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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

"massive ingestion of fishing gear and plastics"

I think there's an elephantine clue in there somewhere.

A high proportion of marine platics, and especially ones most dangerous to sea life are fishing gear. Fishing kills the oceans both directly and indirectly. It's unsustainable, and we should stop doing it.

As for the rest, collection is by far the biggest problem, and most of the pollution comes from seaboard cities in developing nations.

Sure the manufacturers should be made responsible for the ultimate fate of their products, but it is not their problem or fault alone, though I think it's fair to say they've used every trick possible to push all responsibility on to others so far.

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A couple of relevant links:

Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880

Ten Rivers Contribute Most of the Plastic in the Oceans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19908033

> most of the pollution comes from seaboard cities in developing nations.

I also notice an disgusting amount of rubbish disposed of on the nearest pavement in developed nations.

Yes, that is true, some developed nations cities have disgusting pavements.

Still, that doesn’t compare to every report I heard from people I know personally that went to visit, or had to work, or has families/grow in our former colonies. The waste management is orders of magnitude worse.

Yes , people complain about Rome and SF streets, but those are nothing compared to the reports i’ve heard. It’s another circle of hell entirely.

And remember that most of the world population is from developing nations (well I guess it depends on how you classify china and india, but those are only starting to care about environment now, for the last decade their focus was rapid industrialization, which is the biggest crime to the environment)

Regarding “developed” vs “developing” categorization, I guess most people think about it differently, everyone has their bias and there’s lots of politics involved in the terms. But i would do the divide on whether sustainability/environment is one of the most constant political topics in the country, and most major political parties have to engage with it (to different levels). This means food and shelter are secure (even if prices are hard on people)

Of course, but honestly nothing compared to many developing cities, from first hand experience.

And the developed pavement rubbish is collected, or if it's washed into the sewers, it's then filtered out before going to the river/sea. Not so in many developing nations, where it's often either thrown directly into the rivers, or washed there by heavy rains.

> it's then filtered out before going to the river/sea

31 Mar 2022 — Water companies discharged raw sewage into English rivers 372,533 times last year, a slight reduction on the previous year.

They dont even filter the sewerage before dumping it in rivers. What mades you think that they are picking out all the other detritus?

This is on an entirely different scale, and not only that, the UK water companies are under investigation for their practice of dumping sewage during storm overflow situations; it may be nefarious, it may simply be inadequate capacity.

IMHO it's unlikely, unless they are being exceptionally brazen, that they're skipping the easiest and most easily observable step in sewage processing, filtering out solids.

Exception proving the rule?

There’s regulation, there’s fines, there’s enforcement. Waste management companies do try to avoid those, and in some cases with big success. But some business trying their ways out of the laws, is very different from there being no law, no enforcement, no reporting, and bad management just being normal.

I know people that worked in waste management companies, and lawsuits for bad management are real, and most operations run legally, but there is just huge amount of money to in some ocasions break the law. So the big shots call the big shot. Immoral and unethical move, but most people working there don’t get enough opportunities outside those companies so , they just follow along the big shot call. I do know some that left because of not wanting to lie if a lawsuit came. “I want to sleep at night with clean conscience “ . There’s plenty of FAANG engineers with plenty of opportunities outside, but it’s better to do some very ethical questionable stuff there.

The thing is, you can only hide illegal stuff if most of the work you do is legal. But what if you don’t need to hide because there’s no laws or no enforcement? That’s the scenario on plenty of developing nations, the scale of bad waste disposal is just different.

Same with “recycle your clothes” that some fast fashion brands do and pay with vouchers, is just green washing marketing shit to just burn them in international waters.

Free trade between the worlds nations is very pretty, but when accountability is very different in different country you get shit like that. Just outsource illegal stuff.

( on a side note There’s plenty of FAANG engineers with plenty of opportunities outside, but it’s better to do some very ethical questionable stuff there. sure if your visa depends on the job it’s one thing, but plenty can just leave, but paycheck is too good or lifestyle was so inflated, that questionable development is the only thing that pays the bills)

"Free trade between the worlds nations is very pretty, but when accountability is very different in different country you get shit like that."

Exactly, free trade was never a level playing field and many nations have taken advantage of the fact.

What annoys me most is that governments still pretend there's no problem and or that they're still pursuing individual free trade agreements without including provisions to cover these environmental issues. By our governments not doing so we are just shifting our 'shit' from our location to some other country with less ridged controls. We are dishonesty freeloading on others and the environment suffers just as much as if we'd not enacted our environmental laws.

I recall this being obvious during the free trade debates of the Reagan-Thatcher era but Big Business had such a stranglehold on governments that there wasn't a snowball's chance of including not only the environmental stuff but also other important stuff such as wages parity, product quality (parity quality on like items)—junk product dumped at super low prices alone killed off many local industries and we still haven't fully recovered. Same goes for safety standards—countries with high standards had to reduce them to the lowest common denominator, and so on.

What still worries me is why the populace at large swallowed this poisonous rhetoric without major objection. Remember, that happened in the 1930s with disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, that tragedy hasn't made the citizenry immune from such rhetoric.

It seems to me that until we citizens find some way of protecting and immunizing ourselves from the snake oil salesmen then we're bound to repeat similar mistakes next time around.

This video talks about air pollution but pay attention to the things people throw on the ground

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC4saZg6sG0

Plastic and organic trash emanates from the coastlines of southeast Asian countries like energetic particles are emitted by the sun. Lots of it and in every direction.

> most of the pollution comes from seaboard cities in developing nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_wise_monkeys

Without some citations, this is just a internet claim. I will note that it would be very convenient to a lot of big industries which happen to have very well funded marketing teams if what you wrote was true.

I'm not going to write a paper every time I comment.

I don't see how your insinuation that my comments are pro plastic-corp-marketing is valid in any way.

I've said the fishing industry should end.

And that manufacturers should be responsible for the life-cycle of their products, but that of course the rest of society needs to play their part in that, unless we force coke etc to employ garbage-collection departments, etc, etc.

Or we can just ban plastics entirely, but honestly, plastic is used for a reason, and for example a plastic bag is highly efficient, especially when it's used multiple times (as all mine are), and then as temporary storage, bin liners, etc.

I'd like also to note that although the headline is 'Coke', which I assume is mostly PET bottles (quite recycleable), Unilever is also in the list. IMHO cosmetics, soaps, detergents are the actual worst manufacturers when it comes to plastic waste, and seem to be avoiding the spotlight, compared to plastic bags, straws, etc.

A simple “according to xxx” would have sufficed, no need for an essay. I’ve heard the same thing, I don’t know from where, and that makes me suspect. I wish it where true, it would mean we have to change 1 single industry instead of all manufacturing. The pictures I have seen from The Great Plastic Texas-sized zone didn’t look like fishnets. I don’t think you are pro-Coca-Cola but I do think that message being out there benefits them.

One recent report https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/07/invisibl...

And I'm not saying this is the only problem, far from it.

We do still have to deal with consumer plastic waste, but we can't just blame manufacturers for that, as the main problem is that it isn't collected properly.

Sure, manufacturers should make less (but we should demand less), make it more easily collected, and be held responsible for the fate of their products; maybe taxed based on re-useability, etc.

But it's quite simplistic and just misses the real issues to blame coke for dead whales.

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