Ocean Plastic Waste Probably Comes From Ships, Report Says (afp.com) 97
Most of the plastic bottles washing up on the rocky shores of Inaccessible Island, aptly named for its sheer cliffs rising from the middle of the South Atlantic, probably come from Chinese merchant ships, a study published this week said. From a report: The study offers fresh evidence that the vast garbage patches floating in the middle of oceans, which have sparked much consumer hand-wringing in recent years, are less the product of people dumping single-use plastics in waterways or on land, than they are the result of merchant marine vessels tossing their waste overboard by the ton. The authors of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, collected thousands of pieces of waste during visits to the tiny island in 1984, 2009 and again in 2018. The island is located roughly midway between Argentina and South Africa in the South Atlantic gyre, a vast whirlpool of currents that has created what has come to be known as an oceanic garbage patch. While initial inspections of the trash washing up on the island showed labels indicating it had come from South America, some 2,000 miles (3,000 kilometers) to the west, by 2018 three-quarters of the garbage appeared to originate from Asia, mostly China. Many of the plastic bottles had been crushed with their tops screwed on tight, as is customary on board ships to save space, said report author Peter Ryan, director of the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
That, and 90% from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa (Score:4, Informative)
By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.
Eight of them are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa â" the Nile and the Niger.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda... [weforum.org]
Re:That, and 90% from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds impressive until you realize that 60% of the world's population lives in Asia and 17% in Africa.
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So what you are saying is they pollute a 1/3rd more / unit population and at an insanely high level for pollution/economic output ?
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Yes. They are poorer countries, and have more lax environmental regulations.
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And they pollute just the same. Been to Nepal - wonderful people, clean streets, clean buildings, clean people, generally a very tidy place. Rivers were a mass of waste and mountain streams were just as bad. Most tourists / hikers would kill themselves before littering but, I saw more natives just tossing stuff willy nilly for others to pick up and transport to the burn pits.
This was the same in most third-world countries I've visited and would expect it to be the same for all. Not saying the USA is any b
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No you forgot to add the population of Africa, so that's 77%
Also remember that a LARGE proportion of that pollution is because of jobs we outsourced to those locations. America *used* to be a lot dirtier, then standards rose and the dirty jobs got outsourced. America has the combination cheap goods, high standard of living and clean air ONLY because we paid someone else to be allowed to shit on their lawn, then we get to laugh at how their lawn is all shitty.
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It's not supposed to be "impressive", and if the amount of plastic in the oceans has certain environmental consequences, the Earth doesn't do per capita calculations when deciding environmental impacts.
But yes, by all means: let's keep focusing on straws and bags, ignoring China and India on greenhouse gas emissions -- because they are "developing", or they have more people -- and rejecting nuclear power.
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This was a conscious and deliberate US economic policy, to offshore low value manufacturing to countries with low labor costs and few environmental or labor regulations. What would you expect the result of such a policy to be?
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dilapidated inner cities, social decay and the rust belt?
Re: That, and 90% from 10 rivers in Asia and Afric (Score:4, Informative)
I was working for an environmental group when Clinton normalized trade relations with China. Neither environmentalists nor labor were happy with the idea of American workers competing with Chinese laborers in what amounted to a crony capitalist state with no labor or environmental protections.
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dilapidated inner cities, social decay and the rust belt?
I'll give you the last one as most manufacturing happened there, and leave the middle one to the sociologists to talk about. Inner cities, however, have been coming back and have been the center of industry since the 80's. The service economy is based not only on vertical integration bit also having large pools of skilled workers to rely on. The main issues we are seeing today are caused by an economic boom in the inner cities and dilapidation of rural areas, not just the rust belt. It's happening across th
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India has less than half America's greenhouse gas emissions...Why are you twice as bad when you have less than 1/4 the number of people?
Oh you think Earth cares about $ when deciding environmental impacts. Where is my eye-roll emoji?
Climate change report card [nationalgeographic.com]
India - top of the class
China - shows some promise
America - barely trying
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The reason that plastic bags and plastic straws are so cheap and common in developing countries is partly due to them being in high demand in the West. If we switch to more sustainable products the price of those will fall too and it will be easier for developing nations to do likewise, not least since they are making a lot of this stuff locally anyway.
