Where does the plastic in oceans come from?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Seven of the top ten rivers are in the Philippines. Two are in India, and one in Malaysia. The Pasig River in the Philippines alone accounts for 6.4% of global river plastics. This paints a very different picture to earlier studies where it was Asia’s largest rivers – the Yangtze, Xi, and Huangpu rivers in China, and Ganges in India – that were dominant."
Sources: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health/article/2168819/philip...
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/10/plastic-trash-from-the-sac...
https://urban-links.org/insight/turning-the-tide-on-ocean-pl...
[1] https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/cover-story-trash-ash
I really hate that recycling became essentially a for-profit shell game of shipping it somewhere else to be a problem rather than dealing with building the domestic infrastructure needed to correctly handle it (including not overselling recycling so we could get waste-to-energy plants as part of the mix).
And I still can't get a non melting straw.
1. I'm a man so I don't have a purse to put it in, thereby making carrying it around a pain
2. cleaning it probably uses more resources than making a new straw and disposing of it
Perks include:
1) Space for a straw or extra objects but conveniently small enough for day-to-day activities
2) A good range of available colours and tones to match formality
3) Useful for holding travel documentation and other objects at the airport
4) Fun couples activities with matching bags
That's one metric. Are you sure it's the best way to understand this question?
If people are using them, then almost by definition people are finding value from them, so you have to be more careful than that (not to mention the administrative cost of the ban, but let's ignore that here).
Straws are a small enough thing that it's easy to be mindlessly dismissive by saying "bring your own", but that does not actually advance your side of the argument at all. You can see how absurd that argument is when applying it to other things -- why not ban wasteful drink bottles and cans? Just bring your own cup or bottle from home. Or ban the wasteful automobile, just walk or ride or catch a bus if you want to go somewhere.
Or looking at it another way -- straws are such a minuscule part of the plastic pollution problem that banning them really doesn't matter right? If you can handwave away their small inconsequential value, then I can handwave away their small inconsequential impact.
> A large group of people have determined that it is wasteful and have therefore pushed to change it. I'm not a "lone thinker" in this regard. I can't imagine a world view in which you deem the disposal of straws, used entirely to suck liquids inside of probably an hour window, is not an easy problem to solve. I would also argue that such seemingly trivial changes are symptomatic of increasing reflection and movement towards the reduction of plastic, rather than as you paint it, some kind of virtue signalling exercise intended to piss off other people. At the end of the day, most people are not in control of global supply chains or have extenuating circumstances that inhibit their ability to contribute to the reduction of plastic waste beyond mitigating what they do and dont chuck out.
Logical fallacies. None of what you wrote addresses what I wrote or the flaws in your assertion.
> (of a person, action, or process) using or expending something of value carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.
So yes. It is extravagant to use a straw and then throw it out and it is wasteful especially when perfectly viable alternatives are available that do not produce plastic debris.
not "by definition" really
There is a limit of things you can ban before people will get tired of banning, and then you won't be able to ban things that might fully deserve it.
BTW, the world is running out of clean water, so how about we ban dishes in the restaurants to avoid wastefully washing them? Just bring your own, right?
[0]: (note: ref near the end, but good read overall, if a poor source) https://www.statnews.com/2017/10/06/hepatitis-a-outbreak-san...
Yeah, you're right. Straws aren't the main problem. Of the two bags of litter I picked up today, there were only one or two. You could ban everything but straws and there'd still be so much plastic in the ocean that if you were forced to look at it, you'd vomit.
You're right. We're not going to fix plastic ocean trash by banning straws. We're going to have to fix plastic ocean trash by banning all one-time use plastics. For a start. And then ban the rest. And I guarantee you you're going to hate that.
That would be it's own economic and ecological disaster. How many trees are you going to cut down and how much ore will you mine to make this happen? And given the considerable weight savings plastics bring, how much fuel will we burn to transport our substantially heavier goods in the dystopia you envision?
Pardon my bluntness, but if we had a better habit of not eating so many to-go meals and sat down and ate off a reusable plate with reusable utensils like all of humanity had to just 100 years ago, single-use plastic would have almost no reason to exist.
If it doesn't include Philippines, China and India, it won't do much for fixing plastic ocean trash.
Also, we can obviously keep using one-time use plastics, as long as we don't dump it in the ocean, and still fix the plastic ocean trash problem.
