophic level fauna, with toxic results.
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then concentrate it further inside their bodies
Why don't they just poop it back out ?
Re:Not that much (Score:5, Informative)
Because the excretory systems of simple invertebrates of this type (Corals, sponges, etc) preclude the existence of a dedicated GI tract as you would normally envision it. (A sponge is literally just two layers of cells that suck in water on one side, and push out water on the other, for instance.) They are unable to digest the particle, it stays large, and it cannot pass through. This is bad for the filter feeder, and toxic to the organism that consumes the filter feeder.
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If they only have one opening, and the particle goes in, it shouldn't be too big to go back out, right ? Same as if they get some sand inside.
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your asshole isn't always as large as your mouth
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I don't think Goatse man would agree.
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Sponges dont regurgitate, any more than your heart can beat backwards. They are very, VERY simplistic colonial organisms. Again-- Literally-- Sucks water IN on one side, pushes water OUT on the other. They digest what gets caught. (Except when they can't, then it just sticks in there.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
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Neither are dogs, but if they eat a lego, it still comes back out.
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That's because a dog has a complex digestive system capable of handling non-food items being ingested. Simpler organisms don't have this complex a system. It's just "pull in food item", "digest", "expel remains" - with the remains assumed to be of a certain size or smaller. If the remains happen to be larger (e.g. because they are a non-digestible plastic), then it gets stuck in the organism. You might ask why the creature doesn't account for this and the answer would be Evolution. The creature would n
Re:Not that much (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is far worse than that. The plastic degrades into microscopic particulates which then enter the food chain. It affects *all* marine life--since it's all connected. They even discovered recently how much paint (from ship hulls) is floating around and being consumed by animals--which is also a problem.
We need to stop dumping *anything* into the ocean--it's a primary source of food on our planet.
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Not sure, but I'm betting humans are going to lose.
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You would have lost that bet every time in history. The humans always win.
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Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All it takes is one big loss for humans to disappear.
Even if the loss isn't a "wipe out all humans" scale loss, there are making kinds of losing. When the Library of Alexandria was lost, humanity lost out on a lot of knowledge. We might have gotten some of it back and might have survived without it, but we might be much further along technologically had its contents been available for more generations.
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But doesn't most aquatic life concentrate in a small percentage of the sea (ie: near the surface)?
And isn't that where most plastic ends up?
Re:Not that much (Score:4, Informative)
I think the point here is surface area, not volume.
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The volume isn't anything to scoff at either. I just did some numbers to get a visual perspective of the plastic mass we're talking about, in terms of container ships. 8 million metric tons at standard container size and weight (1 TEU = one twenty-foot equivalent unit, average loaded weight of 20 metric tons) and with high-capacity containerships averaging 15,000 TEU, thats 27 fully loaded ships. Thats approximately 350 meters long, 50 meters wide, and 15 meters deep of containers stacked 14-high per shi
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Compared to the 1000 meters long, 1000 meters wide, 1000 meters deep of each and every one of the 80,000,000 cubic kilometers of ocean, it's not really a lot.
Should we stop dumping plastic in the ocean? Yep, surely should. Alas, we here in the US have little control over China and the other 18 countries that dump more of it into the oceans than we do. And eliminating o
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Actually we have lots of control. We are the people buying so much of the plastic stuff made in China; we can make those purchases conditional on how the plastic is made.
What we don't have in the US is the political will to flex that muscle, because it might disrupt someone's profit. So we only flex it to solve little problems, like Pakistani children sewing soccer balls.
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How long are people going to take it up the ass from corporate america before you realize it is happening?
Thank you, CEO, may I have another??
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Re:Not that much (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why not? That's less E. coli than I'd accidentally ingest swimming at most public beaches. I think you need a better example.
I have a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have a solution (Score:4, Interesting)
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But then you couldn't showcase the actual product through the packaging! Marketing departments the world over will scream as if the apocalypse as has come!
Umm.... (Score:2)
Except you could do what retailers have done for eons.... Open ONE box and put a sample product on display next to all of the boxes, so you can see and even touch/handle the sample product to know what you're getting.
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Let's not go overboard, here. A lot of design went into making the product look like what you want, but making products meet consumer expectations when actually being used or handled costs too much.
