For a lot of less developed countries and regions, the only way they've ever gotten rid of their trash was by dumping it in the nearby river. Plastics just last way longer than anything else we have produced as a species up till now.
I would love to see your source of this information. Everything I have ever seen say that the plastics come from 10 rivers in the asian and african continent. Fisherman waste is a drop in the bucket. It should still be addressed, but its not even clowe to being a "big chunk"
[UNEP estimates that 10% of all waste plastic in the ocean are from discarded fishing nets.](https://www.nature.com/articles/536263a)
So only 1/10th, but I would say that's still a significant proportion.
I have always struggled with the fact that the best solution we have for all our trash is to just bury it in the ground. I mean, it gets the job done, and I don't have any better solutions, but it just seems really dumb for humans to do considering how smart we like to think we are.
Finding ways to recycle everything is probably the “best” solution. The problem is it’s expensive and often times costs more than making the material from scratch, and people care more about money than the environment.
There *is* research being done into better ways to destroy plastic, like developing bacteria that eats it. If we could find some magical way to destroy plastic like that without causing major pollution, it would be a game changer.
Edit: I am just responding to a question asking about dealing with trash that already exists. I don’t need a lecture about how terrible plastic is for the environment and how we need to stop using it.
It's not only a question of economic viability, but also of energy. If recycling something requires a great deal of electricity then recycling it can be worse for the environment than just making it from scratch.
Plastic recycling is mostly a myth created by plastic companies to make us feel less bad about the insane amount of plastic waste we create. Metal and glass are infinitely recycleable and most companies have moved away from those materials bc of cost. Instead of pretending to recycle we should be reducing the amount of plastic we use, especially single use but thats not happening. Most cities cannot recycle, sort, or decontaminate all plastic types so it just ends up in landfills. But people feel good bc they throw it in a blue bin while endlessly consuming more and more.
I think I’ve heard even glass isn’t that recyclable. Like, physically it is, but at the moment it’s still more economical to make new glass in most cases than it is to use recycled glass.
No source on this, I admit, just something I’ve heard
Glassworks in Denmark have taken well sorted glass for recycling for free, or possibly even paid for it.
As soon as there is more than a minuscule fraction of plastic or car window glass or other exciting stuff in the recycled glass, it becomes uneconomical to recycle. Automated sorting is not yet good enough for what the glassworks require, so recycling relies on the consumers being diligent.
Glass is easily and cheaply recyclable. The biggest cost to most recycling is sorting and decontamination. If you have a bin of pure glass its easy. If you need to sort every box, clean it, process it etc it becomes expensive. When its too expensive people dont buy recycled glass, they make it new. Presorting is the biggest way to cut cost but it requires a separate bin for glass, paper, plastic, metal.
Our county where I live have to bins divided in to four bins under the lid. First one is combustables, bio-material, non-colored glass and metal. Second one is paper, plastic, colored glass and magazines/newspapers.
>If we could find some magical way to destroy plastic like that without causing major pollution
The 'cleanest' way to get rid of plastic is to burn it, at high temperatures, with good air filters et al. Downside, obviously, is that burning plastic usually releases byproducts that are extremely toxic, but if you can reduce it down to *mostly* CO2 and a few elements, that's very much closed cycle w/r the environment. Ignoring climate change, obviously, though the issue there is quite simply that we *continue to pull significant amounts of sequestered hydrocarbons out of the ground*, period.
And the best way to get rid of waste, obviously, is to simply generate less of it (and instead reuse things as much as possible), instead.
Plastic-eating bacteria is a pipedream. And a fairly literal pandora's box, since once you've created plastic-eating bacteria, that *will* *get released into the environment*, *and is now in the environment,* *forever*.
So say goodbye to PVC pipes, plastic food safety and biomedical packaging, *anything* that currently uses plastics (as that will *eventually* decompose), et al.
That's maybe not the total end of the world given that we could switch back to metals, ceramics, glass, and silicone stuff instead (with probably much less harm to the environment), but still – very hard to understate just how damaging that would be if you made hydrocarbon-based materials something that bacteria can now happily eat.
Good (and maybe the only real solution) for getting rid of microplastic pollution though.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about how a “plastic-eating” bacteria would work and none of them are accurate based on the work that’s already been done.
Problem is that releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is an existential crisis to the planet's biosphere. We need to stop releasing CO2 immediately.
Burying the plastic is returning the carbon back underground from where it came from. Landfills are the most environmentally friendly way to handle plastic waste at the moment, with our current technology.
Plastic waste is an excellent fuel though. It could replace virgin gas or oil for use in central heating facilities or other energy producing boilers. Replacing gas and oil derived energy with burning plastic would result in a net decrease in CO2 and solve the problem of plastic waste. It strikes me as a better solution until we can replace fire-based energy production altogether.
SpaceX launched 80% of the total mass to orbit in Q1 2023 [source](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/spacex-launched-over-80-of-all-orbital-payload-mass-in-q1-2023.html).
If we extrapolate out to a full year, that will work out to about 1000 metric tons to orbit.
The USA alone sends ~140 million tons to landfills annually, so among many other issues, we'd need to be launching rockets at a rate ~140,000 times as much, or about 40,000 rockets per day just to handle the USA's trash problem alone.
> Finding ways to recycle everything is probably the “best” solution.
No, it's the least bad. It was very very deliberate that the catchphrase the environmental movement was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". That's an ordered list!
The best thing is to not make a thing that will become trash in the first place. If you do make a thing, make a thing you can reuse (like cloth grocery bags instead of paper or plastic). If you do have to throw out the thing, try to recycle some of it.
But the absolute best thing you can always do is produce less waste in the first place.
[https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy-in-depth.php](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy-in-depth.php)
Dont worry the nerds know what to do with your trash.
This. Sure, it produces a lot of GHGs, but that is already a problem we are working on fixing as well. While its technically kicking the can down the road, at least its slightly centralizing our mess.
Except for plastic and glass (and specific waste like heavy metals and batteries), the natural decaying process is perfectly fine. Wood, paper, food and metal will all deteriorate just fine. Though whether you want metals in future soil is another thing.
Most of the problem is plastic and we use it for literally everything except what it would be most useful for. If we built house frames out of the stuff, where it lasting hundreds of years was a plus we'd be all set.
Plus, fossil fuels will run out eventually, and thats where we get most polymers. The current theory is that when that happens we will "mine" old landfills for polymers and we will switch back to wood and metal for all but more essential uses for plastic which we should be doing now but hey.
I like how you're just using "metal" as some blanket term.
There are many different metals and many of them are toxic. Many of them also require a great deal of energy to mine and refine, which is why recycling metals is important.
Metal yes. I specified out heavy metals and battery materials. Aluminum and steel are the most common and its more expensive than mining and refining weirdly enough. I wish it wasn cheaper to recycle them. Hell aluminum is super easy to recycle but apparently we get so muching mining other thongs that its still cheaper to just refine it after getting the other things we wanted out of the mine.
Sad but true.
We dont even recycle gold. 10% of all gold ever mined is sitting in landfills.
I'm not sure when the last time I read up on it was, but I'm pretty sure recycling aluminum is always cheaper and easier than refining new metal from ore. Both happen, a lot, but the refining process for Al is very, very energy intensive.
For steel, it's complicated. Most of the time steel is made they use a mixture of scrap (i.e. recycled) and ore-based material. That process is, again, easier and often cheaper, but with the significant caveat that there are a huge number of useful steel alloys and not all of them can be made this way.
There's a steel mill near me that recycles scrap, and isn't bankrupt.
Aluminum is pretty much solidified electricity. It takes immensely less energy to pick out and melt aluminum than it does to electrolyze it.
I have a friend-of-a-friend whose job is determining the gold content of electronic scrap so buyer and seller can negotiate a fair price. There was a short period after the IBM 360 was retired that it was cheaper to put a computer in your basement than the equivalent electric furnace. Then somebody realized there was gold in them there boxes, and they all went away. "We don't even recycle gold" is at best over simplistic.
I like how I say its usually cheaper to just produce newer stuff and you took that to mean that any recycling will make you bankrupt.
Never change reddit
What would happen if we did away with Garbage services all together. The only options would be recycling or personal sequestration. You'd watch your plastic consumption if you couldn't get rid of the bottles.
No, but if you eliminate and monitor runoff, it's a great long term solution with almost no downside other than the loss of a very small amount of low value land.
Maybe in North America, but there are plenty of island nations where land is at a premium. The cost of building a landfill as opposed to dumping in a river makes it much more economical in the short term. On top of that, properly setting up a landfill is not cheap. Generally the cheapest, easiest way to dispose of garbage is throwing it in the river. That does not mean it's the best option, just that it's easiest and cheapest. And getting people to not do things the easy, cheap way can be difficult.
Be "we" do you mean just the area you live or do you mean all of Earth? Because there are many places where they don't have perfectly good landfills neither do they have the infrastructure to get it their.
I was in Vietnam a few years ago 2017. One guide told us that plastic waste has become a bigger and bigger issue. As for take away food, it used to be served in a banana leaf and then people throw the leaf when they done. Now everything is packed in plastic, but the old people still just throw it away like they are used to.
Now i hope I can get banana leaf bags to carry home my groceries in Norway.
Lots of places it does get literally dumped in rivers (I've seen it). Obviously not sure what percentage we're talking about, but enough to see it multiple times in different countries
No a lot of third world countries do not have trash collection, especially in rural areas. They burn it or it goes in streams, rivers or off cliffs and canyons where it eventually gets into the watershed. This is probably always what has been done but plastics don’t degrade on any reasonable timescale. I’ve spent time in rural central and South America, and hard to believe, but streams and rivers are widely used to dispose of residential waste.
What I mean is that most people don't gather all their plastic, walk with it to the river and throw it in. They just throw it on the street and the rain washes it away.
The effect is the same but the phrasing emphasises that the issue is the lack of trash collection and not evil brown people throwing things in the river for fun.
