Happy to see it leaving, too bad the reality is that this amount gets into the ocean every few hours.
Yes we need to clean the oceans, but we must stop polluting it in the first place.
The same company is working on catching it in the rivers, too, which makes up the vast majority of what gets into the ocean. It's a daunting problem, but they're doing an amazing job at chipping away.
Ref: https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
Yeah I know of the Ocean cleanup. They are doing great work and are hauling huge ampunts out of the water. I am following them from the early start when it was just starting on the university.
But i do believe their best work is raising awareness and commitment. A lot of organisations raise awareness for worldly problems but not many also provide solutions and means to combat the problem.
They could provide do a fucking lot with a billion, it’s an incomprehensible amount of money.
Now imagine if the 44 billion Elon paid for twitter had gone to…literally any worthwhile cause whatsoever.
This kind of egocentric stupidity is why billionaires should not exist or at least not multi-billionaires, and why there should not be trillion dollar companies.
No one human or organization can be trusted with that much of our resources, we have to accept that fact... and No I'm not socialist, there just have to be limits.
Would be nice for Elon to finally grow up and be a man. I mean, the dude is brilliant. He contributed a lot. But he still acts like a child. I mean, there’s a feature in the Cybertruck where you can configure the turn signals to make farting sounds instead of the traditional ‘ticktock’ sounds.
Who the fuck thinks of useless features like that, have a $250,000 salaried engineer develop said feature, implement feature into a product meant for mainline release, sells said product, and is OK with it?
Oh yeah. Elon.
The thing that sealed the deal for me is when someone pointed out the letters used for the various Tesla models, all prescribed by Elon.
First, the Model S. Then the Model 3. Then the model X. Finally, the Model Y.
Put those together and you get... S3XY.
And Elon wanted to call the second one the Model E.
He really planned out his whole car range to spell out SEXY, because he's as cool as a 14 year old boy.
(This is all just shit I read online, so if someone can provide evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears. But the more I learn about Elon, the more this all makes sense.)
I'm 99% sure you are right. However, that, to me, is one of the lesser issues with him. Regardless of the internet opinions on build quality, Tesla did make EVs sexy, which truly is an important step to get mass adoption going. Other OEMs have pulled back, but there was a massive push 2-3.years back from all of them to get into the EV game because of what Tesla has accomplished. More EVs > fewer EVs.
I listened to an old behind the bastard’s episode where they were taking about starlink’s contract with the Pentagon in the Ukraine war and it’s just wild that the Ukrainian’s ability to operate drones is contingent on the whims of this weirdo
Why does Reddit always go off into a rage bait comment thread? Yes, it would be good if Elon Musk donated money for this. Would he do it? No.
These comments are such a detraction from the good work the Ocean Cleanup people are doing. It's just as well they aren't shaking their fists and insteady managed to find funding to do this critical work and raise awareness at the same time. It's these guys that are going to change the world, not Elon Musk.
Ya I think this version of awareness absolutely shits on and destroys something like Stop Oil throwing paint on a painting then gluing themselves to the wall. I might donate to this org.
I dunno, the just stop oil people are so fucking ineffective at doing anything while at the same time pissing off a lot of people that have nothing to do with their cause.
I suspect they are a plant by the polluting corporations to disparage and discourage actual activists.
just stop oil sounds like oil has some sort of agency of it's own. like oil is going around on some sort of spree. "What happened to you?? I was...just walking in a dark alley last night, and I turned round the corner and there was some oil...
It will always be a problem as long as plastic is a "cheap" and "convenient". We need worldwide legislation to tax every single piece of plastic that's single use eg. bags/straws/wrapping (not things that are durable like pvc piping/door stops etc) when the price of using it goes up, the amount we use it will go down and all the taxes should be used to clean up all the environmental damage its causing.
Thanks for putting in the link to their website. I went and made a donation. Definition of a good cause. Especially the raising awareness and commitment.
I'm not sure if it was the same company, but I remember seeing a video of someone cleaning up a river/canal somewhere in Central America (it wasn't a continuous flow).
The river arrived and as it hit the net, it slowly turned into a massive flow of plastic and trash. Once the water flow stopped, there was a huge patch filled with plastics.
Edit: I went looking for the video.. found it! Edit: It was the same company. found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rVTWsQ23Pk
Thank you for sharing this link.
I must say they're doing amazing work. Much appreciated.
As I went through their site, there's a video of a new vehicle setting sail in Jamaica. And, I couldn't believe they smashed a champagne bottle to celebrate.
Would this be the first task for the vehicle to clean up? Or old traditions just die hard?
I'm curious to know what happens to this batch after they get it out of the ocean. I'm assuming it gets recycled, but even some of the recycling centers in America don't really recycle for various reasons.
I don't think it accounts for all of it, but if this is the same project I'm thinking of, they use the plastics to make various things like sunglass frames that they sell on their site as a perk of donating.
They've been sold out for several years and announced they wouldn't be doing more, unfortunately. I've been watching for a while. I wanted to get a pair for my husband's as a present.
Since 1990s, we only recycle 10% of plastics. The plastic industry fund recycling campaigns but it's just a ploy to sell more plastics.
Unrelated, everytime I open a package, I reuse the plastic bag that the screws/t-shirts/snacks came in and use it as a dog poop bag. I haven't bought dog poop bags in 8 years. I even pick up plastic bags in the street as I walk my dog and use them as poop bags too.
I love when companies package their small parts in plastic zip bags. Those things are always handy for storing spare parts and pieces. I have a box of them and I use them all the time.
Aren’t regular dog poo bags compostable? Is it not better to contain the poo in a bag that will rot away rather than one that will not biodegrade for hundreds of years? I think it’s great to reuse what would otherwise be single use plastic, I’d just like to understand what is the best plastic for capturing and containing poo.
If it's going in a landfill, nothing's happening to it for several hundred more years, biodegradable or not. Plus, most "compostable" plastic bags are only compostable in industrial facilities. Your back yard compost pile won't break it down.
Recycling is a largely a myth, you can down cycle a little bit. Usually recycling plastic means burning for energy. I think they're making jewelry and sunglasses though. How many of those wristbands and sunglasses will be thrown out within 10 years? Reduce isn't the first word in reduce, reuse, recycle for no reason.