Because it is obviously theatre to anyone with an ounce of intelligence and integrity. Another chance for unworldly Westerners to signal their grace without making real, substantial change.
It is clear that to fix ocean plastic we don’t need to ban plastics, we don’t need to do feel good campaigns about environmentalism in america… we need to promote public service announcements about littering in a few target countries and subsidize the creation of sanitation industries around the world.
Making americans bring their own bags and drink through terrible straws makes a certain kind of person feel good because it feels like they’re doing something, a feeling which is somehow enhanced by the thing being somewhat unpleasant and unpopular. Feeling like you’re doing something and actually accomplishing something are entirely different.
Starbucks solved it that way and it’s amazing. Their cold drinks now come with a lid that has a big hole you can drink out of like it’s a normal cup. No straws, no annoyance, everyone’s happy.
The problem are those stupid lids with a hole in the middle that make it literally impossible to drink without a straw. But the non-plastic straws aren’t up for the job.
So you’re stuck with a super annoying situation that just sucks.
That said, the straw ban is nonsense not because of this, but because they should ban goddamn plastic CUPS and plastic CONTAINERS first. I routinely get served a compostable straw with a petroleum-based plastic cup.
So because you now see that SF is a smaller slice of the global pie of pollution than you expected, then SF should not have attempted to address the local problem?
There have been efforts over the last few decades to clean it up. But, Mumbai slums are situated on the river, and dump everything and anything into it. It would be nice to know if the Ulhas is mostly polluted with plastic upstream or at the mouth near Mumbai.
For thousands of years, Philippines culture was responsible for zero plastic waste being dumped into river and ocean systems. Food was grown organically, packaged and transported sustainably, and waste was managed to preserve ocean and river ecosystems.
What changed?
> The United States exercised formal colonial rule over the Philippines, its largest overseas colony, between 1899 and 1946. American economic and strategic interests in Asia and the Pacific were increasing in the late 1890s in the wake of an industrial depression and in the face of global, interimperial competition.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
US corporations deserve great credit for inventing plastics which have enabled foods and beverages to be transported conveniently all over the world.
Fortunately for US corporations, this credit has already been realised through the enormous revenues that have accrued to the patent holders and trading companies which have been richly rewarded for the invention and production of plastics.
> What changed?
The development of mass produced plastics in the 1940s-1950s; no one was throwing any significant quantity of plastic waste anywhere before then, so “thousands of years” of history are irrelevant.
> The United States exercised formal colonial rule over the Philippines, its largest overseas colony, between 1899 and 1946.
So...that ended just as mass produced plastics were becoming available anywhere, and wouldn't be directly relevant. If you want to argue that it produced cultural changes that directly affected how they local people reacted to mass plastic availability, you should make a specific argument, with evidence, about the changes it supposedly induced.
You're making that argument yourself in your own words.
> you should make a specific argument, with evidence, about the changes it supposedly induced.
I wouldn't argue that way. I would instead note two salient points.
1. Traditional Philippine food waste management involved disposing of food waste and packaging in rivers. That was environmentally sustainable when all food packaging was biodegradable e.g. banana leaves and coconut shells.
2. Whilst foreign companies introduced plastic packaging to the Philippines, nobody introduced a way to process plastic waste effectively, which is why we have this problem.
so, "bad cultures" are just misguided, and can change.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/news/plastic-waste-shipment...
EU have great recycling industry, none of the waste leave the continent, it's all reused or sold(to be reused), there is no waste at all
https://theoceancleanup.com/updates/in-search-of-the-rivers-...
Banning single-plastic use in removes millions of tons of plastic from the ending up in the sea. That is a net benefit for very little effort and inconvenience. It's not going to solve all problems and it's a low hanging fruit, but it's a start toward removing our dependence on single-use plastics.
Whatever level of plastic management we reach, there are already millions of tons of plastic in the sea to clean up. So efforts on that front are not in vain either. Again, they aren't going to fix the whole issue but they attempt to fix one part of it.
We don't have to tackle issues one at a time. People make efforts where they can. Even if it's only solving a few percent of the global issue. It's not posturing if it helps. No-one said each of these is the end-all of all solutions to the plastic waste problem.
These efforts don't distract from tackling the problem of waste disposal. Helping building waste infrastructures in countries like the Phillipines is first and foremost a political and policy problem, there needs to be a political will and a legislation framework to make it happen, then it's a money problem.