Except that a lot of third world countries do (or at least did, as many are getting better about it) just throw their trash in the river? Idk where you are looking at, while litter being washed away is relevant without any levels of industrialization throwing trash into the river is really the only way to do get rid of trash beyond just piling it up next to the village...
> (and the village probably has proper waste collection today)
Doubtful, life under communism is crazy, once you go off the main thoroughfare visible to foreigners conditions deteriorate fast and there's zero interest towards improving them. Rural China is on-par with the worst parts of sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to deprivation.
People leave those areas for all the obvious reasons, but if you want a crazy rabbithole check out the "hukou" system. Even in well developed "Tier 1" cities like Shanghai only 1 in 3 residents have a Hukou, or residency permit. They live and work in shanghai as literal second class citizens with no access to even the most basic public services like sending their kids to school. Within the Chinesse system they're only entitled to services provided in their ancestral hometowns.
Elite first-class city Chinese also have some pretty extreme prejudice and disdain for folks from the rural areas. It's bizarre.
Exclusively as a tool to perform a national census they're similar, but the role they play in society couldn't be more different.
From what I can gather the Korean and Japanese systems mostly had an impact on the application of Family Law by institutionalizing Patriarchal family structures with a male head-of-household.
I don't see anything about controlling the free movement of the population by creating a caste system where a majority of the urban residents are excluded from public services and entitlements.
This is suggesting all dumping on land is equal, which is not the case - landfills are perfectly adequate for the timeframes we're interested in. But landfills need a minimum degree of competence and non-corruption to work properly, which unfortunately is hard to come by in developing countries and often even in developed ones.
Throwing something in a river sounds absolutely criminal if you live in an urban westernized country, but in rural places people don't really bother with garbage - they just throw it off the nearest cliff, literally. Which may not dump it directly in a river, but come spring and sure enough, it still gets washed away. Since it doesn't decompose the only way for it to go is down, and this eventually means rivers and seas.
Please don’t comment if you have no idea what you’re saying. You’re in eli5. People are here to learn.
Plenty of third world countries dump their trash into rivers.
Exactly. Dumps aren't contained in a warehouse or anything. They're still still just open to the environment. Wind, rain, and animals can move it around. Also there's a lot of trash that never makes it to a dump or even a garbage can
Modern/western dumps contain their trash pretty well and get buried as they fill. They look like big hills of a set width that grow in length over time until they run out of allotted space and close it. First, they dig them out, then they layer the bottom of the trench with shredded tires, and then they pile up trash and finally, they cover it with the dirt excavated earlier (and some extra, leaving a trench alongside the hill). They're not ideal but they do keep our trash out of the environment for the foreseeable future.
Dumps are generally decently contained.
The issue is that a significant portion of people on earth don't have access to proper waste disposal. Then there's those who do have access but are too selfish to utilise it.
Developing areas should receive support to make environmentally friendly development. The air and water all gets mixed up in the end anyway and you'll have a lot more impact first getting the low hanging fruit abroad.
People who litter are scum of the earth and should fines that increase with each repeat offence and scale with income.
Let's not try and blame it on the third world. It is the corporate world that has made profit off of the plastic based economy while degrading the environment.
Sure but let’s not be completely blind either: The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of new plastic trash into our oceans are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea. [(Source)](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
Now, the plastics in these rivers might partly or even fully represent plastics that ultimately were made by “the corporate world”, but it’s still corporations selling things to meet demand in those countries and then what the residents of those countries choose to do with the plastics that is causing them to be added to the oceans in 2023. I have lived in China, for example, and the amount of plastic film that is involved in a small supermarket shop is extraordinary: fruit will be individually wrapped in plastic foam nets and then plastic wrap, and the pack of four will then be in a tray which is also plastic and secured by yet more plastic film. The amount of stuff that comes individually wrapped to meet local demand for what is considered fresh is really very extreme by western standards.
Of course, much of the older plastic already in the oceans has its roots in poor disposal practices by Western nations, and in some cases going all the way back to the very earliest plastics. Please don’t read this comment as a claim that the aggregate plastic in the ocean comes from the same places the additional plastic comes from today. But it’s also incorrect and, in my view, more than a little paternalistic to argue that developing countries and their societies don’t have to improve their use and disposal of plastics AS WELL as the west (and that globally that transition has to be effected ultimately by the companies that make the stuff we all buy). Everyone has a responsibility.
Plastics definitely not. Plastics in developed countries go pretty much 100% into sealed landfills or incinerators, or recycling plants (much more rare than the other 2)
Name does not check out.
Yea, that was a very short period where doing that was *slightly* profitable. But, you seem to think it's now, then, always... I wonder where you got that misconception?
Actually most lesser developed countries burn their garbage. And when done properly is way healthier for the environment than dumping...
Most countries that "recycle" get horrific ratios of actual recycled products. Too much labour involved not much gets recycl3d properly.
Read your local recycling guides, people are supposed to wash out every item going in to the plastics bin etc. Imagine...
A lot of third world countrys, especially in Southeast Asia, took a lot of plastic trash for "recycling" from Western countrys and got payed for it. But instead of recycling it, corrupt governments and people threw it into rivers and oceans to make a maximum amount of profit.
Which is why I always say "why don't we just throw our own trash in the rivers"? Like, that shit is free. We don't have to pay someone to do this. What a waste of money. Brain dead politicians....
Yep. Your can pacify people by putting a problem on a cart, rolling the cart into a room, and closing the door and saying "now the professionals will take care of it". It could even be a problem without a real, practical solution
EV's have a much bigger ecological footprint than ICE to build and pretty much all materials are lined / bad-for-ecology processes are done in 3rd world.
Over the lifetime of the vehicle lifespan, they don't have a bigger ecological footprint. And the efficiency will only get better, not worse. ICE engines have pretty much reached their limits of efficiency.
As for the mining in the "3rd world", maybe the US and the 1st world needs to step up, rather than the GOP dragging their feet on this.
[https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth2](https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth2)
I don't disagree with any of that. But the only way "we" see the EV as magical green vehicles is because all the ecological damage happens far away. Which is what I responded to in the first place.
PS: it will be pretty impossible to do in 1st world countries what they do now in the 3rd world countries because of ecological restrictions and cost.
There's plenty of ecological damage happening right here in America for mining and fossil fuel drilling. It's been happening for decades-centuries.
EV production can be done more responsibly, it's just cheaper to offshore, and capitalist corporations will always pick the path that results in the least economic cost and most profits.
So let's focus on a mix of ecological responsibility and economic costs, and look at the 50-200 year time frame and beyond, not just the next wall street quarterly profits. The only thing that will make that happen is government responsibility, not the average consumer or trans-national corporations.
Sorry, but this is not accurate at all. Western countries SOLD their plastic recycling to China for a very long time (they stopped taking it in 2018). Why would they pay money to buy it, then dump it in the river? That would just be 100% loss. Plastic sold is recycled for a profit. The plastic in the ocean primarily comes from poorer cities with little to no garbage disposal system, so the people just dump their trash in the river. Here are some sources
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/702501726/where-will-your-plastic-trash-go-now-that-china-doesnt-want-it#:~:text=For%20years%2C%20America%20sold%20millions,7%20million%20tons%20a%20year.
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%2081,third%20of%20the%20global%20total.
>Sorry, but this is not accurate at all. Western countries SOLD their plastic recycling to China for a very long time (they stopped taking it in 2018). Why would they pay money to buy it, then dump it in the river? That would just be 100% loss.
Apologies if I'm being silly but doesn't your quoted article describe exactly this?
>"And what we found confirms some of our worst nightmares: dumping in the local canyon of materials they couldn't recycle, plastic in the farmland incorporated into the soil of the cornfields nearby," \[Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, Calif\] says.
Along with references to the plastic going to other nations without the capacity to recycle or properly dispose of the waste which would also fit the above commenters position.
It's worth noting that China didn't outright stop taking the waste. They stopped taking it unless the contamination rate was below a rather ridiculous .05%, [precisely because of this](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/sep/20/environment.china):
>"I would say that Britain is dumping its rubbish in the name of recycling. It is not responsible recycling that is being done. It is reprocessing, but the methods being used are still mostly rudimentary. There are some good factories, but on the whole it is small scale, done in backstreets with little environmental standards. People are burning plastic, sorting it by hand, the water gets polluted and it goes back into the rivers," \[Martin Baker of Greenpeace China\] said.
The only distinction is that, contrary to the above users comments, China was paying for the waste rather than being paid. So other than the direction of payment the comment was largely accurate in that the west was sending large volumes of waste to nations that were not properly recycling or disposing of it.
The short version is that 2/7 plastic categories are worth recycling while the other 5 are garbage. We exported mixed plastic to china so that the companies could pull out the useful stuff and landfill the garbage where it's not in our backyard.
The Chinese government basically put it's foot down that they'd only accept the import of actual recyclables rather than garbage.
The EU "sold" their recycling to Asian countries as part of trade deals. If the Asian countries wanted access to the EU market they had to buy recycling waste from the EU. Kind of funny that we expected them to dig through our trash looking for raw materials, in order to make more stuff for us in their factories. Since it's always cheaper and easier to make new plastic they mostly just dumped the recycling.
"Now that China doesn't want it." Right. They used to recycle plastic, but now they've mysteriously stopped. Meanwhile, a pile of plastic the size of Texas somehow found itself in the ocean right where all the plastic being sent to China to be recycled passed through.
You are half right.
It comes from Asian countries. Ever walked around and seen all the waterways?
https://images.app.goo.gl/agkp8NsXNGnhNpNF8
But it's not western trash, that actually did get recycled. It's just local people dumping shit on the street and getting washed into waterways.
Hi! I teach Environmental Science. This definitely sounds like what actually happened, but is there any hard soiled evidence, court cases, or some documentation you can provide so I can show my kids? TIA
Plastic recycling is a lie. For decades every piece of plastic we thought we were recycling, was actually being shipped to third world countries and thrown in the ocean. In light of this discovery, it came out that plastic recycling isn't entirely feasible and the majority of plastic products aren't eligible for it.