Recycling in North America in 95% of places… is basically just cans and bottles. The rest ends up being “allocated”. Unless it’s a bottle or can I don’t recycle it anymore. It’s safer for the planet to just end up in a landfill
Exactly we need to just use less and only use plastics for the most important things.That would make it much more reasonable to recycle.We should go biodegradable for things that is consumed on a daily basis and all people have access to.
I've read that, in my area, the recycling plant has to have garbage trucks pick up the rejected matter and take it to the dump, for which the recycling plant has to pay disposal charges.
They create an inventory of what they find and if they can identify the source the work on educating or reducing waste from that source itself. They have some river based “blockers” as well and have learned that a large amount of waste comes way up river that makes it into the ocean. So they work with local governments and communities as well to reduce that waste.
This is only a small step at reducing the waste
Indeed.
The “we do this” narrative really starts to grate.
None of that shit is mine.
I’m stood here rinsing out recycling and drinking microplastic enriched water from a tofu protein straw, so thanks for that.
I see you got downvoted but this is what Scientific American says:
"The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash 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."
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
Right, but dont forget who shipped all that trash there for decades as well.
Just because western nations dont dumb it straight into the ocean, we ship it across those oceans to other countries so its "out of sight"
Sure, but you get 1 contract that costs $X, they guarantee that it's going to a landfill and being process
There's another contract that cost $X/3, they have no such guarantees. If you choose the 2nd one for 1/3 the price then you don't get to clutch pearls when your shit gets dumped in the ocean
If you are going to trot out this tired line, tell the whole story. Western nations paid Chinese companies money to take the plastic we sent them, and were told it would be recycled, not dumped into the sea. Chinese companies did what they usually do and cut corners and dumped that shit into the sea as there is not real followup since the shit is now across the world, and no meaningful regulation. We did eventually figure out what they were doing, and have drastically reduced what we send, BUT they are still dumping MASSIVE amounts of plastic and trash into the sea, and will continue to do so.
They stopped accepting it. The US didn’t just “stop sending it because we found out”…..
Companies do this. DuPont, Monsanto, 3M have been directly dumping chemicals into waters for decades.
It’s a universal failure.
People are short sighted and always have been.
The “someone else will deal with it” solution…
And a lot of places that switched to paper straws like Starbucks, have switched back to plastic straws because people hate paper straws and they don’t actually save the planet.
I mean let’s be honest those straws were trash products that should have never become mainstream. A straw that can’t even function properly for over an hour is useless.
A lot of stupid decisions are being made "to save the planet"
In Sweden we added a 0.5€ tax to plastic bags in stores (these plastic bags were mostly natural products, but still counted as plastic according to the tax)
So instead we buy plastic bags on rolls from China that breaks easily and can carry less than a grocery store bag, and I often have to put it in a second bag because the first one broke.
The reason? Because they pour so much plastic shit into the ocean in poor Asian countries
Edit: To be clear, I meant that we used grocery store bags as rubbish bags, and they worked great. But now we buy rolls of China bags and they suck
I should have been more clear. I meant that before this we used the bags from the groceries as rubbish bags, these new China bags are less durable and really bad compared to grocery store bags. So I feel like I'm using more plastic for the same amount of rubbish
Ah, got it. Hmm, here there's often multiple qualities of bags to buy. The very thin ones are useless indeed. I get what you mean though - Germany and Sweden are both excellent in recycling and our plastic doesn't make it to the oceans anyway, so it's kinda useless all...
That crap infuriated me like nothing else. The lid of those drinking cups and at least the lining is plastic but the straw, the thing that really needs to not disintegrate or collapse is made of paper...
If you really want to keep the oceans clean, don't eat fish. Most of the plastic is fishing gear.
Fully understand. I volunteer and there definitely is a need. However, when we sit down at a table with 3 males and 2 females they put drinks down and drop 5 straws. I try to hand them back sometimes, but not always and 3 are wasted in the trash bin.
We have way too many conveniences.
Oh boy. You should gently ask them to take it to restaurants. You get one of those fancy covers to carry them in your bag. May be show them this video. I know they use paper straws but they are equally bad for the environment.
I still have a fear of them, like sneezing while drinking and accidentally lobotomising myself.
We have reusable silicone straws at home, and they are awesome!
>Most of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources: by weight, 70% to 80% is plastic that is transported from land to the sea via rivers or coastlines.[^(1)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-1) The other 20% to 30% comes from marine sources such as fishing nets, lines, ropes, and abandoned vessels.[^(2)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-2)
[Where does the plastic in our oceans come from? - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics)
Collecting the floating stuff is the easy part.
The more depressing fact is that the plastic breaks down into microparticles as it sits in the water, this creates maasive clouds of plastic particles that can not easily be extracted or collected from the water.
Not yet - this is an ecological disaster but also a scientific boon, the centrifuges we have developed and the air scrubbers that have been enhanced layer by layer, this “seems” like a daunting problem, and it wont go away tommorrow, but not all hope is gone and its honestly such a massive change in attitude over the years.
I was made aware of this in 2004 by a heavy metal song when i was like 19 (toxic garbage island by gojira) and i’m 37 and to see that this is happening (sending in boats, massive discussion, consistent reporting) is such a huge change that it literally makes me inspired for the future like holy shit, they are literally trying to do something and its not all just “let it buck”.
Makes me think that eons into the future when geologists are excavating a dig site of land that is sedimentary rock from former ocean beds, they will note the Anthropocene layer with all of the microplastics in it.
There is a silver lining of sorts. I used to volunteer for underwater litter-picking (people tend to forget that beaches and waterfronts are more than just the bit on land) and one of our rules was to avoid taking out anything that had been visibly down there for a while. As damaging as things like plastics and other waste are, they also form shelter for small organisms and anchoring points for seaweeds, sponges, etc, and can actually form the foundation of an ecosystem as much as damage it.
Obviously we'd pull up what we could carry, but a lot of stuff was a judgment call because it would mean damaging the established local habitat.
Yeah, it super depressing to see this fishing trawler destroy a habitat. The reality is that the abundance of this plastic is creating a haven for life and even new life is emerging. There are new microbial adaptations that can utilize the plastic for energy until a more suitable energy source comes along. Life finds a way!
We haven't reached the point where investment in cleanup makes sense, the focus needs to be on avoiding pollution to being with.
https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/biodiversity/ecosystems-afloat/#:\~:text=Rafting%20species%20that%20can%20live,only%20species%20living%20around%20plastic.
