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Comment by recycledmatt | Hacker News Reader

It is 50,000 tons per year. In plastic recycling terms, not that much volume. A very large plastic recycling facility can do about 200,000 tons in a year. http://intelligentliving.co/worlds-largest-climate-neutral-p...

A tractor trailer hauls roughly 20 tons - so all the sea nets in the world in a year could be hauled by 2,500 trailers. Not that much in the scheme of things.

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From the article:

"Unlike other forms of marine debris, fishing gear is specifically designed to catch marine life. Under certain conditions, derelict gear can continue to catch and kill organisms for years."

The issue is economic incentives do not align. The fisher can bring it back to shore and probably have to pay to dispose of it in a landfill. Or they can drop it in the ocean for free, while creating a negative externality.

If someone setup a fund to pay fisherman 5 cents a pound to bring their nets back, and then they would deal with disposal, they could avert most of this. No one has stepped up with $50 million a year tho to solve this.

Maybe you missed the part where it's IN THE OCEAN.

floating recycling center then. Believe there's a video somewhere of one in the Charles River or something.

There is one in Baltimore!

Not a terrible quantity in one year, but the stuff essentially never disappears, so you have to sum over all years starting from a couple of decades back to the hypothetical future date where we finally manage to stop polluting (or killed all marine life). That adds up to a lot of garbage.

It does beg the question, what is the right amount of plastic to be in the world's oceans?

Of course it’s none, but there are other sources of plastic pollution that are much larger contributors. To me it’s not about the amount, but the ROI on mitigation measures

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