The peanut gallery is in full force today.
It's really not necessary to insult people who are trying to make a difference. You could spend your time turning up your nose at the huge corporations producing the plastic products that they are jamming in to these markets, or you could turn up your nose at corrupt third world countries for having broken waste management strategies, or you could turn up your nose at people who throw their garbage in rivers...and you decide that the people you want to deride are...the people picking up garbage and pointing out the problem?
In truth, I've never met a narcissist picking up garbage. Never.
> In truth, I've never met a narcissist picking up garbage.
I didn't call them narcissist. I called the people who got on Twitter to let the world they know they support plastic straw bans because they care about the ocean, narcissists. And why do people feel the need to make up straw men to respond to? You can't find enough holes in what I said, so you make up something I didn't say? Why?
So, where is it coming from?
TFA examined the last step - from river to ocean. But what is the source of all this plastic? Is it soda bottles, single use plastic bags, shrink wrap, structural plastic?
> It is estimated that 81% of ocean plastics come from Asian rivers. The Philippines alone contribute around one-third of the global total.
That's a start. We are becoming more informed.
What percentage of the ocean plastics are manufactured in Asia?
What percentage of the ocean plastics are manufactured in USA?
What percentage of the ocean plastics are manufactured in Europe?
What percentage of the ocean plastics are manufactured by the top 5 global food corporations?
The value of these questions is not to shift blame. It is to understand the system so we can target fixes.
The most informative question wasn't even raised in TFA.
Who profits from plastic waste?
What types of items end up in the oceans?
Are they dumped legally or illegally?
What are the reasons that certain countries don't have the infrastructure in place to dispose of waste?
How can wealthier countries do their part in supporting countries who need to develop better waste management infrastructure?
I think that it is better to ask questions that lead us directly towards solutions that are actionable. The data strongly suggests that ineffective or nonexistent waste management is the root cause, so I think we should direct our questions towards solving that issue.
That will require money.
Who profits from producing the plastic in the first place?
The reason that question addresses your point is that a viable systemic fix would involve repurposing a percentage of the revenue towards waste management.
Once they sell you something wrapped in minimal cost packaging, they socialize the problem. Rinse and repeat.
We know the Philippines take in recycling from the rest of the world as they had a diplomatic spat with Canada over being send household waste rather than recyclables.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/trash-talk-phi...
The data point that the Yangtze, Xi, and Huangpu rivers are no longer the biggest sources can be simply attributed to China banning the import of recyclable plastic; it now likely goes to the Philippines and Malaysia instead.
Stuff that washes out of rivers is almost all single-use containers like soda/water bottles, bottle caps, food containers, chip bags, consumer items from shampoo to mouthwash to toothpaste, toothbrushes, flip flops, combs, lighters, straws, toys, balls, cleaning products, oil cans, drums, tobacco tins, tupperware, disposable utensils, paddles, gas cans, pill bottles, syringes, milk crates.
Basically, if it's made out of plastic--doesn't matter the use, the lifetime--it ends up in the river and then the ocean.
Commercial fishing produces tons of discarded nets. I've seen an estimate that over half of ocean garbage is nets. I don't have a habit of trawling the deep ocean, so I can't confirm that. But I pick up beaches a lot and from volume, it's almost all consumer food items. Soda bottles in particular. It gives you a picture of what most people eat and drink. We're a bunch of sick monkeys from what I gather.
I'll also say that what you find washing up on shore or down river is filtered out by a number of factors. Not all plastics are buoyant (i.e. less dense than water). Most plastic materials are actually really close to neutral, and some are slightly denser than water. That means that containers that get punctured and eventually fill up will simply sink. If those materials end up in surf breaks they will get obliterated and turned into a microplastic dust that will can still be suspended in the liquid. So you won't find them washing up (as much). The lighter plastics that are buoyant will tend to washed up onto shore just by wind and wave action. So the ocean sorts and filters things by their size and density. What you see on shore isn't what's out there in the deep ocean.
Case in point: plastic bottles are usually PET, which is denser than water. They will actually sink if they are punctured or without cap. The ones you find usually have a cap on. But the caps are polypropelene and they are generally less dense than water, so they float. That's why you'll always find a zillion more bottle caps and almost never find a plastic bottle without a cap on it, at least from wash up.
Makes you realize where all those damn missing bottles are. The ocean floor is fucked.