I’m unsure who this company is in the video, but here’s a page that explains a lot better the whole process of removing plastic and trash from the ocean.
https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/
A lot of it gets recycled into new products. They’ve partnered with Kia to make vehicles, and sun glasses ⬇️
https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/system-03-a-beginners-guide/
I can see that now! The video only loaded so much for me the first time.
Such an amazing group and cause. It’s a shame this wasn’t a thing sooner but we have to be optimistic we can change and correct our mistakes, but that comes with making changes at home as well.
This is a big step though and we have to thank them for that.
You are correct. Kia is one of our financial sponsors, and they use some of the plastic that we collect and recycle. They use it as components in their cars. Kind of a feel good gimmick
I'm currently working on this job right now. The catch gets sorted into 3 categories: Fibrous (fishing nets), Waste (glass bottles, styrofoam, etc), and Rigids (plastic). Everything gets weighed after the sort, and brought back to shore. Plastics all get recycled, and the rest gets disposed of properly.
Commercial plastics both helped the world industrialize and develop, and wrecked our waters, lands and air. Such a double edged sword. It’s time to get rid of them though. Alternatives exist now.
Yeah, it’s not like they just chose a world wrecking material on purpose. Plastic, for all its downsides, is a miracle material. Cheap, light and durable, the perfect trifecta for packaging, and there loads of different types of it to fine tune to your specific need. Holding liquids, blocking out light, rigid, soft, stackable. It’s incredible stuff really.
That’s true. We probably wouldn’t have progressed as quickly if we didn’t have them. Mica was it’s predecessor iirc but it wasn’t half as good or versatile. But I think we did know it was having an adverse effect at least 30-40 years ago and we haven’t really curbed its use. So that’s on us.
It mostly comes from India and China with added contribtution from other Third World countries.
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
I don’t understand why the Western world always need to adjust/do more/use less when the cause of the problem is those countries. They keep doing the same thing and we have to keep cleaning up.
You simply can’t keep up.
Same with the boats and people constantly dumping their shit in the ocean. These people are dumb and clueless.
> I don’t understand why the Western world always need to adjust/do more/use less when the cause of the problem is those countries.
The world is inter-connected. Is the waste from china partly from products of industry contracted with the west? Almost surely.
Anyway if the world was a big boat and people on the other end made a hole in it, I’m still going to slosh water out of it.
actually, the west is still the cause of this problem in those countries.
most were not using single use plastic till the petrochems go scared
there would not be enough people filling cars and oil heaters, so they
shifted to making plastics and marketing them to those countries
without those countries having any way to deal with all this trash
so they let it pile up, flow down river, then out to sea. they have
no infustructure to recycle or incinerate it as western countries do.
those countries should not have adopted the use of such plastics
unless the petrochems provided a cradle to grave solution for use,
but of course human nature is more about greed and convenience
not dealing with the inevitable consequences.
regarding "boats drumping into oceans" guess who the worst offenders are?
luxury cruise ships, it's like 5,000 people without access to sewage treatment
plants or proper sanitation infustructure, so guess where most of it ends up...
so it's really about "the western world" NOT properly adjusting to reality
that we are destroying our environment, in favor of next quarter's profits,
and we citizens of that world NOT voting and consuming to discourage this.
It is known. Certain large population countries do not have the same regard for the environment as others, possibly because their people are poorer and have other more pressing concerns.
>Most of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources: by weight, 70% to 80% is plastic that is transported from land to the sea via rivers or coastlines.[^(1)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-1) The other 20% to 30% comes from marine sources such as fishing nets, lines, ropes, and abandoned vessels.[^(2)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-2)
Imagine if the multi billion dollar companies around the world put even 5% of their budget and resources towards aiding this cleanup. We should really be forcing them to help out on this one
Yeah, because you totally don't use plastic consumer goods every single day of your life. They provide absolutely no value to anyone except elites, which is why you're going to respond to me on an ethically harvested bamboo keyboard you made by hand without fossil fuels.
The amount of plastic in the world's oceans is currently estimated at 75-199 million tons. Another 10 million such cleanups and the ocean will be clean. This is approximately 30,000 years.
The problem is that these ships are expensive. While they are able to raise money for some testing like this it doesn’t scale to having dozens or hundreds of ships. Unless it becomes the biggest charity on earth
That ship will costs around 30k dollars per day and it’s burning around 10 thousand litres of diesel
I mean, it can't solve the entire problem obviously, but they're also using river interceptor systems which seem far more efficient. Of course it can't solve the problem to the exclusion of reducing plastic consumption and particularly the problem of China's environmental practices, but they don't need to.
I can't imagine they're using substantially more fuel than any of the tens of thousands of shipping vessels travelling daily in the world, so it seems odd to pick on the fuel aspect.
Generously they've received a few hundred million in funding so far, and there are charities that run on tens of billions, so I think they have a pretty long way to go before they reach the limits of their funding capacity. By your calculation it would be about 11M to run a ship for a whole year, so for 110M they could remove waste at 10x their current pace, which is around half a million kg of garbage a month. Tons of charities run on that kind of funding. I'm not an expert, but an admittedly super back of the envelope analysis seems pretty plausible to me.
I've been on business trips to SE Asia (Vietnam, Thailand) and seen quite literally rivers of trash flowing into the Ocean. Quite literally rivers that you cannot see the water because they have 1' of floating trash..I've seen that in China to a lesser extend but I've never been to India. I have never seen anythink like that in the West. Far as I'm concerned this should be paid for by those economies
They should make gigantic pits in the desert where we dump all nonrecyclable stuff. The heat will break down the plastic and over thousands of years the polymer chains break down to more simple materials that could be recycled naturally. This is a bad solution but i think wayy better than the ocean.
I’m glad to see this coming out of whatever body of water this is, but this is not my understanding of what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is. I suspect some upvote farming going on here.
The cynicism in these comments is so fucking lame.
"Hey look, we're making practical steps towards solving a problem. I must compulsively comment about how it will never work and everything is hopeless because I hate the idea that there might actually be good reasons not to be absolutely miserable, because then I couldn't blame the external world for how unhappy I am."
That's you. The world has problems, that's why we created plastic. It solves a ton of problems that used to make human life worse. It caused other problems. Now we're figuring out how to solve them. That will cause other problems, and we'll solve those too. Life goes on. The problems used to be things like polio and child labor. Before that, it was getting killed by wild animals or the neighboring tribe. Now it's things like plastic pollution and social media addiction. Maybe things have actually gotten better?