The more destructive one needs to be to actually get to the product, the less likely disappointed people are to demand a refund.
Re:I have a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Online shops is the obvious place to enforce this. No packaging for simple stuff like cables, plain bags for non-breakable loose stuff, plain boxes for everything else. People are buying from pictures and reviews and shoplifting is a non-issue, so packaging only needs to be minimally functional. I think AmazonBasics products use this approach, and it'd be nice to see Amazon push it back a bit on their suppliers.
Ideally, it should be the responsibility of the retailer to display the product attractively rather than the job of the package, but blame Walmart. They've done a pretty solid job of unloading a lot of traditional retailer jobs back on the manufacturers.
Re:I have a solution (Score:5, Informative)
The clamshell packages weren't made for you the consumer... it was originally designed for the retailer to slow down shoplifting.
After all, it's much harder to smuggle out a bigger-than-your-pocket-sized plastic container with a 64GB geek stick in it, than to simply smuggle out the geek stick itself. Being hard to open w/o damaging it prevents a shoplifter from just taking that 64GB geek stick out of its original package and putting it into a 8GB package (with an obviously cheaper price tag) before strolling to the checkout stand with it.
Costco stamps (Score:3)
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In theory, you could replace that stuff with compostable plastics. But that would take an awful lot of corn...
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...and then cut me...
And apparently several thousand people per year seriously enough to send them to the emergency room for treatment...
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Blame your fellow humans.
Believe me, companies would rather NOT have to spend more $ for expensive shell packaging, but its very challenging nature of opening significantly reduces pilferage and shoplifting.
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Believe me, companies would rather NOT have to spend more $ for expensive shell packaging, but its very challenging nature of opening significantly reduces pilferage and shoplifting.
Many stores manage to do just fine either putting small items into big plastic packages which are opened at the register and then reused, or by putting small expensive items behind glass and requiring the customer to ask for them by name or hand in a paper tag at the register in order to get them. Demanding plastic clamshells is the asshole way out.
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Honestly, where do you live that consumers would tolerate having to ask the clerk to hand them stuff?
Here in the midwest US, sure, that's true for small high value electronics, jewelry, and cosmetics - none of which is commonly packaged like this, as you observed. Then again, they are what, 1% of purchase transactions?
Sure, 8 million tons, but that's the free market (Score:1)
If people wanted trash-free oceans, the market would provide it. Since you currently can't buy trash-free oceans at any price, it's clear that nobody wants it. Government regulation is not the answer.
I think I've got the theory straight on this, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Re:Sure, 8 million tons, but that's the free marke (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're quite right. All that really counts is money, so providing someone is making money by not dealing with plastic trash entering waterways, that's good. Aquatic life, future generations, they don't really make us that much money, so fuck them, each and every one.
Simple solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Put a deposit on everything sold. The company gets an interest free loan for the life of the product and people are motivated to pick up trash. Yes I know its complicated but microdots or chemical signatures make even plastic bags traceable.
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Have you ever listened to a Scott Walker speech?
"Metric" tons? (Score:1)
Re:"Metric" tons? (Score:4, Informative)
Because there's a few countries that haven't seen the shining light that is the metric system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Re:"Metric" tons? (Score:5, Informative)
ton(US) 2000lb
Tonne or Metric ton 1000kg (2204.62lb)
so yes, it matters.
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Another name for these:
ton(UK) 2240lb = Long Ton
ton(US) 2000lb = Short Ton
Tonne or Metric ton 1000kg (2204.62lb) = Metric Ton
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Wtf is a "metric" ton? A ton is and has always been metric. No need to specify.
Better phrased as tonnes (if metric). They should have just stuck with kilograms. 1 ton = 2240 lb (an imperial measurement). 1 tonne = 1000 kg (a metric measurement). It's the Brits' fault:1 ton= 20 hundredweight= 20 X8 stone = 20 X 8 X14 pounds= 2240 pounds
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I'd like to see your reference for this statement "A ton is and has always been metric".