A lot of fishing equipment is made of plastic and is lost at sea due to storms and waves. That’s 20-30%
Also, several countries, especially in Southeast Asia, pretty much just send garbage into the ocean via their rivers. China, India, Brazil, are big contributors. That’s 70%.
Your soda straw isn’t the problem.
The disappointing reality of being a conservationist in the United States is that on a global scale you really can't do fuck all to solve the issue. For as many molecules of pollutants we prevent from entering the ecosystem through our common sense environmental laws, fifty times as many are introduced to the ecosystem courtesy of China, India, etc.
Banning straws isn't common sense. It's self-flagellation. Every time you sip an iced coffee through that disintegrating cardboard straw, you taste the sacrifice of "doing your part".
Banning straws is not common sense, but so many of our laws are. Go to L.A and ask an older person what the air quality was like before Catalytic Converters became mandatory in the 70s.
Where did you get this data? Last time I checked USA has the biggest pollution per capita along with Saudi Arabia. That is also on top of the fact that most of the industrial pollution of US goods happen in south asian countries.
The five countries that pollute the oceans the most are, in order, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.
The country that expels the most air pollution in terms of CO2 is China at 10 million tons. In second place is the USA at 5.4 million tons.
Just because others are bigger polluters, doesn't mean that "we" can't make an effort to reduce our own waste 🤷♂️
One less soda straw in nature is one less soda straw in nature.
Of course we can't make a difference. Even if everyone reading this thread stopped making all trash for a year, it wouldn't even put a dent in what the big corps output in a day.
Yeah, influencing corporations and other countries is up to politicians.
But that doesn't take away that people producing less waste on a personal level is still a good thing.
I mean every bit helps. I can be fully aware that corporations produce the lion's share of waste and still care about recycling. I'm not gonna start chucking plastic in rivers just because "everyone else is doing it", that's like...reverse propaganda.
But don't you see that this is a straw man position? Nobody nowadays thinks that's okay.
There's a big leap from "gonna start chucking plastic in rivers" to "no supermarket can give you a plastic bag", and "here at 7-eleven, we only have paper straws that disintegrate after your first 3 sips"
Most of these consumer-level make impressionable young people feel good, like they are "making a difference", but all they accomplish is adding hassles to daily life.
It’s the same approach with water conservation. If everyone has a lawn you couldn’t tell the difference between water use if nobody had a lawn. Urban/suburban water use is minuscule compared to agriculture use and often they have no incentive to conserve.
Yes, but once you've moved it that place is empty, and the corporation fills it with a new straw.
If we stop taking them from the shop and putting them in the bin, they stop making new ones to put in the shop.
It all adds up, and individual pressures are more important than people realise in a lot of ways, but omw thing we don't often see talked about is the huge amount of behind the scenes waste. Every box on a supermarket pallet is wrapped in plastic, then the pallet itself is wrapped in plastic again, and all of that is thrown out before the consumer even looks at the product.
And of course we've seen that even if the supermarket claims to recycle it, it's just being sent to the Philippines and dumped into a river.
If everyone stopped making all trash for a year, voted for politicians that created policies preventing trade with countries that produce global waste, and stopped supporting local corporations that are bad for the environment, then we can absolutely make a difference.
The absolute most effective way to *not* solve a problem is to stop believing in your own agency in the first place.
>Your soda straw isn’t the problem.
It is if the landfill you send it to decides to pay a shady company overseas to "recycle" it.
And by "recycle" I mean toss it straight into the Pacific.
Single use plastics account for less than 1% of ocean plastics (and your own is even less likely to contribute if your country has well managed landfills). Your straw is not the problem.
Yeah, at most, but the point was that if our focus is minimizing single use plastics, then we aren't really addressing the issue. For the most effective immediate changes, we should be addressing packaging and the fishing industry. These two sectors are where the majority of ocean plastics come from.
It is a tiny part of the problem, but when curbing single use plastics was en vogue a few years ago, consumers were given the impression that their choice of straw material would be the deciding factor in the survival of the world's ocean fauna.
I agree one straw is not significant but 1% of all ocean plastic is still a shit ton. And it’s future 1 % that will not add to the existing problem. So everyone needs to feel concerned. It’s not like you need to buy a 70k ev, it’s small and mostly free actions.
As a starter you can stop buying anything in plastic as much as possible:
Cartons of milk instead of plastic jugs
Water in larger bottles, never small bottled water less than a gallon
Glass instead of plastic Tupperware
Don't shop/eat at places that take away in plastic
Use reusable wooden utensils instead of plastic
In terms of straws, ask yourself what needs a straw and do I really need to be drinking it?
In the end, the government needs to start regulating the use of plastics if we're to make a difference (sorry conservatives, libertarians), people cannot self govern.
Edit: to add what others mentioned, get a filtration system at home and refill your bottles. I personally have hydroviv and refill my glass bottle that I use when I cycle. I cannot recommend reverse osmosis because they are not really effective for all typical contaminants.
Just on the water-bottle point, you can invest in a reverse-osmosis system (pretty cheap nowadays) and just keep refilling whatever water bottles you have.
I don’t see how reuse would make a difference. Drinking water out of plastic at all would be the same; maybe even worse if it’s always new bottles that have their full load of plasticisers. But anyways I’m always using it for cold water in the fridge, so that should reduce any leaching a good deal.
And glass has its own issues, mainly breakage if you drop it, with corresponding tiny glass shards getting everywhere. And that would definitely be a frequent occurrence in my house. 🤣
Reduce, reuse, recycle. It's in that order for a reason. Reduction is best. Reusing the plastic means that more plastic doesn't need to be made for the subsequent uses, and no additional energy is used to recycle it. Recycling is still a lot better than throwing it away, but it can be resource intensive to do.
Reduce using plastic as you can. Reuse plastic that you get, and finally recycle what can be done.
Just get a Hydroflask or one of the knock offs. It keeps the water colder than plastic bottles and they last forever.
I have an undersink inline filter and fill large jugs to keep in the fridge. I then fill my hydroflasks and take that to work instead of buying bottled water. I have amazing tap water where I live so I get some people might need a RO or something better than just a basic filter. Besides the plastic waste buying bottled water is a massive waste of money. You also don't need to carry around water when you are just going to the grocery store or something, people use bottled water as a pacifier.
Your soda straw is *equally* as much of a problem as a soda straw’s worth of plastic from China, India, Brazil, or the other countries that push their garbage straight into the ocean.
The problem is believing that those 4 billion tons are only Philippines’ or south east Asia’s problem, when they most likely have American and European plastic too.
Rich countries consume the most plastic but somehow conveniently turn around and point fingers at others to blame. At the end of the day, we share the same ocean and we’re probably gonna suffer the same consequences of our mismanagement and overconsumption.
Rich countries generally have well managed waste management systems. Modern landfills aren’t just holes in the ground that they fill up. Aside from straight up litter, if you throw something in a trash can in a Western, developed country, it will make it into a landfill and never leave. That’s not true everywhere, where trash is dumped haphazardly throughout the environment.
Hardly any regulations or poor infrastructure to deal with trash in majority of countries especially Southeast Asia. Trash isn’t secured and gets taken out to the ocean via floods, tides, natural disasters, etc. Also happens a lot in some South America countries as well. People like to think just North America and Europe can fix the issue by themselves, but don’t realize that’s just a small fraction of global population.
Fishing industry uses a lot of plastic and accidents happen where they lose it in the water and other times they don’t care and would rather just dump the broken stuff.
Another thing is, high plastic consuming rich countries sell plastic trash to countries without the infrastructure nor intention to recycle all of it, so it’s just dumped in rivers, and sometimes straight into the ocean.
Everyone knows where it really ends but they don’t care enough to interrupt the cycle because for the first side, it is cheaper to sell it and send it than to manage it locally, also because once it’s out, it’s no longer “their problem”. And for the other side, they’d rather just get the money.
This is the highest up comment that is the correct answer. Most of the top comments blame it on pollution by poor countries when the vast majority of the plastic pollutants are fishing nets.
Step 1: Tell Americans to separate out their plastic into "recycling bins", collect the plastic, and send it to the local transfer station.
Step 2: Discover that there is no market for recycled plastic with all of the impurities present in it, and that there probably wouldn't be one even if "pure" plastic could be sorted out from the collected material.
Step 3: Load all of this plastic onto a ship headed to a developing country, so that you can pay them to "recycle" it.
Step 4: The plastic is unloaded and then sits on a big empty lot in a pile, not being recycled.
Step 5: The plastic is then bulldozed into the ocean at ebb tide, taking it out to sea.
The crying tragedy here is that this all could have been avoided, save for some media hysterics from a more naive time. From 1987, the [Mobro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000) was a sea-going barge loaded with trash from New York (whose dumps were full), headed toward a pilot program in North Carolina to convert 3,168 tons of trash into methane, something which is actually useful.
A rumor that the barge's payload included some medical waste (medical gowns, syringes & diapers) caused a panic, and the State of North Carolina refused to accept the waste, and thus the barge was forced to find another harbor. The barge spent the subsequent four months at sea as the owner of the garbage tried to get it docked to unload as nimby political officials repeatedly denied it access to a port, all the way down to Mexico and Belize.
Ultimately, the barge was sent to New Jersey and the cargo was incinerated, and the ashes were buried. This was the moment when the United States suddenly got very, very excited about waste recycling, and its been a giant boondoggle ever since. When even **[Greenpeace](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/deception-by-the-numbers/)** is telling you that recycling is a delusional fantasy, it's time to put an end to these programs.
Aside from plastic straight up being dumped into it. Plastic gets thrown on ground. Wind movies plastic from place to place. Plastic happens to land in water. Wind does not take plastic out of water back on land.
I remember seeing somewhere that the vast majority of microplastics in the ocean come from degrading fishing nets. The fishing industry is pretty bad for the ocean in a lot of ways.
A lesser reason for it is because plastic is so light. Even if it’s disposed of properly, some of it will blow out of landfills and other disposal areas. In general, the lighter plastic objects are harder to deal with; for example, bottles are pretty easy to process, but straws are virtually impossible.