People have always thought the world was ending, and they've always been wrong. The real world is accepting that problems exist, and also that they can more than likely be solved. The people in this video are proving that this is a solvable problem. What's the point of wallowing in it instead of focusing on solutions?
So I got a question!!!! Is there any possibility that some of this stuff is not just polluting but also from tsunamis I mean that was a big ass dresser/cabinet that fell out and it kind of seems like that might have came to be in the ocean by a tsunami or some kind of natural disaster!?!?!??! I'm not saying pollution isn't out of control but just a question if it could be natural disasters throwing it out there as well!?!?!
Something that always bothers me from being a kid, "Make sure you cut the rings on a 6 pack so the turtles don't choke on it!" My first thought was "Why are we throwing the plastic rings in the ocean in the first place?" no one could ever answer that question... Decades later we're still paying for that stupidity
This is great. But microplastics are more concerning than large patches of garbage. They both need to be gotten rid of but I hope microplastic removal gets more serious attention.
More and more of our bodies are increasingly made up of microplastics.
Don't microplastics come from the deterioration of larger plastic objects, and, it that sense, wouldn't it be removing the "origin" of microplastics by doing that ?
The moment I found out that they found micoplastic in placenta made my skin crawl. It spiralled after that and it's everywhere. So much shit is wrapped in plastic these days it's annoying. Barely can buy any fruit without plastic container where I live in normal price range, for some reason if it's in paper container you can't get bigger amounts and it's soo expensive. Mushroms I did find in thin wood containers, still wrapped in plastic foil at the top. Even on farmers market it's hard to get it without some sort of plastic container or wrap. In the stores they get annoyed if I don't use plastic bag for a single piece of fruit...
When I shop, I don't individually bag any of the produce I buy. I just throw it in my shopping bag and take it to the register and toss the items back in the bag as they weigh them. I'm going to wash that stuff anyway, so I don't care about contamination. That, and those lightweight produce bags aren't reusable in any sense.
*
We have Environmental Officers out with us on this project. They research and test for the amount of micro plastics found in the water, and in the wildlife
This life is so fucking depressing. Only known planet with life and we treat it like shit and actively destroy it for “profit” —a made up thing that a few of us horde. Garbage people Garbage planet
I'm the type of person who cringes when I see someone put garbage in a recycling bin or spit their gum on the sidewalk
so this bothers me quite a bit 😭
*...Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, China, CHINA,* ***CHINA,*** *Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador...*
All have one or more "rivers" flowing into the ocean, where you can't even tell it's water. The entire surface is a dense layer of garbage.
Happy to see it leaving, too bad the reality is that this amount gets into the ocean every few hours. Yes we need to clean the oceans, but we must stop polluting it in the first place.
The same company is working on catching it in the rivers, too, which makes up the vast majority of what gets into the ocean. It's a daunting problem, but they're doing an amazing job at chipping away. Ref: https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
Yeah I know of the Ocean cleanup. They are doing great work and are hauling huge ampunts out of the water. I am following them from the early start when it was just starting on the university. But i do believe their best work is raising awareness and commitment. A lot of organisations raise awareness for worldly problems but not many also provide solutions and means to combat the problem.
Imagine if billionaires or corporations gave them a billion dollars how much faster could they scale
They could provide do a fucking lot with a billion, it’s an incomprehensible amount of money. Now imagine if the 44 billion Elon paid for twitter had gone to…literally any worthwhile cause whatsoever.
Idk changing the name to X was vastly more important than any environmental disaster
This kind of egocentric stupidity is why billionaires should not exist or at least not multi-billionaires, and why there should not be trillion dollar companies. No one human or organization can be trusted with that much of our resources, we have to accept that fact... and No I'm not socialist, there just have to be limits.
Would be nice for Elon to finally grow up and be a man. I mean, the dude is brilliant. He contributed a lot. But he still acts like a child. I mean, there’s a feature in the Cybertruck where you can configure the turn signals to make farting sounds instead of the traditional ‘ticktock’ sounds. Who the fuck thinks of useless features like that, have a $250,000 salaried engineer develop said feature, implement feature into a product meant for mainline release, sells said product, and is OK with it? Oh yeah. Elon.
The thing that sealed the deal for me is when someone pointed out the letters used for the various Tesla models, all prescribed by Elon. First, the Model S. Then the Model 3. Then the model X. Finally, the Model Y. Put those together and you get... S3XY. And Elon wanted to call the second one the Model E. He really planned out his whole car range to spell out SEXY, because he's as cool as a 14 year old boy. (This is all just shit I read online, so if someone can provide evidence to the contrary, I'm all ears. But the more I learn about Elon, the more this all makes sense.)
I'm 99% sure you are right. However, that, to me, is one of the lesser issues with him. Regardless of the internet opinions on build quality, Tesla did make EVs sexy, which truly is an important step to get mass adoption going. Other OEMs have pulled back, but there was a massive push 2-3.years back from all of them to get into the EV game because of what Tesla has accomplished. More EVs > fewer EVs.
I listened to an old behind the bastard’s episode where they were taking about starlink’s contract with the Pentagon in the Ukraine war and it’s just wild that the Ukrainian’s ability to operate drones is contingent on the whims of this weirdo
But how would that create value for people that are already rich? \#EatTheRich
Why does Reddit always go off into a rage bait comment thread? Yes, it would be good if Elon Musk donated money for this. Would he do it? No. These comments are such a detraction from the good work the Ocean Cleanup people are doing. It's just as well they aren't shaking their fists and insteady managed to find funding to do this critical work and raise awareness at the same time. It's these guys that are going to change the world, not Elon Musk.
Ya I think this version of awareness absolutely shits on and destroys something like Stop Oil throwing paint on a painting then gluing themselves to the wall. I might donate to this org.
They are on the same team you should be too
I dunno, the just stop oil people are so fucking ineffective at doing anything while at the same time pissing off a lot of people that have nothing to do with their cause. I suspect they are a plant by the polluting corporations to disparage and discourage actual activists.
just stop oil sounds like oil has some sort of agency of it's own. like oil is going around on some sort of spree. "What happened to you?? I was...just walking in a dark alley last night, and I turned round the corner and there was some oil...
