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Comment by dbatten | Hacker News Reader

Where does all this come from?

I'm admittedly not the biggest saint on the sustainable living front, but I also don't see how all of this is getting into the oceans? AFAIK, any plastic that comes into my house either ends up in the recycling (where it's presumably recycled or sent to the landfill if it can't be recycled), ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) or (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling. Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.

It's easy to blame others for this sort of stuff (and, as I already said, I admit I could do more on this stuff). But I can't help but think that first world countries with relatively advanced recycling/trash systems aren't contributing much to this and can't do much about it by implementing additional regulations...

Am I wrong about that?

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No, you aren't wrong.

"Almost all plastic in the ocean comes from just 10 rivers" [0] - The source is Deutsche Welle, which appears to be Germany's equivalent of the BBC. [1]

"It turns out that about 90 percent of all the plastic that reaches the world's oceans gets flushed through just 10 rivers: The Yangtze, the Indus, Yellow River, Hai River, the Nile, the Ganges, Pearl River, Amur River, the Niger, and the Mekong (in that order).

These rivers have a few key things in common. All of them run through areas where a lot of people live — hundreds of millions of people in some cases. But what's more important is that these areas don't have adequate waste collection or recycling infrastructure. There is also little public awareness that plastic trash is a problem at all, so a lot of garbage, gets thrown into the river and conveniently disappears downstream."

Someone linked a great map of these 10 rivers in a past thread, but I can't seem to find it.

[0] http://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle

I wonder how practical it would be to have some sort of plastic filter / water processing plant where these rivers dump into the ocean. It would be in all of our best interest to fund something like that, but I wonder if you could do it without a negative ecological impact, i.e. blocking wildlife from traversing the river to and from the ocean.

Definitely possible. As always, dollars and effort are what's required.

https://www.theoceancleanup.com/technology/

You might be interested in Baltimore Harbor's Water Wheel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5l7s6wC50g

It uses the water flow, solar, some pontoons and a clever design to fill up a dumpster with debris. This seems like the real issue: someone still needs to take it from the dumpster, but at that point it's a manageable problem.

Or just have some sort of waste disposal facilities like civilized countries.

I have trouble believing that 10 rivers are responsible for this. For example, the Ocean Cleanup Project estimates that 1 garbage truck per minute enters the world's oceans. Picture that in terms of plastic flowing through rivers, and it just doesn't work.

The only explanation is organized, industrial-scale dumping from coastal countries (particularly Indonesia and Southeast Asia) that lack landfill and reclamation infrastructure.

I wouldn't be surprised if commercial dumping is a factor, but I don't find the idea of 10 large rivers transporting that amount of waste in a minute that hard to imagine?

If you work out the math for what the river would have to look like, and then inspect these rivers, I think you'll find that it doesn't match up.

At any rate, it would great if this were actually the case, because then it would be easier to bottleneck and corral this trash. But, I don't think this is the case.

1/10th of a garbage truck per minute per river is not going to look like anything obvious just some random junk.

The Amazon is dumping 450,000,000 cu ft per minute into the ocean on average, 1/10th of a garbage truck in such a vast quantity of brown water filled with floating crap seems very reasonable. Further, this is an average the bulk is probably dumped during floods when the flow is higher and plastic floats from roads and whatnot into over flowing drainage systems.

"If"? Please do the math then.

OK, fine, I'll do the math for you.

Here's a list of discharge rates for most of those rivers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_discharge add in the Hai river at 717 m^3/s and the total discharge volume of those 10 rivers together adds up to 123,500 m^3/s, that's 7.4 million cubic meters per minute.

What do you think a few cubic meters of plastic diluted into over 7 million cubic meters looks like? It looks like a dilution level of around 1 part per million. Is that representative of the hugely polluted outflows of these rivers? It certainly seems like it to me.

Ten percent is abandoned fishing nets. http://www.fao.org/tempref/docrep/fao/011/i0620e/i0620e.pdf

Interesting, on page 19 of this paper[0] it says "The fishing industry is responsible for the largest input (50–90%) of total plastic marine debris to the oceans". Granted, [0] is from 2012, whereas the paper from Schmidt et al is newer. Nonetheless, you would think Schmidt et al would cite this older paper.

[0] http://plastics.earthmind.net/files/ART_Hammer_2012.pdf

EDIT: It appears the 2017 paper is looking at microplastics.

This is one of the few beaches in Mumbai. The plastic is because the city dumps its sewers into the ocean and the plastic washes up on the beach. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEnaEqan7FI Large sections of the coastline have mangroves which are completely covered in plastic and impossible to clean up.

Full text of the journal article referenced in the Deutsche Welle article is paywalled, but there is what looks like a research/conference poster at https://www.ufz.de/export/data/2/149396_EGU_2017_Schmidt.pdf that contains quite a lot of detail.

When you put something in the bin it means it "goes to the recycler" not "it gets recycled". The recycler sorts through the trash and recycles what they can. The price of oil, currently low, makes it less viable to recycle plastic. Not every container that has that little symbol on the bottom is really commonly recycled.

The vagueness of what happens at the recycler coupled with the fact that the packaging industry puts symbols on container that the average person thinks they mean they will be recycled, lead me to believe that a lot of this is done to make us feel better. I think we all should try to minimize the amount of packaging we use. Water bottles and plastic bags are completely unnecessary.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. It was in that order for a reason : )

Undoubtedly... hence why I said "or ends up in a landfill if it can't be recycled."