By far, the worst is micro plastics from car tires. Cars drive down roads and slowly wear microscopic bits of tire away. Then it rains and all those bits flow down a storm drain, to a river, and eventually, out to sea. Good luck earth.
Most comments talk about big pieces of plastic, but microplastic are also an issue. Maybe even a bigger one. It's coming from everywhere. For example car tires are a huge source of microplastics. Those tiny flakes get washed away with the rain, into the ground and oceans.
The number I've found from IUNC guesses that around 14 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans.
https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/marine-plastic-pollution
UNESCO says 8-10 million tons of plastic per year.
https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/plastic-pollution-ocean/
This Ocean Cleanup/ Mark Rober video explains it pretty well. It also shows where most of the plastic waste that goes into the ocean comes from.
https://youtu.be/pXDx6DjNLDU
It’s sorta like asking how so much water ends up in the ocean. Lots of stuff just works it’s way downhill. Silt, sand, rocks, water, plastic, it all goes downhill and ends up in the oceans. It’s just all of those things are benign and plastic isn’t.
most trash is dumped in the water, its a long tradition these last 400 years by the people in charge. especially if they created an extremely deadly and toxic substance then its def going into the fresh water supply to dispose of.
research has been done on this.
people can guess but most will be shocked to learn that the number 1 source is from laundering your synthetic clothes. I would be surprised if any of the higher voted comments will mention this but we'll see.
everytime you wash your t-shirt or yoga pants, you are putting microplastics into the environment.
number 2 source is tyres wearing down on roads.
Lots of clothing is made from plastic and every time you wash it, it sheds micro plastics into the waste water. This eventually flows to the oceans. Same with micro plastic beads in beauty/grooming products.
Chinese fishing nets, look it up, the majority of plastic in the pacific is from discarded or ripped Chinese fishing nets that are made using very cheap plastics and harmful chemicals. It isnt the straws and coke holder plastic that you see on the news, those are just the things they use to make you feel bad, the real issue is China and it will continue to be China for the foreseeable future
Countries need to take responsibility for their trash and not ship it to other countries. Third world countries get money for "recycling" when in reality they just throw it in the ocean.
People put it there or it gets blows in from dumps or off barges. Ships dump it in there and plastics end up in waterways and sewers that end up in the ocean.
Some countries or companies or individuals don't give a shit and dump in the ocean.
Plastic gets on the ground. Water washes plastic into drains. Drains eventually get to rivers. Rivers get to oceans. Oceans don’t drain anywhere.
Also, some plastic directly goes from humans to oceans. Fishing equipment has plastic. All the plastic a boat has when it goes out isn’t there when it comes back.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It does not come from the Western industrialized countries. The vast majority of it comes from Asia. They use their big rivers to take everything away they don't want. I have spent a bit of time in China for work, and their rivers are unbelievable, obviously just for the disposal of raw sewage, industrial waste, and trash. And it all eventually flows out to sea. In SE Asia as well. One time was with a group of people in a car. They just threw trash out the window. I convinced them that we needed a trash bag. So they used that. And when we got to the destination, they threw the bag out the window, said the rains would wash it away. Hopefully the next generation will be better.
Edit: There is a bit of hope, in the past five years I have seen a change in attitude there about trash disposal.
It actually does come from Western industrialized countries because we were paying them to "recycle" the things we didn't want to deal with ourselves, not to mention how much of the plastic they throw out is from Western corporations. Waste plastic is a global issue and we can't absolve ourselves of responsibility.
We put it in our recycling. We don't recycle it. We put it on ships to send to poor counties. They don't recycle it. It ends up in rivers. Or in the ocean during transport.
Also, as a matter of mass, a huge amount of ocean plastic is made up of fishing nets. As much as 46%
https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/ghost-fishing-gear#:~:text=Fishing%20gear%20accounts%20for%20roughly,a%20name%3A%20ghost%20fishing%20gear.
Recycling. They “sell” garbage to another country to recycle. If it was profitable to recycle plastic, there would be a shop on every corner to buy your plastic. Instead, it is sold by your country to another to just bury it or dump it. The worst part, everyone fucking knows this in government.
People in poor countries do not have the infrastructure to deal with waste as efficiently as wealthy ones. So, they throw their waste on the ground, or take it to places where it is piled up. After that, nature takes over and loose material is blown away until it lands in rivers and streams which, eventually, end up in lakes and oceans.
People like to point out that the MOST polluted areas of our oceans are directly related to rivers in Asia and Africa, but that is simply because Europeans and North Americans have developed better ways of hiding our trash.
The Americans buy a lot of plastic. The Americans have a lot of plastic waste. The Americans are not able to recycle their plastic waste. The Chinese tell the Americans that they are able to recycle plastic. The Americans sell their plastic to the Chinese. The Chinese take the plastic into international waters and dump it. The Americans see that there is a growing pile of plastic waste in the ocean, and tell everyone to recycle their plastic. The Chinese buy and dump more plastic, and the plastic island grows.
5 Asian Countries Dump More Plastic Into Oceans Than Anyone Else Combined.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asian-countries-dump-more-plastic-than-anyone-else-combined-how-you-can-help/?sh=552490f51234
There is a huge amount of 3rd world countries that pretty much just have streams of trash constantly flowing into the ocean.
For example, Dominican republic is all pretty resorts on one side of the island and trash ville on the other side.
Rich countries ship their plastic garbage to lesser developed countries and they dump a lot of it in rivers or landfills from where it eventually also ends up in rivers, which end up in oceans.
Plus developing countries nowadays produce a lot of plastic garbage by themselves, too. China has already reached levels of developed countries like Germany... PER CAPITA.
The simplest way to put it, water is sticky due to hydrogen bonds. When plastic hits it, it doesn’t leave unless it’s deliberately removed. There’s a lot more to it obviously, but I think a 5yo could quickly see how a plastic shopping bag can blow all over the place on land in the wind, once it hits a body of water, it’s instantly stuck in place.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say this. Whenever you drop something on the ground, that doesn't degrade in nature, it will end up in the ocean at some point. Wind and rain carries it until it ends up in a river somewhere, and rivers usually at some point end in the ocean
Developed countries export their plastic waste to underdeveloped countries and pay them to take said waste. Then tell the world how green they are / how much they recycle.
Underdeveloped countries give a flying fuck where the waste ends up and either dump it in a river, dump it on land (that gets washed away into rivers and/or ocean) or dump it directly into the ocean.
Entropy.
Ya know the phrase “shit rolls down hill?” It’s applicable to more than corporate work life. Everything is making its way towards the lowest point on earth. The ocean is essentially that point and water is the lube. There are some exceptions, but it’s generally true. Water finds the lowest points it can, stuff rolls to a low point and will likely find water, the water will move the stuff to bigger water, which will find its way to the ocean.
Entropy at work.
I'm going to riah getting banned for this. But China and India.
A lot of the smaller cities (the cities with no tourists) have zero to little infrastructure for cleaning up trash on the ground.
You see the videos all of the time of a clogged river or canal filled with plastic bottles and bags.
I also worked in the plastics industry for over two decades. One of my jobs was moving manufacturing plants to China. One of the major reasons was not the labor. It was because China doesn't have an EPA. There was one type of plastic that the was so dirty about 1/4 of that plants budget was handled the waste.
They sent it to China for this reason. After that the waste was either pushed into a ditch and burned. Or loaded in a cargo boat and dumped in the ocean.
The US did this as well, so all of us are to blame for this. But someuch more than others.
This is just stupid shit, you think that a small towns in China and India are generating that amount of waste? And that China is to blame because the US outsources polluting the planet?
A small town in china still has a million people living there. And yes they pollute way more than the US.
All that garbage ( a few decades worth) that left New York destined for China didn't make it. It was dumped in the ocean.
Depends on the country. In countries like Indonesia and Philippines, the vast majority of plastic pollution is from people tossing bottles on the ground
For a lot of less developed countries and regions, the only way they've ever gotten rid of their trash was by dumping it in the nearby river. Plastics just last way longer than anything else we have produced as a species up till now.
Don't forget fishermans that just throw overboard their damaged nets. A big chunk of the plastic they find is fishing nets.
By volume (weight?), it's like half the total I reckon
The numbers I see vary from 1/3 to 3/4, so half is probably right
I would love to see your source of this information. Everything I have ever seen say that the plastics come from 10 rivers in the asian and african continent. Fisherman waste is a drop in the bucket. It should still be addressed, but its not even clowe to being a "big chunk"
[UNEP estimates that 10% of all waste plastic in the ocean are from discarded fishing nets.](https://www.nature.com/articles/536263a) So only 1/10th, but I would say that's still a significant proportion.
We have perfectly good landfills. And plenty of open land to put new ones in.
I have always struggled with the fact that the best solution we have for all our trash is to just bury it in the ground. I mean, it gets the job done, and I don't have any better solutions, but it just seems really dumb for humans to do considering how smart we like to think we are.
Finding ways to recycle everything is probably the “best” solution. The problem is it’s expensive and often times costs more than making the material from scratch, and people care more about money than the environment. There *is* research being done into better ways to destroy plastic, like developing bacteria that eats it. If we could find some magical way to destroy plastic like that without causing major pollution, it would be a game changer. Edit: I am just responding to a question asking about dealing with trash that already exists. I don’t need a lecture about how terrible plastic is for the environment and how we need to stop using it.
It's not only a question of economic viability, but also of energy. If recycling something requires a great deal of electricity then recycling it can be worse for the environment than just making it from scratch.
Not sure “worse” is the right term. It’s differently bad. Choosing between two evils.
Plastic recycling is mostly a myth created by plastic companies to make us feel less bad about the insane amount of plastic waste we create. Metal and glass are infinitely recycleable and most companies have moved away from those materials bc of cost. Instead of pretending to recycle we should be reducing the amount of plastic we use, especially single use but thats not happening. Most cities cannot recycle, sort, or decontaminate all plastic types so it just ends up in landfills. But people feel good bc they throw it in a blue bin while endlessly consuming more and more.