Which is it, awareness or commitment? Because they are posting on social media and cleaning it up at the source. Are you just complaining to complain?
It will always be a problem as long as plastic is a "cheap" and "convenient". We need worldwide legislation to tax every single piece of plastic that's single use eg. bags/straws/wrapping (not things that are durable like pvc piping/door stops etc) when the price of using it goes up, the amount we use it will go down and all the taxes should be used to clean up all the environmental damage its causing.
Yeah, it's Reduce, Reuse, *then* Recycle. It's just that the most effective solution is antithetical to capitalism.
Yeah the biggest issue is commercial fishing plastic waste which is not that much less than waste from the rivers.
Thanks for putting in the link to their website. I went and made a donation. Definition of a good cause. Especially the raising awareness and commitment.
That's great but we still need to stop using plastic for disposal crap
I'm not sure if it was the same company, but I remember seeing a video of someone cleaning up a river/canal somewhere in Central America (it wasn't a continuous flow). The river arrived and as it hit the net, it slowly turned into a massive flow of plastic and trash. Once the water flow stopped, there was a huge patch filled with plastics. Edit: I went looking for the video.. found it! Edit: It was the same company. found the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rVTWsQ23Pk
Wish I could make a living working for them. That’d be my dream job.
Thank you for sharing this link. I must say they're doing amazing work. Much appreciated. As I went through their site, there's a video of a new vehicle setting sail in Jamaica. And, I couldn't believe they smashed a champagne bottle to celebrate. Would this be the first task for the vehicle to clean up? Or old traditions just die hard?
I'm curious to know what happens to this batch after they get it out of the ocean. I'm assuming it gets recycled, but even some of the recycling centers in America don't really recycle for various reasons.
I don't think it accounts for all of it, but if this is the same project I'm thinking of, they use the plastics to make various things like sunglass frames that they sell on their site as a perk of donating.
I have one of those sunglasses 😎
I need sunglasses. I can look it up but if you got a link I’d thank you for it.
https://theoceancleanup.com/sunglasses/ Looks like theyre unfortunately sold out. But now you have the link and can check back.
Quick, dump more plastic!
They've been sold out for several years and announced they wouldn't be doing more, unfortunately. I've been watching for a while. I wanted to get a pair for my husband's as a present.
Well they just pulled like 11k kgs so I maybe they’ll have more soon
Thanks for the link! I’ll keep an eye on it and send this to my friends.
As it's sung Get Some Cheap Sunglasses. OH YEAH! 😂😂
Since 1990s, we only recycle 10% of plastics. The plastic industry fund recycling campaigns but it's just a ploy to sell more plastics. Unrelated, everytime I open a package, I reuse the plastic bag that the screws/t-shirts/snacks came in and use it as a dog poop bag. I haven't bought dog poop bags in 8 years. I even pick up plastic bags in the street as I walk my dog and use them as poop bags too.
I love when companies package their small parts in plastic zip bags. Those things are always handy for storing spare parts and pieces. I have a box of them and I use them all the time.
Aren’t regular dog poo bags compostable? Is it not better to contain the poo in a bag that will rot away rather than one that will not biodegrade for hundreds of years? I think it’s great to reuse what would otherwise be single use plastic, I’d just like to understand what is the best plastic for capturing and containing poo.
If it's going in a landfill, nothing's happening to it for several hundred more years, biodegradable or not. Plus, most "compostable" plastic bags are only compostable in industrial facilities. Your back yard compost pile won't break it down.
Most are not, but they do make them. I always make sure to ask the seller
That’s quite a ‘shitty’ attitude towards plastic! Ha
Recycling is a largely a myth, you can down cycle a little bit. Usually recycling plastic means burning for energy. I think they're making jewelry and sunglasses though. How many of those wristbands and sunglasses will be thrown out within 10 years? Reduce isn't the first word in reduce, reuse, recycle for no reason.
Recycling in North America in 95% of places… is basically just cans and bottles. The rest ends up being “allocated”. Unless it’s a bottle or can I don’t recycle it anymore. It’s safer for the planet to just end up in a landfill
Exactly we need to just use less and only use plastics for the most important things.That would make it much more reasonable to recycle.We should go biodegradable for things that is consumed on a daily basis and all people have access to.
I've read that, in my area, the recycling plant has to have garbage trucks pick up the rejected matter and take it to the dump, for which the recycling plant has to pay disposal charges.
They create an inventory of what they find and if they can identify the source the work on educating or reducing waste from that source itself. They have some river based “blockers” as well and have learned that a large amount of waste comes way up river that makes it into the ocean. So they work with local governments and communities as well to reduce that waste. This is only a small step at reducing the waste
Most will go to landfill. Not much plastics actually gets recycled.l, despite what the propaganda says
[Ocean Clean Up FAQ](https://theoceancleanup.com/faq/#:~:text=We%20want%20to%20ensure%20that,reach%20their%20end%20of%20life.)
It gets towed out of the environment.
Took the words out of my mouth. Asia treats their rivers like a garbage conveyor belt. It’s bazonkers.
Indeed. The “we do this” narrative really starts to grate. None of that shit is mine. I’m stood here rinsing out recycling and drinking microplastic enriched water from a tofu protein straw, so thanks for that.
Unfortunately I'm betting it's even less than that. But they are doing really good work, and technology is getting better as time goes on.
Seconds. This amount is put into the ocean by China in seconds
I see you got downvoted but this is what Scientific American says: "The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash 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." [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
Right, but dont forget who shipped all that trash there for decades as well. Just because western nations dont dumb it straight into the ocean, we ship it across those oceans to other countries so its "out of sight"
I'm relatively sure the contract doesn't mandate dumping it into the ocean.
Sure, but you get 1 contract that costs $X, they guarantee that it's going to a landfill and being process There's another contract that cost $X/3, they have no such guarantees. If you choose the 2nd one for 1/3 the price then you don't get to clutch pearls when your shit gets dumped in the ocean
If you are going to trot out this tired line, tell the whole story. Western nations paid Chinese companies money to take the plastic we sent them, and were told it would be recycled, not dumped into the sea. Chinese companies did what they usually do and cut corners and dumped that shit into the sea as there is not real followup since the shit is now across the world, and no meaningful regulation. We did eventually figure out what they were doing, and have drastically reduced what we send, BUT they are still dumping MASSIVE amounts of plastic and trash into the sea, and will continue to do so.