As for rejecting nuclear power, is it really a good idea for unstable developing nations to have it? Especially given the cost, it seems that other low emiss
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Those brown skinned people can't be trusted, eh?
I worry more about how the United States generates it's power, myself.
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That sounds impressive until you realize that 60% of the world's population lives in Asia and 17% in Africa.
Not so impressive when you consider most of their lifestyles that aren't so disposable plastic bottle based.
Re:That, and 90% from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa (Score:5, Informative)
The headline does not match the story.
Headline: Most oceanic plastic waste comes from ships.
Story: Most oceanic plastic waste IN THE SOUTH ATLANTIC comes from ships
Since most plastic waste goes into the North Pacific, and most surface currents don't cross the equator, there is no way for it to reach the South Atlantic. Even plastic dumped into the North Atlantic, South Pacific, or Indian Ocean, would rarely drift into the South Atlantic.
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That does not sound convincing.
I live at the Mekong, besides "dirt" there is no real pollution in the river.
If the Nile would be full with plastic, so would be the mediterranean sea, which it is not. The plastic waste is an atlantic and pacific problem.
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He's busy playing golf.
Propaganda from plastic straw pollution deniers (Score:2)
By analyzing the waste found in the rivers and surrounding landscape, researchers were able to estimate that just 10 river systems carry 90% of the plastic that ends up in the ocean.
That's just propaganda from the plastic straw manufacturing lobby pushed to social media by the plastic straw pollution deniers. :-)
Re:That, and 90% from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa (Score:4, Informative)
There are multiple metrics for the amount of plastic garbage in the oceans, including item count and weight. Interestingly, according [theoceancleanup.com] to The Ocean Cleanup [wikipedia.org], "When accounting for the total mass, 92% of the debris found in the patch consists of objects larger than 0.5 cm, and three-quarters of the total mass is made of macro- and mega plastic. However, in terms of object count, 94% of the total is represented by microplastics." Furthermore, "Fishing nets account for 46% of the mass" in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Based on the most common pollutants, it's not entirely clear that the plastic waste policy in the world is targeted at the most significant sources of the problem.
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Yea you'll find the majority of it was coming out of rivers in which they "processed" recycling waste shipped to them from first world countries. I think their "processing" half the time involved just dumping or letting it fall into the river, not out of malicious intent, but just out of disorganisation, incompetency, taking on more than they can handle in the pursuit of $$$.
The mess the planet is in today is because first world countries have been shirking their environmental responsibilities for far too
Plastic straws? (Score:1)
But we've banned Plastic Straws.. We are doing something.. I feel better about myself now (While tossing out the plastic cup and flatware and the foam container your takeout came in into that plastic trash bag)
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Enjoy carrying your paper garbage bag out to the garbage can every week. :-)
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People don't use paper for trash can liners. Now, instead of re-using the plastic grocery bags, they buy purpose-made trash bags. The plastics industry thanks you for your support.
Re:Plastic straws? (Score:5, Insightful)
FTFY.
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Yeah, that's my problem with this. I reuse all those plastic bags as garbage bags. I guess I could use paper ones for office trash and maybe bathroom trash, but kitchen trash is just plain do wet to use paper. And you take those bags away now I have to buy bags that use more material.
I also feel like packaging waste is completely out of hand and is the low hanging fruit here. So much plastic that only exists to be thrown out. But it would require a national rather than state or regional effort to reduce tha
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Growing up, one of my chores was to take the garbage out to the can in the alley. Plastic trash bags were really just starting out and plastic wasn't really a thing for retail/grocery store bags, so we used brown paper bags all the time for the trash. You occasionally had to be careful to make sure the bottom didn't fall out, but using paper worked fine.
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Um, we used to use paper bags to put trash in our metal trash cans.
All we need to do is use algae and seaweed to process into compostable "plastic" trash cans, and you just upend the waste basket over the trash can, and the garbage guy does the same, no muss no fuss.
Save the paper bag for your compostable food scraps that go in the yard waste.