This. The Petro chemical industry did a PR blitz to promote recycling.
I think I’ve heard even glass isn’t that recyclable. Like, physically it is, but at the moment it’s still more economical to make new glass in most cases than it is to use recycled glass. No source on this, I admit, just something I’ve heard
Glassworks in Denmark have taken well sorted glass for recycling for free, or possibly even paid for it. As soon as there is more than a minuscule fraction of plastic or car window glass or other exciting stuff in the recycled glass, it becomes uneconomical to recycle. Automated sorting is not yet good enough for what the glassworks require, so recycling relies on the consumers being diligent.
In the us the vast majority of all recycling is contaminated. We don't presort, so everything is fucked.
Glass is easily and cheaply recyclable. The biggest cost to most recycling is sorting and decontamination. If you have a bin of pure glass its easy. If you need to sort every box, clean it, process it etc it becomes expensive. When its too expensive people dont buy recycled glass, they make it new. Presorting is the biggest way to cut cost but it requires a separate bin for glass, paper, plastic, metal.
Our county where I live have to bins divided in to four bins under the lid. First one is combustables, bio-material, non-colored glass and metal. Second one is paper, plastic, colored glass and magazines/newspapers.
>If we could find some magical way to destroy plastic like that without causing major pollution The 'cleanest' way to get rid of plastic is to burn it, at high temperatures, with good air filters et al. Downside, obviously, is that burning plastic usually releases byproducts that are extremely toxic, but if you can reduce it down to *mostly* CO2 and a few elements, that's very much closed cycle w/r the environment. Ignoring climate change, obviously, though the issue there is quite simply that we *continue to pull significant amounts of sequestered hydrocarbons out of the ground*, period. And the best way to get rid of waste, obviously, is to simply generate less of it (and instead reuse things as much as possible), instead. Plastic-eating bacteria is a pipedream. And a fairly literal pandora's box, since once you've created plastic-eating bacteria, that *will* *get released into the environment*, *and is now in the environment,* *forever*. So say goodbye to PVC pipes, plastic food safety and biomedical packaging, *anything* that currently uses plastics (as that will *eventually* decompose), et al. That's maybe not the total end of the world given that we could switch back to metals, ceramics, glass, and silicone stuff instead (with probably much less harm to the environment), but still – very hard to understate just how damaging that would be if you made hydrocarbon-based materials something that bacteria can now happily eat. Good (and maybe the only real solution) for getting rid of microplastic pollution though.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about how a “plastic-eating” bacteria would work and none of them are accurate based on the work that’s already been done.
Problem is that releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is an existential crisis to the planet's biosphere. We need to stop releasing CO2 immediately. Burying the plastic is returning the carbon back underground from where it came from. Landfills are the most environmentally friendly way to handle plastic waste at the moment, with our current technology.
Plastic waste is an excellent fuel though. It could replace virgin gas or oil for use in central heating facilities or other energy producing boilers. Replacing gas and oil derived energy with burning plastic would result in a net decrease in CO2 and solve the problem of plastic waste. It strikes me as a better solution until we can replace fire-based energy production altogether.
Send it to space ?
SpaceX launched 80% of the total mass to orbit in Q1 2023 [source](https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/spacex-launched-over-80-of-all-orbital-payload-mass-in-q1-2023.html). If we extrapolate out to a full year, that will work out to about 1000 metric tons to orbit. The USA alone sends ~140 million tons to landfills annually, so among many other issues, we'd need to be launching rockets at a rate ~140,000 times as much, or about 40,000 rockets per day just to handle the USA's trash problem alone.
The best way is to REDUCE waste. Less waste consumed, less waste going out. Less waste polluting the Earth.
Eliminate half the population at random. Got it. _SNAP!_
> Finding ways to recycle everything is probably the “best” solution. No, it's the least bad. It was very very deliberate that the catchphrase the environmental movement was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". That's an ordered list! The best thing is to not make a thing that will become trash in the first place. If you do make a thing, make a thing you can reuse (like cloth grocery bags instead of paper or plastic). If you do have to throw out the thing, try to recycle some of it. But the absolute best thing you can always do is produce less waste in the first place.
We should be using materials like glass and metal which can be recycled almost infinitely. Single use plastics are so bad.
Just wait until that bacteria gets super aggressive and starts eating all the plastic in the world!
[https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy-in-depth.php](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/biomass/waste-to-energy-in-depth.php) Dont worry the nerds know what to do with your trash.
If it's biodegradable you might as well let it biodegrade.
This. Sure, it produces a lot of GHGs, but that is already a problem we are working on fixing as well. While its technically kicking the can down the road, at least its slightly centralizing our mess.
Except for plastic and glass (and specific waste like heavy metals and batteries), the natural decaying process is perfectly fine. Wood, paper, food and metal will all deteriorate just fine. Though whether you want metals in future soil is another thing. Most of the problem is plastic and we use it for literally everything except what it would be most useful for. If we built house frames out of the stuff, where it lasting hundreds of years was a plus we'd be all set. Plus, fossil fuels will run out eventually, and thats where we get most polymers. The current theory is that when that happens we will "mine" old landfills for polymers and we will switch back to wood and metal for all but more essential uses for plastic which we should be doing now but hey.
I like how you're just using "metal" as some blanket term. There are many different metals and many of them are toxic. Many of them also require a great deal of energy to mine and refine, which is why recycling metals is important.
Metal yes. I specified out heavy metals and battery materials. Aluminum and steel are the most common and its more expensive than mining and refining weirdly enough. I wish it wasn cheaper to recycle them. Hell aluminum is super easy to recycle but apparently we get so muching mining other thongs that its still cheaper to just refine it after getting the other things we wanted out of the mine. Sad but true. We dont even recycle gold. 10% of all gold ever mined is sitting in landfills.
I'm not sure when the last time I read up on it was, but I'm pretty sure recycling aluminum is always cheaper and easier than refining new metal from ore. Both happen, a lot, but the refining process for Al is very, very energy intensive. For steel, it's complicated. Most of the time steel is made they use a mixture of scrap (i.e. recycled) and ore-based material. That process is, again, easier and often cheaper, but with the significant caveat that there are a huge number of useful steel alloys and not all of them can be made this way.
There's a steel mill near me that recycles scrap, and isn't bankrupt. Aluminum is pretty much solidified electricity. It takes immensely less energy to pick out and melt aluminum than it does to electrolyze it. I have a friend-of-a-friend whose job is determining the gold content of electronic scrap so buyer and seller can negotiate a fair price. There was a short period after the IBM 360 was retired that it was cheaper to put a computer in your basement than the equivalent electric furnace. Then somebody realized there was gold in them there boxes, and they all went away. "We don't even recycle gold" is at best over simplistic.
I like how I say its usually cheaper to just produce newer stuff and you took that to mean that any recycling will make you bankrupt. Never change reddit
What would happen if we did away with Garbage services all together. The only options would be recycling or personal sequestration. You'd watch your plastic consumption if you couldn't get rid of the bottles.
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You're a human. What's your better solution?
I literally said I don't have a better solution. It just feels dumb to me regardless.
Problem is the open land for landfills tends not to be where the people are. So there needs to be suitable infrastructure to transport the rubbish.
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No, but if you eliminate and monitor runoff, it's a great long term solution with almost no downside other than the loss of a very small amount of low value land.
Maybe in North America, but there are plenty of island nations where land is at a premium. The cost of building a landfill as opposed to dumping in a river makes it much more economical in the short term. On top of that, properly setting up a landfill is not cheap. Generally the cheapest, easiest way to dispose of garbage is throwing it in the river. That does not mean it's the best option, just that it's easiest and cheapest. And getting people to not do things the easy, cheap way can be difficult.
We *rich* countries have perfectly good landfills, and the spare land to create them. And the heavy machinery to operate them.
Be "we" do you mean just the area you live or do you mean all of Earth? Because there are many places where they don't have perfectly good landfills neither do they have the infrastructure to get it their.
I was in Vietnam a few years ago 2017. One guide told us that plastic waste has become a bigger and bigger issue. As for take away food, it used to be served in a banana leaf and then people throw the leaf when they done. Now everything is packed in plastic, but the old people still just throw it away like they are used to. Now i hope I can get banana leaf bags to carry home my groceries in Norway.
They aren't dumping it in rivers. They're mostly dumping it on land but it gets washed away into rivers.
Lots of places it does get literally dumped in rivers (I've seen it). Obviously not sure what percentage we're talking about, but enough to see it multiple times in different countries
No a lot of third world countries do not have trash collection, especially in rural areas. They burn it or it goes in streams, rivers or off cliffs and canyons where it eventually gets into the watershed. This is probably always what has been done but plastics don’t degrade on any reasonable timescale. I’ve spent time in rural central and South America, and hard to believe, but streams and rivers are widely used to dispose of residential waste.
What I mean is that most people don't gather all their plastic, walk with it to the river and throw it in. They just throw it on the street and the rain washes it away. The effect is the same but the phrasing emphasises that the issue is the lack of trash collection and not evil brown people throwing things in the river for fun.
Except that a lot of third world countries do (or at least did, as many are getting better about it) just throw their trash in the river? Idk where you are looking at, while litter being washed away is relevant without any levels of industrialization throwing trash into the river is really the only way to do get rid of trash beyond just piling it up next to the village...
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> (and the village probably has proper waste collection today) Doubtful, life under communism is crazy, once you go off the main thoroughfare visible to foreigners conditions deteriorate fast and there's zero interest towards improving them. Rural China is on-par with the worst parts of sub-Saharan Africa when it comes to deprivation. People leave those areas for all the obvious reasons, but if you want a crazy rabbithole check out the "hukou" system. Even in well developed "Tier 1" cities like Shanghai only 1 in 3 residents have a Hukou, or residency permit. They live and work in shanghai as literal second class citizens with no access to even the most basic public services like sending their kids to school. Within the Chinesse system they're only entitled to services provided in their ancestral hometowns. Elite first-class city Chinese also have some pretty extreme prejudice and disdain for folks from the rural areas. It's bizarre.