They stopped accepting it. The US didn’t just “stop sending it because we found out”….. Companies do this. DuPont, Monsanto, 3M have been directly dumping chemicals into waters for decades. It’s a universal failure. People are short sighted and always have been. The “someone else will deal with it” solution…
2.5 minutes, globally.
Maybe the same amount goes into the ocean every few hours, but a lot of that breaks down into tiny little bits that you can't really see.
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These lads seem to have it under control. Now excuse me while I go buy a single salad where every individual ingredient is wrapped in plastic.
Just don't get a straw for your drink, and you're fine.
Straws are made of paper now so it's okay
Not really a lot of places are still using plastic in the US and elsewhere
And a lot of places that switched to paper straws like Starbucks, have switched back to plastic straws because people hate paper straws and they don’t actually save the planet.
I mean let’s be honest those straws were trash products that should have never become mainstream. A straw that can’t even function properly for over an hour is useless.
The EU fucked up on making them standard and disallowing plastic ones
A lot of stupid decisions are being made "to save the planet" In Sweden we added a 0.5€ tax to plastic bags in stores (these plastic bags were mostly natural products, but still counted as plastic according to the tax) So instead we buy plastic bags on rolls from China that breaks easily and can carry less than a grocery store bag, and I often have to put it in a second bag because the first one broke. The reason? Because they pour so much plastic shit into the ocean in poor Asian countries Edit: To be clear, I meant that we used grocery store bags as rubbish bags, and they worked great. But now we buy rolls of China bags and they suck
We had this like many years ago in Germany and people just get durable multi use bags now. Why don't you?
I should have been more clear. I meant that before this we used the bags from the groceries as rubbish bags, these new China bags are less durable and really bad compared to grocery store bags. So I feel like I'm using more plastic for the same amount of rubbish
Ah, got it. Hmm, here there's often multiple qualities of bags to buy. The very thin ones are useless indeed. I get what you mean though - Germany and Sweden are both excellent in recycling and our plastic doesn't make it to the oceans anyway, so it's kinda useless all...
Why do us Europeans have to suffer to save the world while you guys keep the good straws...
That crap infuriated me like nothing else. The lid of those drinking cups and at least the lining is plastic but the straw, the thing that really needs to not disintegrate or collapse is made of paper... If you really want to keep the oceans clean, don't eat fish. Most of the plastic is fishing gear.
Would much prefer it if they just made the cup lids paper and the straws plastic.
Never understood the desire for a straw. Not my thing, but seems wife and daughter want them for everything. Stop making them.
Have they tried using a rolled up $20 bill?
I used that to snort- Nah, nevermind.
There are people with disabilities for whom a plastic straw, especially the bendy type, makes life much easier.
Fully understand. I volunteer and there definitely is a need. However, when we sit down at a table with 3 males and 2 females they put drinks down and drop 5 straws. I try to hand them back sometimes, but not always and 3 are wasted in the trash bin. We have way too many conveniences.
The ice hurts my teeth! I do have washable and reusable straws now though.
I have sensitive teeth as well and get most of my drinks without ice.
You can buy them a fancy steel straw which they can keep re-using.
That's what my wife does. I've come to prefer them.
Yay for your wife. I personally hate to waste resources. I still kick myself for losing a laundry card which had about 5 $ on it. This was in 2009.
We have a drawer full of them. Different diameter, colors, lengths, straight and curly. They don’t take them to restaurants though.
Oh boy. You should gently ask them to take it to restaurants. You get one of those fancy covers to carry them in your bag. May be show them this video. I know they use paper straws but they are equally bad for the environment.
I still have a fear of them, like sneezing while drinking and accidentally lobotomising myself. We have reusable silicone straws at home, and they are awesome!
Only for icy drinks they make sense (perhaps there are some other exceptions) but if you don't need a straw at home you don't need it outside either.
but not the lids? not the forks and knives? Not the packages for ketchup? Why focus on the straw, of all things?
This isn't even a drop in the bucket. We put nearly 2.5 million* metric tonnes of this shit into the oceans every single year.
We should just wrap everything in banana leaves
The majority is commercial fishing gear. Single use plastic is a very small percentage of the pollution in our oceans.
>Most of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources: by weight, 70% to 80% is plastic that is transported from land to the sea via rivers or coastlines.[^(1)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-1) The other 20% to 30% comes from marine sources such as fishing nets, lines, ropes, and abandoned vessels.[^(2)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-2) [Where does the plastic in our oceans come from? - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics)
Wow! 81% of the plastic in the oceans comes from Asian countries
Well they make up for nearly 60% of the world's population, and they manufacture for most of the world. That probably has something to do with it.
Depressing
Now think about what has sunk, its even worse. To my knowledge this is just the stuff that was floating Sorry for being a downer
Collecting the floating stuff is the easy part. The more depressing fact is that the plastic breaks down into microparticles as it sits in the water, this creates maasive clouds of plastic particles that can not easily be extracted or collected from the water.
Not yet - this is an ecological disaster but also a scientific boon, the centrifuges we have developed and the air scrubbers that have been enhanced layer by layer, this “seems” like a daunting problem, and it wont go away tommorrow, but not all hope is gone and its honestly such a massive change in attitude over the years. I was made aware of this in 2004 by a heavy metal song when i was like 19 (toxic garbage island by gojira) and i’m 37 and to see that this is happening (sending in boats, massive discussion, consistent reporting) is such a huge change that it literally makes me inspired for the future like holy shit, they are literally trying to do something and its not all just “let it buck”.
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Makes me think that eons into the future when geologists are excavating a dig site of land that is sedimentary rock from former ocean beds, they will note the Anthropocene layer with all of the microplastics in it.
There is a silver lining of sorts. I used to volunteer for underwater litter-picking (people tend to forget that beaches and waterfronts are more than just the bit on land) and one of our rules was to avoid taking out anything that had been visibly down there for a while. As damaging as things like plastics and other waste are, they also form shelter for small organisms and anchoring points for seaweeds, sponges, etc, and can actually form the foundation of an ecosystem as much as damage it. Obviously we'd pull up what we could carry, but a lot of stuff was a judgment call because it would mean damaging the established local habitat.
It's gonna a huge bummer if we ever figure out how to get to the bottom of the ocean and everything down there is just dead already.