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The problem with plastic is to make plastic from "other" sources like corn or algae and seaweed, you (very scientifically) need to turn those things into hydrocarbons before you turn them into plastic. Turning things into "oil" costs a lot of energy on its own, the earth has taken millions or billions of years and massive amounts of pressure and friction to do it.
In the end, even 'compostable' plastic requires large industrial composting facilities which virtually nobody has access to because they are (too)
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Very funny, but paper is what we used. There were no plastic bags, outside of Gucci..
I remember when plastic bags first came out. They used to ask which you preferred. We chose paper because we were accustomed. Then the tree people came and said no more paper.
Re: Plastic straws? (Score:4, Insightful)
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A lot of paper packaging can be made with recycled paper, so we're well within a position to make paper and cardboard packaging that still minimizes the amount of trees that have to be felled per package. Unfortunately, it appears that plastic recycling has never really caught on as much as paper recycling, perhaps because breaking down plastics is a lot more expensive than repulping paper.
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A lot of paper packaging can be made with recycled paper
No, it cannot. Recycling paper breaks the fibers and makes weak paper and cardboard. Paper packaging needs virgin fiber or it won't hold up.
Unfortunately, it appears that plastic recycling has never really caught on as much as paper recycling, perhaps because breaking down plastics is a lot more expensive than repulping paper.
I've been convinced by people in the industry that recycling paper and plastic are rarely worth the trouble. There is so much paper and plastic and very limited use for recycled material that we'd be better off just burning the paper and plastic for fuel.
One problem is removing the contaminants from both. Paper and plastic are of similar density and so typical means
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That was just a feel-good cover by the grocery stores, because people were used to paper bags but plastic ones were much cheaper.
Re:Plastic straws? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I buy an SDcard, I get a piece of hardware that is no more than about an inch square, and then I get a package about ten times that size of hard plastic. A lot of the packaging is astonishingly wasteful, probably more for theft prevention. But even that's silly because in most of the stores I go into, because even the larger packaging is easy to pocket, they have it locked cabinets or behind the counter.
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I get a package about ten times that size of hard plastic. A lot of the packaging is astonishingly wasteful, probably more for theft prevention.
Possibly also for advertising, it is usually marketing that designs the packaging.
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I get a package about ten times that size of hard plastic.
Really. It's stronger than aircraft aluminum. Maybe it is transparent aluminum. You need tin snips to cut it open.
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Except that paper is worse than plastic. Between the chemicals needed to make paper and the extra weight they incur as well as the plastic and glues they're often needed to be coated in to be food-safe.
It is estimated that paper straws are at least an order of magnitude worse than plastic straws in their entire lifecycle, likewise 'reusable' bags require almost 2000 re-uses to get to the equivalent use of thin plastic bags.
There is a reason cheap plastic is being used everywhere, the cost of it is low, cost
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Plastic bottles, cutlery and bags should be banned. It should be pretty cheap to replace them with paper.
100 times this. I keep a paper bottle of water in my car for emergencies. But every time I go to use it, someone has already broken into my car and drunk it. They always manage to spill a little bit too.
I've also had a few paper cuts, so I know paper can be sharp. But my paper knives never seem to work as well as advertised, maybe I'm just using them wrong?
Sampling bias (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't think that would change the floating and drifting characteristics of the trash, compared to, say, plastic bottles with the caps left off? Or non-crushed bottles with the caps screwed on tight?
If you want to know what's in the garbage patches floating in the middle of the oceans, the most reliable way is to go out there and sample it directly. I know, taking a ship out t
Re:Sampling bias (Score:4, Insightful)
(BTW, I crush plastic bottles and screw the cap on tight at home, so they'll take up less space in a landfill if they should somehow end up there instead of recycled.
You should not do that. REMOVE THE CAPS.
If bottles go to a landfill, they can be more reliably crushed flat with no cap.
If bottles are recycled, the caps need to be removed because they are a different plastic (usually HDPE instead of LDPE), and often add color contamination. This adds pointless labor and expense to the recycling process.
ALWAYS dispose of your bottles with the caps removed. This is true for glass bottles as well as plastic.
if people on ships are just throwing these bottles overboard, why are they bothering to crush them to save space?)