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Exclusively as a tool to perform a national census they're similar, but the role they play in society couldn't be more different. From what I can gather the Korean and Japanese systems mostly had an impact on the application of Family Law by institutionalizing Patriarchal family structures with a male head-of-household. I don't see anything about controlling the free movement of the population by creating a caste system where a majority of the urban residents are excluded from public services and entitlements.
A lot of trash is literally dumped into rivers.
This is suggesting all dumping on land is equal, which is not the case - landfills are perfectly adequate for the timeframes we're interested in. But landfills need a minimum degree of competence and non-corruption to work properly, which unfortunately is hard to come by in developing countries and often even in developed ones. Throwing something in a river sounds absolutely criminal if you live in an urban westernized country, but in rural places people don't really bother with garbage - they just throw it off the nearest cliff, literally. Which may not dump it directly in a river, but come spring and sure enough, it still gets washed away. Since it doesn't decompose the only way for it to go is down, and this eventually means rivers and seas.
I've seen videos where dump trucks were literally backing up to a river and dumping entire loads into it. Horrifying!
Please don’t comment if you have no idea what you’re saying. You’re in eli5. People are here to learn. Plenty of third world countries dump their trash into rivers.
Exactly. Dumps aren't contained in a warehouse or anything. They're still still just open to the environment. Wind, rain, and animals can move it around. Also there's a lot of trash that never makes it to a dump or even a garbage can
Modern/western dumps contain their trash pretty well and get buried as they fill. They look like big hills of a set width that grow in length over time until they run out of allotted space and close it. First, they dig them out, then they layer the bottom of the trench with shredded tires, and then they pile up trash and finally, they cover it with the dirt excavated earlier (and some extra, leaving a trench alongside the hill). They're not ideal but they do keep our trash out of the environment for the foreseeable future.
Not just shredded tires and durt. There are multiple layers of farious materials underneath and above the waste, each with a purpose.
Dumps are generally decently contained. The issue is that a significant portion of people on earth don't have access to proper waste disposal. Then there's those who do have access but are too selfish to utilise it. Developing areas should receive support to make environmentally friendly development. The air and water all gets mixed up in the end anyway and you'll have a lot more impact first getting the low hanging fruit abroad. People who litter are scum of the earth and should fines that increase with each repeat offence and scale with income.
Let's not try and blame it on the third world. It is the corporate world that has made profit off of the plastic based economy while degrading the environment.
Sure but let’s not be completely blind either: The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of new plastic trash into our oceans are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa. The Yangtze alone dumps up to an estimated 1.5 million metric tons of plastic waste into the Yellow Sea. [(Source)](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/) Now, the plastics in these rivers might partly or even fully represent plastics that ultimately were made by “the corporate world”, but it’s still corporations selling things to meet demand in those countries and then what the residents of those countries choose to do with the plastics that is causing them to be added to the oceans in 2023. I have lived in China, for example, and the amount of plastic film that is involved in a small supermarket shop is extraordinary: fruit will be individually wrapped in plastic foam nets and then plastic wrap, and the pack of four will then be in a tray which is also plastic and secured by yet more plastic film. The amount of stuff that comes individually wrapped to meet local demand for what is considered fresh is really very extreme by western standards. Of course, much of the older plastic already in the oceans has its roots in poor disposal practices by Western nations, and in some cases going all the way back to the very earliest plastics. Please don’t read this comment as a claim that the aggregate plastic in the ocean comes from the same places the additional plastic comes from today. But it’s also incorrect and, in my view, more than a little paternalistic to argue that developing countries and their societies don’t have to improve their use and disposal of plastics AS WELL as the west (and that globally that transition has to be effected ultimately by the companies that make the stuff we all buy). Everyone has a responsibility.
I'm sorry, you think that developed countries aren't the source of the majority of plastics and other pollutants in water? Ok...
Plastics definitely not. Plastics in developed countries go pretty much 100% into sealed landfills or incinerators, or recycling plants (much more rare than the other 2)
They also ship it to SE asia where it ends up in the ocean.
We used to back when they paid us but it got too expensive after they stopped paying. Cheaper to just bury it locally
Name does not check out. Yea, that was a very short period where doing that was *slightly* profitable. But, you seem to think it's now, then, always... I wonder where you got that misconception?
Actually most lesser developed countries burn their garbage. And when done properly is way healthier for the environment than dumping... Most countries that "recycle" get horrific ratios of actual recycled products. Too much labour involved not much gets recycl3d properly. Read your local recycling guides, people are supposed to wash out every item going in to the plastics bin etc. Imagine...
A lot of third world countrys, especially in Southeast Asia, took a lot of plastic trash for "recycling" from Western countrys and got payed for it. But instead of recycling it, corrupt governments and people threw it into rivers and oceans to make a maximum amount of profit.
The western countries 100% know this is happening too.
Which is why I always say "why don't we just throw our own trash in the rivers"? Like, that shit is free. We don't have to pay someone to do this. What a waste of money. Brain dead politicians....
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Yep. Your can pacify people by putting a problem on a cart, rolling the cart into a room, and closing the door and saying "now the professionals will take care of it". It could even be a problem without a real, practical solution
The plastic is *outside the environment*
Top. Men.
Well put
Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of ~~science~~ *nuclear waste management*
Yes well that's what the whole green EVs is based on.
What do you mean?
EV's have a much bigger ecological footprint than ICE to build and pretty much all materials are lined / bad-for-ecology processes are done in 3rd world.
Over the lifetime of the vehicle lifespan, they don't have a bigger ecological footprint. And the efficiency will only get better, not worse. ICE engines have pretty much reached their limits of efficiency. As for the mining in the "3rd world", maybe the US and the 1st world needs to step up, rather than the GOP dragging their feet on this. [https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth2](https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths#Myth2)
I don't disagree with any of that. But the only way "we" see the EV as magical green vehicles is because all the ecological damage happens far away. Which is what I responded to in the first place. PS: it will be pretty impossible to do in 1st world countries what they do now in the 3rd world countries because of ecological restrictions and cost.
There's plenty of ecological damage happening right here in America for mining and fossil fuel drilling. It's been happening for decades-centuries. EV production can be done more responsibly, it's just cheaper to offshore, and capitalist corporations will always pick the path that results in the least economic cost and most profits. So let's focus on a mix of ecological responsibility and economic costs, and look at the 50-200 year time frame and beyond, not just the next wall street quarterly profits. The only thing that will make that happen is government responsibility, not the average consumer or trans-national corporations.
NIMBY
... because first world countries don't want to sh*t where they eat. Same concept. They would rather pollute poor nations' water bodies.
Why not just put it in landfills?
Money and greenwashing.
Yrs but western politicians don't want that trash around, they don't really care what happens to it as long as its not in their country
Sorry, but this is not accurate at all. Western countries SOLD their plastic recycling to China for a very long time (they stopped taking it in 2018). Why would they pay money to buy it, then dump it in the river? That would just be 100% loss. Plastic sold is recycled for a profit. The plastic in the ocean primarily comes from poorer cities with little to no garbage disposal system, so the people just dump their trash in the river. Here are some sources https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/702501726/where-will-your-plastic-trash-go-now-that-china-doesnt-want-it#:~:text=For%20years%2C%20America%20sold%20millions,7%20million%20tons%20a%20year. https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#:~:text=It%20is%20estimated%20that%2081,third%20of%20the%20global%20total.
>Sorry, but this is not accurate at all. Western countries SOLD their plastic recycling to China for a very long time (they stopped taking it in 2018). Why would they pay money to buy it, then dump it in the river? That would just be 100% loss. Apologies if I'm being silly but doesn't your quoted article describe exactly this? >"And what we found confirms some of our worst nightmares: dumping in the local canyon of materials they couldn't recycle, plastic in the farmland incorporated into the soil of the cornfields nearby," \[Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, Calif\] says. Along with references to the plastic going to other nations without the capacity to recycle or properly dispose of the waste which would also fit the above commenters position. It's worth noting that China didn't outright stop taking the waste. They stopped taking it unless the contamination rate was below a rather ridiculous .05%, [precisely because of this](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/sep/20/environment.china): >"I would say that Britain is dumping its rubbish in the name of recycling. It is not responsible recycling that is being done. It is reprocessing, but the methods being used are still mostly rudimentary. There are some good factories, but on the whole it is small scale, done in backstreets with little environmental standards. People are burning plastic, sorting it by hand, the water gets polluted and it goes back into the rivers," \[Martin Baker of Greenpeace China\] said. The only distinction is that, contrary to the above users comments, China was paying for the waste rather than being paid. So other than the direction of payment the comment was largely accurate in that the west was sending large volumes of waste to nations that were not properly recycling or disposing of it.
The short version is that 2/7 plastic categories are worth recycling while the other 5 are garbage. We exported mixed plastic to china so that the companies could pull out the useful stuff and landfill the garbage where it's not in our backyard. The Chinese government basically put it's foot down that they'd only accept the import of actual recyclables rather than garbage.
The EU "sold" their recycling to Asian countries as part of trade deals. If the Asian countries wanted access to the EU market they had to buy recycling waste from the EU. Kind of funny that we expected them to dig through our trash looking for raw materials, in order to make more stuff for us in their factories. Since it's always cheaper and easier to make new plastic they mostly just dumped the recycling.
Read it again
"Now that China doesn't want it." Right. They used to recycle plastic, but now they've mysteriously stopped. Meanwhile, a pile of plastic the size of Texas somehow found itself in the ocean right where all the plastic being sent to China to be recycled passed through.
So you're insinuating they just threw the trash overboard? On the shipping lane? You ever heard of ocean currents?
You are half right. It comes from Asian countries. Ever walked around and seen all the waterways? https://images.app.goo.gl/agkp8NsXNGnhNpNF8 But it's not western trash, that actually did get recycled. It's just local people dumping shit on the street and getting washed into waterways.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-colonialism-countries-grapple-with-wests-unwanted-plastic
Paid, not payed
Hi! I teach Environmental Science. This definitely sounds like what actually happened, but is there any hard soiled evidence, court cases, or some documentation you can provide so I can show my kids? TIA
Plastic recycling is a lie. For decades every piece of plastic we thought we were recycling, was actually being shipped to third world countries and thrown in the ocean. In light of this discovery, it came out that plastic recycling isn't entirely feasible and the majority of plastic products aren't eligible for it.