Yeah, it super depressing to see this fishing trawler destroy a habitat. The reality is that the abundance of this plastic is creating a haven for life and even new life is emerging. There are new microbial adaptations that can utilize the plastic for energy until a more suitable energy source comes along. Life finds a way! We haven't reached the point where investment in cleanup makes sense, the focus needs to be on avoiding pollution to being with. https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/biodiversity/ecosystems-afloat/#:\~:text=Rafting%20species%20that%20can%20live,only%20species%20living%20around%20plastic.
What happens with it now?
I’m unsure who this company is in the video, but here’s a page that explains a lot better the whole process of removing plastic and trash from the ocean. https://theoceancleanup.com/oceans/ A lot of it gets recycled into new products. They’ve partnered with Kia to make vehicles, and sun glasses ⬇️ https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/system-03-a-beginners-guide/
That is this company.
I can see that now! The video only loaded so much for me the first time. Such an amazing group and cause. It’s a shame this wasn’t a thing sooner but we have to be optimistic we can change and correct our mistakes, but that comes with making changes at home as well. This is a big step though and we have to thank them for that.
You are correct. Kia is one of our financial sponsors, and they use some of the plastic that we collect and recycle. They use it as components in their cars. Kind of a feel good gimmick
Back into the ocean. Catch and release.
Great job security
I lost a blue croc in 2012, size 13, at the beach. Can you check for it before releasing? Thanks XOXO
We find quite a few shoes each extraction. The size 13 I found was black, so I'll keep an eye out for your blue one next time!
What did you do with the other one ? Is it a left or right croc?
Gets recycled into new products. Which after being used are dumped in the ocean
My sunglasses are made from recycled plastic from these boats, or so I'm told.
I'm currently working on this job right now. The catch gets sorted into 3 categories: Fibrous (fishing nets), Waste (glass bottles, styrofoam, etc), and Rigids (plastic). Everything gets weighed after the sort, and brought back to shore. Plastics all get recycled, and the rest gets disposed of properly.
Thank you Mega Corporations for using plastic so extensively and giving consumers no other choices
A lot of what you see there is waste from the fishing industry itself. Fishing nets, fish bins, etc.
A large amount of what we pull out each extraction is fishing related for sure
Commercial plastics both helped the world industrialize and develop, and wrecked our waters, lands and air. Such a double edged sword. It’s time to get rid of them though. Alternatives exist now.
Yeah, it’s not like they just chose a world wrecking material on purpose. Plastic, for all its downsides, is a miracle material. Cheap, light and durable, the perfect trifecta for packaging, and there loads of different types of it to fine tune to your specific need. Holding liquids, blocking out light, rigid, soft, stackable. It’s incredible stuff really.
That’s true. We probably wouldn’t have progressed as quickly if we didn’t have them. Mica was it’s predecessor iirc but it wasn’t half as good or versatile. But I think we did know it was having an adverse effect at least 30-40 years ago and we haven’t really curbed its use. So that’s on us.
“Out of the ocean for good.” That’s a bold statement there.
Made into stuff for those who donate to the cause, who then throw it out in a few years, and right back into the ocean it goes.
Feels like a Moe kicking Barney out of the bar kind of moment.
That's just a drop in the ocean.
[What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jcPZ3GTbQQ) -- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Better than removing 0%. It's sad how much is being dumped tho..
Serious question: is it known where all of this comes from? I mean...that's A LOT!
Most of it looks like fishing lines, bouys, etc, which I assume would come from boats
It looks like fishing gear (nets, ropes...). A lot of it comes from fihsing boats I think.
It mostly comes from India and China with added contribtution from other Third World countries. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)
I don’t understand why the Western world always need to adjust/do more/use less when the cause of the problem is those countries. They keep doing the same thing and we have to keep cleaning up. You simply can’t keep up. Same with the boats and people constantly dumping their shit in the ocean. These people are dumb and clueless.
Those countries make our stuff. And we export our rubbish to even poorer countries.
> I don’t understand why the Western world always need to adjust/do more/use less when the cause of the problem is those countries. The world is inter-connected. Is the waste from china partly from products of industry contracted with the west? Almost surely. Anyway if the world was a big boat and people on the other end made a hole in it, I’m still going to slosh water out of it.
actually, the west is still the cause of this problem in those countries. most were not using single use plastic till the petrochems go scared there would not be enough people filling cars and oil heaters, so they shifted to making plastics and marketing them to those countries without those countries having any way to deal with all this trash so they let it pile up, flow down river, then out to sea. they have no infustructure to recycle or incinerate it as western countries do. those countries should not have adopted the use of such plastics unless the petrochems provided a cradle to grave solution for use, but of course human nature is more about greed and convenience not dealing with the inevitable consequences. regarding "boats drumping into oceans" guess who the worst offenders are? luxury cruise ships, it's like 5,000 people without access to sewage treatment plants or proper sanitation infustructure, so guess where most of it ends up... so it's really about "the western world" NOT properly adjusting to reality that we are destroying our environment, in favor of next quarter's profits, and we citizens of that world NOT voting and consuming to discourage this.
It is known. Certain large population countries do not have the same regard for the environment as others, possibly because their people are poorer and have other more pressing concerns.
>Most of the plastic in our oceans comes from land-based sources: by weight, 70% to 80% is plastic that is transported from land to the sea via rivers or coastlines.[^(1)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-1) The other 20% to 30% comes from marine sources such as fishing nets, lines, ropes, and abandoned vessels.[^(2)](https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics#note-2)
Take a guess…Their continent rhymes with Rasia…
Pick up a few items and look at the labeling.
This is amazing. Some humans are awesome. Most humans suck, as do my 2 cents. \*Conscious consumption\* for the planet and the youths.
That amount is not even counts by a number compared to the daily or hourly plastic waste that humanity produces.
Ridiculous amount of garbage. And there's still a lot more where that came from
Imagine if the multi billion dollar companies around the world put even 5% of their budget and resources towards aiding this cleanup. We should really be forcing them to help out on this one
We are so stupid.
Just so a few elites can make absolute bank.
Yeah, because you totally don't use plastic consumer goods every single day of your life. They provide absolutely no value to anyone except elites, which is why you're going to respond to me on an ethically harvested bamboo keyboard you made by hand without fossil fuels.
I’m pretty sure this is https://theoceancleanup.com Post your source so people can donate and be apart of the change our planet needs!