I wondered about that too. Maybe they are storing waste while in port. But in that case, they could just dispose of them in a dockside dumpster. But if they are just tossing them overboard while underway, there is no logical reason to crush them and screw on the cap.
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But if they are just tossing them overboard while underway, there is no logical reason to crush them and screw on the cap.
This isn't about some douchebag standing on the deck, chugging his Deerpark water, and then throwing the bottle over the rail. These are big ships. On the passenger vessels, there are food service, bars, and room service operations all over the place. They use countless bottles of water, juice, soda, etc., as they serve. They temporarily store up that stuff all across the ship as bring it to central waste storage areas. Sounds like some of them like to avoid the costs of shore-side handling of those materi
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I have often wondered about this and have always left them on thinking it is better (for no particular reason).
I just (belatedly) checked my city's recycling guide [qld.gov.au] and it does indeed say to remove the lids.
Thanks for mentioning this!
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Could be that they crush bottles for show. That way if they get inspected within someone's territorial waters, they can say they're doing everything right. They may even be taking extra trash to dump, because it's free.
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To increase sea level rise? Side note. I don't think I personally could "toss" anything that weighs a ton...
Re:Sampling bias (Score:5, Informative)
We go boating pretty regularly. Water bottles get crushed and then thrown in a trashbag. Since we are only out for 4-6 hours we just wait until we get to shore and then toss out the trash bag into the trash can. On a container ship it's probably cheaper (and certainly legal) to toss the trash bag overboard as soon as you are 200 miles offshore in international waters. Maybe less legal to toss plastic overboard but enforcement of trash laws offshore is 100% unenforceable. Also the average crew on a non-global scale containership can barely write their own name so educating them of the global impact of plastic in the oceans.
Anyways, yeah it's super common to crush bottles for space on boats.
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And why would they crush bottles to safe space, if they just keep tossing them overboard in the next moment. People also need to safe space when they have to carry their trash from their home to the next river. This seems much more likely to me.
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Same thing on a ship. You don't walk each napkin or empty water bottle from the mess to the deck and toss it overboard before returning to the mess to finish dinner.
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So I don't see how these researchers come to the conclusion that the waste comes from ships. Do they just assume that people live like them, and don't get how different life is for people in less developed countries?
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Maybe less legal to toss plastic overboard but enforcement of trash laws offshore is 100% unenforceable.
The obvious solution to this is to require ships reaching our ports to offload a reasonable amount of rubbish for their journey. If they were at sea for a month they should have a month's worth of rubbish to dispose of. A simple check by weight would be a good start.
Does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
The trade war with China could do more for the environment than sweeping plastic consumption bans?!
That sounds racist to me (Score:1)
You sure you aren't a NAZI ?
the solution is obvious to me (Score:2)
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Tell them to stop and if they don't? Bomb the ships to the bottom of the ocean.
Bombs are imprecise. Limpet mines work better.
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Tell them to stop and if they don't? Bomb the ships to the bottom of the ocean.
And then leave a bunch of trash in the ocean to float away or sink to the bottom? And the fuel? What of the fuel?
What of the people that toss plastic into the rivers? Can we bomb the polluting nations too?
Let's just bomb everyone into the stone age. That way we have people shitting in the rivers and cutting down trees to burn for heat.
I'm thinking people need to calm down and get a handle on just where the problem lies, assuming the problem is even something that is actually a problem. The ocean is big
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Whooosssshhh!!!!
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We've reached parody inversion. Can't tell if anyone is serious now.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2019... [dilbert.com]
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They're doing it anyway, a ship can make hundreds of trips. A single sidewinder missile and a sunk boat (which they'll do eventually anyway) is better for the environment.
But what you say is right, if you don't let nations develop and consume lots of fuel, they'll consume fuel and resources that are worse. The US has decreased CO2 emissions as it has increased its wealth, so has the UK. The EU has increased CO2 emissions as it has increased solar and wind power and decreased reliance on nuclear (because Ger
Too bad your oblivious to real solution ... (Score:2)
The solution is obvious to me. Tell them to stop and if they don't? Bomb the ships to the bottom of the ocean.
Too bad your oblivious to real solution.
STOP BUYING THINGS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN.