That's a lie some of it is recycled here lol, usually only the premium #1/#2 plastics though
A lot of fishing equipment is made of plastic and is lost at sea due to storms and waves. That’s 20-30% Also, several countries, especially in Southeast Asia, pretty much just send garbage into the ocean via their rivers. China, India, Brazil, are big contributors. That’s 70%. Your soda straw isn’t the problem.
Yeah when I was in a big city in India they literally just tossed plastic bags on the ground. I was shocked.
The disappointing reality of being a conservationist in the United States is that on a global scale you really can't do fuck all to solve the issue. For as many molecules of pollutants we prevent from entering the ecosystem through our common sense environmental laws, fifty times as many are introduced to the ecosystem courtesy of China, India, etc.
Banning straws isn't common sense. It's self-flagellation. Every time you sip an iced coffee through that disintegrating cardboard straw, you taste the sacrifice of "doing your part".
Banning straws is not common sense, but so many of our laws are. Go to L.A and ask an older person what the air quality was like before Catalytic Converters became mandatory in the 70s.
Or, you know, not putting lead in gasoline
Where did you get this data? Last time I checked USA has the biggest pollution per capita along with Saudi Arabia. That is also on top of the fact that most of the industrial pollution of US goods happen in south asian countries.
The five countries that pollute the oceans the most are, in order, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka. The country that expels the most air pollution in terms of CO2 is China at 10 million tons. In second place is the USA at 5.4 million tons.
And on a per capita basis the US is first. Since China has 5 times the US population.
Just because others are bigger polluters, doesn't mean that "we" can't make an effort to reduce our own waste 🤷♂️ One less soda straw in nature is one less soda straw in nature.
Of course we can't make a difference. Even if everyone reading this thread stopped making all trash for a year, it wouldn't even put a dent in what the big corps output in a day.
Yeah, influencing corporations and other countries is up to politicians. But that doesn't take away that people producing less waste on a personal level is still a good thing.
It's crazy how good the corporate propaganda on recycling was/is. We, the consumer, really feel that we are the problem.
I mean every bit helps. I can be fully aware that corporations produce the lion's share of waste and still care about recycling. I'm not gonna start chucking plastic in rivers just because "everyone else is doing it", that's like...reverse propaganda.
But don't you see that this is a straw man position? Nobody nowadays thinks that's okay. There's a big leap from "gonna start chucking plastic in rivers" to "no supermarket can give you a plastic bag", and "here at 7-eleven, we only have paper straws that disintegrate after your first 3 sips" Most of these consumer-level make impressionable young people feel good, like they are "making a difference", but all they accomplish is adding hassles to daily life.
It’s the same approach with water conservation. If everyone has a lawn you couldn’t tell the difference between water use if nobody had a lawn. Urban/suburban water use is minuscule compared to agriculture use and often they have no incentive to conserve.
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Yes, but once you've moved it that place is empty, and the corporation fills it with a new straw. If we stop taking them from the shop and putting them in the bin, they stop making new ones to put in the shop. It all adds up, and individual pressures are more important than people realise in a lot of ways, but omw thing we don't often see talked about is the huge amount of behind the scenes waste. Every box on a supermarket pallet is wrapped in plastic, then the pallet itself is wrapped in plastic again, and all of that is thrown out before the consumer even looks at the product. And of course we've seen that even if the supermarket claims to recycle it, it's just being sent to the Philippines and dumped into a river.
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If everyone stopped making all trash for a year, voted for politicians that created policies preventing trade with countries that produce global waste, and stopped supporting local corporations that are bad for the environment, then we can absolutely make a difference. The absolute most effective way to *not* solve a problem is to stop believing in your own agency in the first place.
>Your soda straw isn’t the problem. It is if the landfill you send it to decides to pay a shady company overseas to "recycle" it. And by "recycle" I mean toss it straight into the Pacific.
Single use plastics account for less than 1% of ocean plastics (and your own is even less likely to contribute if your country has well managed landfills). Your straw is not the problem.
> Your straw is not the problem. Sounds like it's 1% of the problem.
Yeah, at most, but the point was that if our focus is minimizing single use plastics, then we aren't really addressing the issue. For the most effective immediate changes, we should be addressing packaging and the fishing industry. These two sectors are where the majority of ocean plastics come from.
It is a tiny part of the problem, but when curbing single use plastics was en vogue a few years ago, consumers were given the impression that their choice of straw material would be the deciding factor in the survival of the world's ocean fauna.
I agree one straw is not significant but 1% of all ocean plastic is still a shit ton. And it’s future 1 % that will not add to the existing problem. So everyone needs to feel concerned. It’s not like you need to buy a 70k ev, it’s small and mostly free actions.
As a starter you can stop buying anything in plastic as much as possible: Cartons of milk instead of plastic jugs Water in larger bottles, never small bottled water less than a gallon Glass instead of plastic Tupperware Don't shop/eat at places that take away in plastic Use reusable wooden utensils instead of plastic In terms of straws, ask yourself what needs a straw and do I really need to be drinking it? In the end, the government needs to start regulating the use of plastics if we're to make a difference (sorry conservatives, libertarians), people cannot self govern. Edit: to add what others mentioned, get a filtration system at home and refill your bottles. I personally have hydroviv and refill my glass bottle that I use when I cycle. I cannot recommend reverse osmosis because they are not really effective for all typical contaminants.
Just on the water-bottle point, you can invest in a reverse-osmosis system (pretty cheap nowadays) and just keep refilling whatever water bottles you have.
Don’t the plastic bottles start to leach stuff into the water if you reuse them multiple times?
I don’t see how reuse would make a difference. Drinking water out of plastic at all would be the same; maybe even worse if it’s always new bottles that have their full load of plasticisers. But anyways I’m always using it for cold water in the fridge, so that should reduce any leaching a good deal. And glass has its own issues, mainly breakage if you drop it, with corresponding tiny glass shards getting everywhere. And that would definitely be a frequent occurrence in my house. 🤣
Reduce, reuse, recycle. It's in that order for a reason. Reduction is best. Reusing the plastic means that more plastic doesn't need to be made for the subsequent uses, and no additional energy is used to recycle it. Recycling is still a lot better than throwing it away, but it can be resource intensive to do. Reduce using plastic as you can. Reuse plastic that you get, and finally recycle what can be done.
Just get a Hydroflask or one of the knock offs. It keeps the water colder than plastic bottles and they last forever. I have an undersink inline filter and fill large jugs to keep in the fridge. I then fill my hydroflasks and take that to work instead of buying bottled water. I have amazing tap water where I live so I get some people might need a RO or something better than just a basic filter. Besides the plastic waste buying bottled water is a massive waste of money. You also don't need to carry around water when you are just going to the grocery store or something, people use bottled water as a pacifier.
They can, and from heat too, I use glass bottles whenever I can.
Bar soap/shampoo instead of bottled
Aren't paper milk cartons usually PTFE lined on the inside, like Tetrapak?
I wish you were wrong, but the tragedy of the commons strikes again. No drop of water blames itself for the flood.
The raindrop doesn’t feel responsible for the flood. A single use plastic straw is still a problem. All single use plastics are.
The raindrop isn't responsible for the flood. The conditions on the ground are.
Your soda straw is *equally* as much of a problem as a soda straw’s worth of plastic from China, India, Brazil, or the other countries that push their garbage straight into the ocean.
My point is that a soda straw in a landfill in Iowa isn’t the problem. 4 billion tons of plastic flowing down rivers from the Philippines is.
The problem is believing that those 4 billion tons are only Philippines’ or south east Asia’s problem, when they most likely have American and European plastic too. Rich countries consume the most plastic but somehow conveniently turn around and point fingers at others to blame. At the end of the day, we share the same ocean and we’re probably gonna suffer the same consequences of our mismanagement and overconsumption.
Rich countries generally have well managed waste management systems. Modern landfills aren’t just holes in the ground that they fill up. Aside from straight up litter, if you throw something in a trash can in a Western, developed country, it will make it into a landfill and never leave. That’s not true everywhere, where trash is dumped haphazardly throughout the environment.
Hardly any regulations or poor infrastructure to deal with trash in majority of countries especially Southeast Asia. Trash isn’t secured and gets taken out to the ocean via floods, tides, natural disasters, etc. Also happens a lot in some South America countries as well. People like to think just North America and Europe can fix the issue by themselves, but don’t realize that’s just a small fraction of global population.
Fishing industry uses a lot of plastic and accidents happen where they lose it in the water and other times they don’t care and would rather just dump the broken stuff. Another thing is, high plastic consuming rich countries sell plastic trash to countries without the infrastructure nor intention to recycle all of it, so it’s just dumped in rivers, and sometimes straight into the ocean. Everyone knows where it really ends but they don’t care enough to interrupt the cycle because for the first side, it is cheaper to sell it and send it than to manage it locally, also because once it’s out, it’s no longer “their problem”. And for the other side, they’d rather just get the money.
This is the highest up comment that is the correct answer. Most of the top comments blame it on pollution by poor countries when the vast majority of the plastic pollutants are fishing nets.