[1] https://www.alamy.com/portrait-of-a-man-amid-his-goods-in-a-...
I think this is a hard question. Lots of people want to say that America is because it is consuming a lot of plastic and then shipping it to Asian countries for recycling. But they pay for that shipping and service. I do think there's a problem if you sell the service of recycling and then just dump it in the ocean/rivers. It's clearly a "both" players are at fault, but there's a key difference. One player is offering a service and the other player isn't checking if that service is being done in the way it is being claimed to be done. I don't think these two things are equal when we consider "fault." This comes down to a question of incentives and where those align. This is also why typically in law we come down harder on the person offering a service in bad faith.
So no matter why Philippines is contributing one-third of the global total, we should be talking about and criticizing them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't also be criticizing others (we should) nor that we shouldn't raise awareness of bad business practices. But we shouldn't shift the blame. We distribute the blame.
Why do you suspect that? The amount of vehicle weight per passenger that those tires have to carry is significantly higher in a car than a bus.
And I'm not absolving them of responsibility, but the richest countries pay to offload plastic on them knowing pretty well there is no way to get rid of it besides tossing it. Those Asian regions that burn it have awful air quality issues.
Should these regions refuse money for our plastic? Probably - but this paints an incomplete picture.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
Plastic garbage from Trader Joe's and an AARP card are peeking out of hillocks of plastic trash piling up in Indonesia.
It's a sign of a new global quandary: What should wealthy countries do with their plastic waste now that China no longer is buying it?
I don't know how common this is but there have been several UK companies prosecuted for it. I've also seen stories where British reporters have gone to Asia and documented piles of obviously British waste in local dumps. These stories crop up in the British media quite frequently.
No.
> I thought that most countries offload their plastic waste to regions in Asia (paying them to take it), so of course Asia comes off looking as the largest emitter.
Why would that be the case? Asia's consumers - billions of them - are now the world's largest in terms of unit consumption/use/disposal of plastic.
I don't think anybody could miss the fact that China's consumer economy is now by far the world's largest in unit terms. And it's set to get quite larger yet. China has more plastic consumers than the US + EU combined at this point.
Just Indonesia + the Philippines = 380 million consumers. They buy, use and dispose of enormous amounts of plastic. These nations are not living in the 18th century, they have full access to plastic consumer goods/packaging, whether manufactured domestically or from China.
But how much of the total in the oceans is riverine versus 'oceanic'? What is the total contribution of maritime activity (freight, fishing, cruises, recreational, military) to a non-riverine/oceanic plastic?
Plastic recycling from Europe is being dumped in Asian waters - https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200630103603.h...
I'd like to see the list of worst offender countries that can do something about preventing plastic pollution, but aren't doing as much.
How is it helpful to know that India is one of the highest polluting countries when half a billion people live in abject poverty?
When it comes to emissions, poor countries are generally way lower than wealthy countries per capita. If we readjusted these charts to be plastic pollution per dollar, the Philippines would be several orders of magnitude higher than anywhere in the west.
GDP x pollution / populationIf you forget your keys you're in bigger trouble, so I still don't see your point.
Have we really come to the point where people carry a little supercomputer in their pockets at all time, but are unable to bring a bag when going shopping?
That said, “grave inconvenience” is really something. Not having plastic bags is absolutely ruining my life. Kids are crying. Wife is mad at me. Boss thinks I’m slacking. Dentist says I don’t floss. If we could have plastic bags back my life would be so much better.
I keep a crate in the trunk of my car. After paying my groceries, I put them back in the shopping cart. I drive that to my car, put the groceries in the crate, and return the shopping cart.
No bags needed, and unloading at home is easier too.
You’re living life on easy street if this is what you consider “gravely inconveniencing.”
Its like CRV tax (california redemption value) but there has never been redemption on bags.
I really liked Reddit's trash bag meme in the end. It actually seemed to get a wider reach than I would have expected. Developing countries do also have status, it might be Versace but it also can be clean waterways, you just need to tie it back to locals who in turn can push governance.
But this article just shows the data where the water gets polluted from mismanaged waste. But not where this plastic comes from? I suppose it's not the full story then?
Sources:
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/10/plastic-trash-from-the-sac...
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health/article/2168819/philip...
Don’t let any of that fool you. We never actually get a breakdown of contribution by country in the extensive article. I’m not sure why.