I'm certain a lot of the stuff I put in a recycling bin doesn't get recycled. But I would be flabbergasted if it's being dumped in an ocean...

Pretty sure most/or at least a lot of it doesnt end up on a landfill

https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-is-no-1-in-exporting-tr...

Some percentage of what lands in the "goes to the recycler" bin doesn't even make it there.

Exactly 0% of these systems are 100% perfect 100% of the time.

Coastal regions are especially problematic in this regard, since all it takes is wind to carry uncontained litter out to sea.

Recycling bins get blown or knocked over distributing their contents on a frequent basis. People collect recyclables from bins in an attempt to earn income, the stuff collected is not reliably delivered to the recycling center. I've seen drunken idiots kick over recycling bins in SF on more than one occasion, from locations with line of sight to either the bay or the Pacific.

Vehicles transporting trash and recyclables are not 100% perfect. I've followed numerous "Recology" trucks in the SF bay area with trash flying out from under the mesh net they use to cover the trailer - it's unattached on the long edges.

Population centers are continuously adding uncontrolled trash to the environment. When they happen to be coastal, much of it goes to sea.

Recycling is most effective at giving people an impression of a 100% closed system and enabling them to continue purchasing individually packages plastic disposable^Wrecyclable goods. The actual implementation of recycling goes off a cliff the moment the bins move outside, but most people don't interact with it after that point, so the theatre is mostly effective.

This isn't even considering the fact that recycling companies are sometimes corrupt and simply dump the waste wherever is convenient rather than fulfilling their obligations.

> (in the case of plastic grocery bags) gets explicitly taken back to a grocery store for recycling.

1. How do we know that the stores actually recycle the items we give them? There are many accounts around the web that most of this stuff (plastic bags, plastic shipping material, batteries, bulbs, ...) is just emptied into a regular dumpster instead of being properly disposed. Have things changed? Do retailers have internal audits for this or is this just empty marketing?

2. Even if the plastic bags are picked up a 3rd party, is it actually recycled or just dumped? Plastic bags are very difficult to recycle and only a few facilities in the country are able to process them properly. Are they somehow shipped to these facilities?

I'm normally hesistant whenever there are new regulations. However, I totally support the mandated purchase of plastic bags. Someone can prove me wrong but I feel that environmental conservation tends to be better controlled and encouraged by pricing instead of just marketing.

You wash your clothes. Any clothing that is mostly synthetic (eg, fleeces[1]) will shed fibres into the water system. In some places those fibres end up in the oceans.

But also I think a lot of it is industrial.

[1] A bit frustrating that these were sometimes sold as eco-friendly way to recycle PET bottles.

EDIT: this comment got downvotes. Here's a newspaper article talking about microfibre pollution: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jun/29...

> Multiple studies have shown synthetic fibers to make up the lion’s share of microplastics found in oceans, rivers and lakes, and clothes made from synthetics (polyester, nylon, and so on) are widely implicated as the source of that pollution. Microfibers, as the name implies, are tiny, so they can easily move through sewage treatment plants. Unlike natural fibers, such as cotton or wool, synthetic fibers do not biodegrade, and tend to bind with molecules of harmful chemical pollutants found in wastewater, such as pesticides or flame retardants. Studies have shown health problems among plankton and other small organisms that eat microfibers, which then make their way up the food chain. Researchers have found high numbers of fibers inside fish and shellfish sold at markets.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachid_Dris/publication...

> Synthetic fibers are one of the forms in which microplastics can be found. They derive presumably from synthetic clothing or macroplastics. Different pathways are thought to be an important source of fibrous microplastics in the aquatic environment. It has been shown that laundry washing machines discharge large amounts of microplastics into waste-waters reaching 1900 fibers in one wash (Browne et al., 2011)). During wastewater treatment, synthetic fibers are known to contaminate sewage sludge (Habib et al., 1998; Zubris and Richards, 2005). The sources and fate of microplastics in the various compartments of the urban environment are poorly documented (Dris et al., 2015a); this paper focuses on the atmospheric compartment and investigates the contribution of the atmospheric fallout as a potential vector of plastic pollution

I don't know why you got downvoted, but you're absolutely right.

Polyester fibers absolutely get washed off clothing and drained out into the ocean (they're too small to be filtered in most cases).

This is however not the plastics the article is talking about - at least not the one that was a problem for the whale. The article says "plastic bags, nets, ropes, plastic sacks, and even a plastic jerrycan" - not a nanometer-scale fibers.

> ends up in the trash (where it's buried in a landfill) ... Exactly 0% ends up in an ocean.

There's no reason to assume that what goes in a landfill, stays in a landfill. There's the stuff that washes away or blows away during years before the landfill is completely covered up, and then there's the stuff that gradually enters the local water supply afterward.

Are you sure about that? They've included a lot of plastics in places you wouldn't think. For instance, in your toothpaste, and in soaps. Lots of people don't even realize that they're sending microplastics right into the water system because crest wanted their toothpaste to look "better".

Here's what relatively advanced recycling systems do/did with much of the plastic: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-b...

Travel to SEA.

Much of it is from fishing vessels.

I highly doubt that all the fishing vessels in the world are dumping more than 5% of the estimated plastic in the ocean.

Over 46% of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" by mass is fishing nets alone: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

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