Step 1: Tell Americans to separate out their plastic into "recycling bins", collect the plastic, and send it to the local transfer station. Step 2: Discover that there is no market for recycled plastic with all of the impurities present in it, and that there probably wouldn't be one even if "pure" plastic could be sorted out from the collected material. Step 3: Load all of this plastic onto a ship headed to a developing country, so that you can pay them to "recycle" it. Step 4: The plastic is unloaded and then sits on a big empty lot in a pile, not being recycled. Step 5: The plastic is then bulldozed into the ocean at ebb tide, taking it out to sea. The crying tragedy here is that this all could have been avoided, save for some media hysterics from a more naive time. From 1987, the [Mobro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000) was a sea-going barge loaded with trash from New York (whose dumps were full), headed toward a pilot program in North Carolina to convert 3,168 tons of trash into methane, something which is actually useful. A rumor that the barge's payload included some medical waste (medical gowns, syringes & diapers) caused a panic, and the State of North Carolina refused to accept the waste, and thus the barge was forced to find another harbor. The barge spent the subsequent four months at sea as the owner of the garbage tried to get it docked to unload as nimby political officials repeatedly denied it access to a port, all the way down to Mexico and Belize. Ultimately, the barge was sent to New Jersey and the cargo was incinerated, and the ashes were buried. This was the moment when the United States suddenly got very, very excited about waste recycling, and its been a giant boondoggle ever since. When even **[Greenpeace](https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/research/deception-by-the-numbers/)** is telling you that recycling is a delusional fantasy, it's time to put an end to these programs.
Aside from plastic straight up being dumped into it. Plastic gets thrown on ground. Wind movies plastic from place to place. Plastic happens to land in water. Wind does not take plastic out of water back on land.
I remember seeing somewhere that the vast majority of microplastics in the ocean come from degrading fishing nets. The fishing industry is pretty bad for the ocean in a lot of ways.
A lesser reason for it is because plastic is so light. Even if it’s disposed of properly, some of it will blow out of landfills and other disposal areas. In general, the lighter plastic objects are harder to deal with; for example, bottles are pretty easy to process, but straws are virtually impossible.
By far, the worst is micro plastics from car tires. Cars drive down roads and slowly wear microscopic bits of tire away. Then it rains and all those bits flow down a storm drain, to a river, and eventually, out to sea. Good luck earth.
Most comments talk about big pieces of plastic, but microplastic are also an issue. Maybe even a bigger one. It's coming from everywhere. For example car tires are a huge source of microplastics. Those tiny flakes get washed away with the rain, into the ground and oceans.
The number I've found from IUNC guesses that around 14 million tons of plastic ends up in our oceans. https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/marine-plastic-pollution UNESCO says 8-10 million tons of plastic per year. https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/plastic-pollution-ocean/
This Ocean Cleanup/ Mark Rober video explains it pretty well. It also shows where most of the plastic waste that goes into the ocean comes from. https://youtu.be/pXDx6DjNLDU
It’s sorta like asking how so much water ends up in the ocean. Lots of stuff just works it’s way downhill. Silt, sand, rocks, water, plastic, it all goes downhill and ends up in the oceans. It’s just all of those things are benign and plastic isn’t.
most trash is dumped in the water, its a long tradition these last 400 years by the people in charge. especially if they created an extremely deadly and toxic substance then its def going into the fresh water supply to dispose of.
research has been done on this. people can guess but most will be shocked to learn that the number 1 source is from laundering your synthetic clothes. I would be surprised if any of the higher voted comments will mention this but we'll see. everytime you wash your t-shirt or yoga pants, you are putting microplastics into the environment. number 2 source is tyres wearing down on roads.
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Lots of clothing is made from plastic and every time you wash it, it sheds micro plastics into the waste water. This eventually flows to the oceans. Same with micro plastic beads in beauty/grooming products.
A lot of fabric softeners also contain micro plastics. Use white vinegar instead. It's 10x cheaper and better for the environment.
Chinese fishing nets, look it up, the majority of plastic in the pacific is from discarded or ripped Chinese fishing nets that are made using very cheap plastics and harmful chemicals. It isnt the straws and coke holder plastic that you see on the news, those are just the things they use to make you feel bad, the real issue is China and it will continue to be China for the foreseeable future
All those industrial waste being dumped into the ocean but your answer is Chinese fishingnets.
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I’ll watch that, thanks
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Countries need to take responsibility for their trash and not ship it to other countries. Third world countries get money for "recycling" when in reality they just throw it in the ocean.
People put it there or it gets blows in from dumps or off barges. Ships dump it in there and plastics end up in waterways and sewers that end up in the ocean. Some countries or companies or individuals don't give a shit and dump in the ocean.
Plastic gets on the ground. Water washes plastic into drains. Drains eventually get to rivers. Rivers get to oceans. Oceans don’t drain anywhere. Also, some plastic directly goes from humans to oceans. Fishing equipment has plastic. All the plastic a boat has when it goes out isn’t there when it comes back.
abundant start memory threatening historical tub ludicrous wipe kiss melodic *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It does not come from the Western industrialized countries. The vast majority of it comes from Asia. They use their big rivers to take everything away they don't want. I have spent a bit of time in China for work, and their rivers are unbelievable, obviously just for the disposal of raw sewage, industrial waste, and trash. And it all eventually flows out to sea. In SE Asia as well. One time was with a group of people in a car. They just threw trash out the window. I convinced them that we needed a trash bag. So they used that. And when we got to the destination, they threw the bag out the window, said the rains would wash it away. Hopefully the next generation will be better. Edit: There is a bit of hope, in the past five years I have seen a change in attitude there about trash disposal.
It actually does come from Western industrialized countries because we were paying them to "recycle" the things we didn't want to deal with ourselves, not to mention how much of the plastic they throw out is from Western corporations. Waste plastic is a global issue and we can't absolve ourselves of responsibility.
We put it in our recycling. We don't recycle it. We put it on ships to send to poor counties. They don't recycle it. It ends up in rivers. Or in the ocean during transport. Also, as a matter of mass, a huge amount of ocean plastic is made up of fishing nets. As much as 46% https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/ghost-fishing-gear#:~:text=Fishing%20gear%20accounts%20for%20roughly,a%20name%3A%20ghost%20fishing%20gear.
Recycling. They “sell” garbage to another country to recycle. If it was profitable to recycle plastic, there would be a shop on every corner to buy your plastic. Instead, it is sold by your country to another to just bury it or dump it. The worst part, everyone fucking knows this in government.
People in poor countries do not have the infrastructure to deal with waste as efficiently as wealthy ones. So, they throw their waste on the ground, or take it to places where it is piled up. After that, nature takes over and loose material is blown away until it lands in rivers and streams which, eventually, end up in lakes and oceans. People like to point out that the MOST polluted areas of our oceans are directly related to rivers in Asia and Africa, but that is simply because Europeans and North Americans have developed better ways of hiding our trash.
The Americans buy a lot of plastic. The Americans have a lot of plastic waste. The Americans are not able to recycle their plastic waste. The Chinese tell the Americans that they are able to recycle plastic. The Americans sell their plastic to the Chinese. The Chinese take the plastic into international waters and dump it. The Americans see that there is a growing pile of plastic waste in the ocean, and tell everyone to recycle their plastic. The Chinese buy and dump more plastic, and the plastic island grows.
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5 Asian Countries Dump More Plastic Into Oceans Than Anyone Else Combined. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asian-countries-dump-more-plastic-than-anyone-else-combined-how-you-can-help/?sh=552490f51234
There is a huge amount of 3rd world countries that pretty much just have streams of trash constantly flowing into the ocean. For example, Dominican republic is all pretty resorts on one side of the island and trash ville on the other side.
Rich countries ship their plastic garbage to lesser developed countries and they dump a lot of it in rivers or landfills from where it eventually also ends up in rivers, which end up in oceans. Plus developing countries nowadays produce a lot of plastic garbage by themselves, too. China has already reached levels of developed countries like Germany... PER CAPITA.
Third world nations dump it, and they will also dump plastic that is shipped in from counties where it's illegal to dump, like the USA.
Most answers are for big plastics. For micro plastics, washing machines and average wear of plastic made products, like shoes on concrete
The simplest way to put it, water is sticky due to hydrogen bonds. When plastic hits it, it doesn’t leave unless it’s deliberately removed. There’s a lot more to it obviously, but I think a 5yo could quickly see how a plastic shopping bag can blow all over the place on land in the wind, once it hits a body of water, it’s instantly stuck in place.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say this. Whenever you drop something on the ground, that doesn't degrade in nature, it will end up in the ocean at some point. Wind and rain carries it until it ends up in a river somewhere, and rivers usually at some point end in the ocean
Developed countries export their plastic waste to underdeveloped countries and pay them to take said waste. Then tell the world how green they are / how much they recycle. Underdeveloped countries give a flying fuck where the waste ends up and either dump it in a river, dump it on land (that gets washed away into rivers and/or ocean) or dump it directly into the ocean.
Entropy. Ya know the phrase “shit rolls down hill?” It’s applicable to more than corporate work life. Everything is making its way towards the lowest point on earth. The ocean is essentially that point and water is the lube. There are some exceptions, but it’s generally true. Water finds the lowest points it can, stuff rolls to a low point and will likely find water, the water will move the stuff to bigger water, which will find its way to the ocean. Entropy at work.
I'm going to riah getting banned for this. But China and India. A lot of the smaller cities (the cities with no tourists) have zero to little infrastructure for cleaning up trash on the ground. You see the videos all of the time of a clogged river or canal filled with plastic bottles and bags. I also worked in the plastics industry for over two decades. One of my jobs was moving manufacturing plants to China. One of the major reasons was not the labor. It was because China doesn't have an EPA. There was one type of plastic that the was so dirty about 1/4 of that plants budget was handled the waste. They sent it to China for this reason. After that the waste was either pushed into a ditch and burned. Or loaded in a cargo boat and dumped in the ocean. The US did this as well, so all of us are to blame for this. But someuch more than others.
This is just stupid shit, you think that a small towns in China and India are generating that amount of waste? And that China is to blame because the US outsources polluting the planet?
A small town in china still has a million people living there. And yes they pollute way more than the US. All that garbage ( a few decades worth) that left New York destined for China didn't make it. It was dumped in the ocean.
People litter. A lot. This is especially true in countries that do not have advanced trash collection systems like the Philippines and Indonesia
0.0001 percent of the plastic problem is causing by people throwing a bottle on the ground. Look at the bigger picture.
Depends on the country. In countries like Indonesia and Philippines, the vast majority of plastic pollution is from people tossing bottles on the ground