As I understand it a "ton" is typically non-metric (either Imperial or US) whereas "tonne" is metric and "metric ton" is the term typically used in the US that refers to tonne. This has been my understanding for years but a quick check on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]) seems to agree, although I notice there is some confusion when talking about an Imperial ton (or lon
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In documents that predate 1960 the word ton is sometimes spelled tonne, but in more recent documents tonne refers exclusively to the metric ton.
from Wikipedia. Should have used tonne maybe. Yes I'm aware some people have weird measurement units, and others drive on the wrong side of the road..
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As far as the wrong side of the road, I would guess that a left handed person designated the driving direction in UK, Aus, Etc. I find it preferable to control steering with my left hand as it is a gross movement, and shifting with my right as it is a fine movement. I would think this is the more logical thing, therefore, the right side of the road is the correct side of the road. :)
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Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a pretty good summary of the reasons for left and right side traffic.
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Interesting theory you have.
But wrong.
They were measuring ship displacement in tons long before the French started beheading their royalty. And the metric system came out of that particular mess.
Note also that the PROPER metric term for 1000 Kg is the Mg. Too bad so few metric worshipers ever use the "mega" prefix....
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Note also that the PROPER metric term for 1000 Kg is the Mg. Too bad so few metric worshipers ever use the "mega" prefix....
That's my biggest beef with those who bitch about customary systems like the one used in the US. They invariably turn around and use the customary abominations that are tacked onto SI without seeing the irony.
We were great once (Score:1)
An idea... (Score:1)
8 million metric tons of sea water ... (Score:2)
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Everything tends to look smaller when you cube root it :
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/eart... [usgs.gov]
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Great link, thanks BlackPignouf.
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That's right. If all that plastic were in a landfill rather than in the ocean where it's killing marine organisms, it really wouldn't be a big deal.
Of course, I once read that every human on earth would fit easily in a cubic box 1 mile on a side. And that box would fit easily in the Grand Canyon. I guess humans aren't very important either. ;)
Guesstimate (Score:2)
This entire study is a big guesstimate. More than likely they get it right with the top half-dozen polluters, but beyond that the margin of error makes it all guesswork.
“Of course we know these aren’t absolute numbers, but it gives us an idea of the magnitude, and where we might need to focus our efforts to affect the issue,”
The USA, at #20 in the list, is responsible for less than 1% of the global pollution of this kind, according to this study. The USA produces only 3% of the pollution China produces alone. Certainly the margin for error in this type of indirect approximation is no better than 5%, putting the USA on the list at all in just statistical noise
Mickey Mouse Statistics... (Score:2)
"...size of coastal population and national plastic production. According to the estimate..."
Sounds like a pretty mickey mouse statistic to come up with an "estimate". More like a wild guess that is barely based on anything relevant...
Wait a minute (Score:2)
Based on plastic production and coastal populations. Not on actually dumping plastic in the ocean.
I would have thought most of the plastic in China is shipped off to other countries. It would then be those other countries polluting.
Encourage container ships to use it as fuel (Score:2)
Already container ships use the cheapest fuel on the market. It is basically sludge left over from the refining process. it is cheap, dirty, but energy dense. Their engines are robust and designed to burn that sort of fuel without a lot of problems.
Consider if they had some external combustion engines on the boat. Just something to augment the existing engines and they could scoop up any plastic just in the water and then dump that into the external combustion engine where it would be burned.
Here someone wi
Ramscoops (Score:2)
Won't work for the same reason that bussard ramscoops won't work. There isn't as much hydrogen out there as we thought/there isn't as much plastic out there as you think, and in both cases, the distribution is uneven and it isn't located where we want to go.
hah (Score:1)
hey, how much snow did you get?
OVER 9000 METRIC TON!
Metric Ton (Score:2)
One thousand Kilograms should be called a Megagram, not a Tonne .
Biodegradable PLA? (Score:2)
My county (Maui) is looking at banning polystyrene food containers. We banned plastic shopping bags a few years ago and it's made a huge difference, I used to see plastic bags blowing around, caught in bushes by the side of the road, and in the ocean all the time, but no more.
The thing with the food containers is...most of them will be replaced with PLA. PLA is compostable, where it's in a commercial compost pile over X degrees and with other conditions that help break it down. But what about floating ar
Rising oceans (Score:2)