Our current consumer purchasing habits are driving all these various forms of ship based pollution. Physical trash, dump of chemical captured by solution control devices, etc. Buying as local as possible is the way remedy this, to reduce the need for these ships in the first place.
Re: the solution is obvious to me (Score:2)
What a load of hooey (Score:4, Interesting)
There are 30 crew on a merchant ship tops. There are maybe 60,000 merchant ships in the world. Let's be very generous and round up to 2,000,000 merchant sailors total.
2,000,000 people, out of the billions of people in the world, are not the ones generating the lions share of the plastic waste found in the ocean.
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If they spent 200 days a year at sea and the ship drops all the waste into the ocean, it is plausible.
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No idea. But I can imagine all the plastic bottles I throw in the recycling bin being sent to China for "recycling" and then simply being dumped wholesale into the ocean.
Its Nonsense (Score:1)
Re:Its Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic logic being, 'some people are wrong about some things, so I'm free do disbelieve whatever I like.'
Re:Its Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're confusing your social media news feed with the reality. Yes, people get regularly crazy on stupid things, but no, the governments of countries all over the world (globally, not locally) do not take stupid decisions.
Recycling was and is still useful. Throw-away plastic bags are being banned, replaced by re-usable bags. Plastic ware is being banned as well. That's where the world is going : less trash, less plastics burned or burried.
But I'm not saying that is the situation in your local town. In particular this does not apply to the US where the government has no interest in driving country-wide policies about pollution, and where recycling is mostly relying on private business making profit or not.
Obviously we need to embargo China (Score:2)
I'd recommend sinking their fleets.
I thought it was all our fault. (Score:1)
If we ban plastic straws in Nebraska, the world's oceans will be saved.
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If we ban plastic straws in Nebraska, the world's oceans will be saved.
Do NOT make me send Greta T over there to shut you down, mister.
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How dare you??!!
What's next? Maybe we need to think before acting? (Score:1)
Eating meat ends up not being nearly as bad for the environment or our health as was believed earlier. The plastic straws and bags we use are almost never found in the ocean. So, what's the next domino to fall? The burning of coal reduces global warming?
Here's an idea, when we find out something that might be good for us or the environment then maybe we should have this double and triple checked before making any action a government policy.
Then when something does become a public policy act on it in a wa
Re: What's next? Maybe we need to think before act (Score:2)
Uh, no. You go read some 28 CFR Part 36 or 42 USC 12181â"89 and let me know when you get to the part about straws.
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The federal act will not point to a need to keep plastic straws in stock, this is an exception in the state and local laws to avoid getting sued over it under the provisions of the federal laws.
Here's a mention of such a provision...
http://www.umassmedia.com/opin... [umassmedia.com]
That means that people with such disabilities will not be able to get drinks from Starbucks anymore, unless a lot of planning is done around it. The same applies to anyone living in Santa Barbaraâ"though the law allows exceptions due to the Americans With Disabilities Act, planning will need to be done beforehand.
But ... but ... (Score:1)
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But ... but ... how am I gonna blame Republicans for this now?
Greta T will help you find a way. You stole her childhood and her dreams, you bastard.
Chinese Merchant ships carrying first world waste (Score:2)
First world countries need to stop the disgusting practice of exporting their waste and environmental responsibilities to other countries in which its far easier for it all to be proverbially swept under the carpet.
Blaming countries like China for pollution is the height of hypocrisy when that pollution is actually being imported into China from other first world countries
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Also the article states clearly that the bottles are labelled Chinese.
In countries with no public garbage collection it is still standard to just throw all rubbish in the next river. This was fine before they had supermarkets and plastic packaging, but this is what is causing the problem now.
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China is dumping trash in the oceans. Not because anyone made them do it, because they don't care.
it certainly wasn't most of us (Score:2)
if this article is true or not, one thing i do know is that most of the plastics in the ocean are not thrown there by people (or at least not in developed nations).
i mean, who they hell do you know who is dumping his (plastic) trash into rivers or the sea? nobody.
So, we can use plastic straws again, right? (Score:2)
Let China ban the junk they're dumping, let China worry about cleaning it up, let Americans use frikkin straws.
Teleserye tv (Score:1)