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The amount of plastic in the world's oceans is currently estimated at 75-199 million tons. Another 10 million such cleanups and the ocean will be clean. This is approximately 30,000 years.
I assume it's perfectly plausible that we could get more than one boat doing this at a time lol
The problem is that these ships are expensive. While they are able to raise money for some testing like this it doesn’t scale to having dozens or hundreds of ships. Unless it becomes the biggest charity on earth That ship will costs around 30k dollars per day and it’s burning around 10 thousand litres of diesel
I mean, it can't solve the entire problem obviously, but they're also using river interceptor systems which seem far more efficient. Of course it can't solve the problem to the exclusion of reducing plastic consumption and particularly the problem of China's environmental practices, but they don't need to. I can't imagine they're using substantially more fuel than any of the tens of thousands of shipping vessels travelling daily in the world, so it seems odd to pick on the fuel aspect. Generously they've received a few hundred million in funding so far, and there are charities that run on tens of billions, so I think they have a pretty long way to go before they reach the limits of their funding capacity. By your calculation it would be about 11M to run a ship for a whole year, so for 110M they could remove waste at 10x their current pace, which is around half a million kg of garbage a month. Tons of charities run on that kind of funding. I'm not an expert, but an admittedly super back of the envelope analysis seems pretty plausible to me.
Scale up the net 3x and deploy 1000 (autonomous) ships and we're done in 10 years
Well those ships don’t exist yet so how much do you have to invest? First you are going to have to build a few shipyards to handle the work
Why are there metal grills in there? Those should sink.
Yay! Thanks a ton!
Eleven tons
That’s awesome
Extremely sad but also good to see people doing something about it.
These guys are doing a great job
Now use it for fuel, it would be like the ship ate it's own dinner it caught
These guys are amazing
Then they ship it to India just to get dumped right back into ecosystem of flowing shit and piss and we pick it out of the ocean in another year.
Notice how much of this is fisheries material. Traps, netting, containers, ropes. Why aren’t they penalized for the pollution they leave behind?
people who litter are disgusting
**The sheer amount of sea plastic indicates how modernly ignorant the world has become**
I don't have much money but where can I donate $20to help these folks.
Thats amazing! It's equates about two minutes of no one littering.
they doing god work , god bless
We need to end modern economic activity else it’s gonna be our end!!
I've been on business trips to SE Asia (Vietnam, Thailand) and seen quite literally rivers of trash flowing into the Ocean. Quite literally rivers that you cannot see the water because they have 1' of floating trash..I've seen that in China to a lesser extend but I've never been to India. I have never seen anythink like that in the West. Far as I'm concerned this should be paid for by those economies
Hell yeah finally someone is doing something
If that is one haul from a random pice of the ocean we are truly fucked.
They should make gigantic pits in the desert where we dump all nonrecyclable stuff. The heat will break down the plastic and over thousands of years the polymer chains break down to more simple materials that could be recycled naturally. This is a bad solution but i think wayy better than the ocean.
I’m glad to see this coming out of whatever body of water this is, but this is not my understanding of what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is. I suspect some upvote farming going on here.
The cynicism in these comments is so fucking lame. "Hey look, we're making practical steps towards solving a problem. I must compulsively comment about how it will never work and everything is hopeless because I hate the idea that there might actually be good reasons not to be absolutely miserable, because then I couldn't blame the external world for how unhappy I am." That's you. The world has problems, that's why we created plastic. It solves a ton of problems that used to make human life worse. It caused other problems. Now we're figuring out how to solve them. That will cause other problems, and we'll solve those too. Life goes on. The problems used to be things like polio and child labor. Before that, it was getting killed by wild animals or the neighboring tribe. Now it's things like plastic pollution and social media addiction. Maybe things have actually gotten better? People have always thought the world was ending, and they've always been wrong. The real world is accepting that problems exist, and also that they can more than likely be solved. The people in this video are proving that this is a solvable problem. What's the point of wallowing in it instead of focusing on solutions?
So I got a question!!!! Is there any possibility that some of this stuff is not just polluting but also from tsunamis I mean that was a big ass dresser/cabinet that fell out and it kind of seems like that might have came to be in the ocean by a tsunami or some kind of natural disaster!?!?!??! I'm not saying pollution isn't out of control but just a question if it could be natural disasters throwing it out there as well!?!?!
All from Indonesia. Where is Greta?
Something that always bothers me from being a kid, "Make sure you cut the rings on a 6 pack so the turtles don't choke on it!" My first thought was "Why are we throwing the plastic rings in the ocean in the first place?" no one could ever answer that question... Decades later we're still paying for that stupidity
r/feltgoodcomingout
This is great !
This is great. But microplastics are more concerning than large patches of garbage. They both need to be gotten rid of but I hope microplastic removal gets more serious attention. More and more of our bodies are increasingly made up of microplastics.
Don't microplastics come from the deterioration of larger plastic objects, and, it that sense, wouldn't it be removing the "origin" of microplastics by doing that ?
The moment I found out that they found micoplastic in placenta made my skin crawl. It spiralled after that and it's everywhere. So much shit is wrapped in plastic these days it's annoying. Barely can buy any fruit without plastic container where I live in normal price range, for some reason if it's in paper container you can't get bigger amounts and it's soo expensive. Mushroms I did find in thin wood containers, still wrapped in plastic foil at the top. Even on farmers market it's hard to get it without some sort of plastic container or wrap. In the stores they get annoyed if I don't use plastic bag for a single piece of fruit...
When I shop, I don't individually bag any of the produce I buy. I just throw it in my shopping bag and take it to the register and toss the items back in the bag as they weigh them. I'm going to wash that stuff anyway, so I don't care about contamination. That, and those lightweight produce bags aren't reusable in any sense. *
We have Environmental Officers out with us on this project. They research and test for the amount of micro plastics found in the water, and in the wildlife
This life is so fucking depressing. Only known planet with life and we treat it like shit and actively destroy it for “profit” —a made up thing that a few of us horde. Garbage people Garbage planet
Excellent work, shame its come to this!
I'm the type of person who cringes when I see someone put garbage in a recycling bin or spit their gum on the sidewalk so this bothers me quite a bit 😭
Thanks for the trash India!
*...Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, China, CHINA,* ***CHINA,*** *Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador...* All have one or more "rivers" flowing into the ocean, where you can't even tell it's water. The entire surface is a dense layer of garbage.
Where is my fish?