But the cynic inside me fears it would never make a difference. First of all, one common statistic is that 90% of trash in the ocean that comes from people dumping it (in rivers) comes from just 10 rivers, all in China/Asia.
And if they cared about the problem, they'd already be doing something about it. But it seems like they don't. Because the real solution there is the same as what is done in the first world -- to implement actual municipal trash pickup and urban trashcans etc. If they can't even do that, I have a hard time believing they'll bother with "bubble barriers".
So this seems like something first-world countries would implement... but that's not where the problem is.
But second, it's also common to hear that a large majority of overall ocean plastic comes from discarded industrial fishing gear -- nets and the like. Which this obviously does nothing for.
So while still very clever, I sadly don't think this could ever make a difference. We need to actually solve the much messier human problems of installing trash collection around the world and figuring out ways to monitor and punish fishers who discard their equipment.
I think there is now a real will from the chinese government to limit plastic pollution.
For example, waste sorting started in Shanghai a year ago and started in Beijing last June [0].
This is not the usual waste sorting we are experiencing in Europe, for example, since you need to decline your identity and not make any mistake while sorting or you may get charged.
Probably a bit too invasive (this is China after all) but more thorough for what I consider a good cause.
Besides, the first bans on plastic use will take effect on January [1]. This is only for small items now, but this is a first step, and it also includes production of these items, which is especially impressive considering China supremacy on the production lines.
You mentioned Shanghai and Beijing, but note that sorting waste isn't new to the country. I was part of a team that installed a single-stream waste sorting system in China in 2007, prior to the Olympics. It was a very impressive system where all garbage would enter at one end and a large array of machines and people would sort the garbage into recyclables, compost, and the rest for an incinerator. It used all the latest tech, mainly from North America.
I think current garbage sorting is waaay too inefficient, and this is fundamentally limits the recyclability rates.
This is especially obvious when you talk about stuff made of a lot of different materials.
Picking such things apart for different material streams is impossible to scale.
I was thinking, what if governments were mandating mandatory chemical tagging of all common materials, so you can just shred everything, and then separate materials using machines which can distinguish chemical tags.
I think it might be easier to just have machines learn to recognize the top 99.9% of all things thrown away and leave the rest to a a small group (or landfill).
This seems like the obvious solution. I bet a database of 100,000 products would cover the vast majority of all waste worldwide. If you can make a machine to sort those things into 100,000 (virtual) piles, you can then have a specific way to handle each type of thing.
Each manufacturer of those goods can decide how to handle their "pile", and if they design for recyclability, it's going to be easier and cheaper for them. If they can just say "combine our product with these other products made from the same material" that'll work out cheapest. If their answer is "our product contains a mix of various toxic stuff" then they're going to have to pay for some specialist to handle it... In every location this 'pile' exists in every city...
The only place this system doesn't work is for products that change state significantly during consumer use - for example a candle gets mostly burnt away, but the remaining blobs of wax are probably untracable to the original manufacturer.
The problem, as I stated above, is that you will be landfilling significantly more than 0.01%.
There are tons of unrecyclable stuff in regular household garbage. For example, a packaging made of two incompatible in recycling methods plastics are a waste.
What about waste vaporization? There are far fewer things that are sensitive to being vaporized (meaning far less sorting needed) and the outputs are far cleaner.
Do you have any good links to the machinery / tech that does that kind of sorting? I've search for it in the past and it seems like I was mostly getting hits on European manufacturers.
The systems use lots of clever tricks, like floating paper and plastics away from metals with water or jets of air, or using eddy currents to push metals out of mixed waste. Here's one example: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-07/how-it-wor...
Recycling, even plastic bans, are not the most direct or simple fix. The first and key step is to stop dumping it in the river. Getting the plastic into landfills is the first step. Reduction and recycling are the stretch goals.
> A not insignificant part of the plastic thrown in rivers in South East Asia is consumed in Europe and the USA
I've heard this repeated many times, but every time I go searching for details I always come back with the same results: This is not true.
The garbage in rivers is local.
No one is shipping waste from Europe or USA, but some countries do buy recycling. But of course since they paid for the recycling, they have no interest in then dumping it.
If you have some source showing different I'd be interested in seeing it.
If you read the study they don't have great data, so they do a lot of estimating. According to the study itself it's 1% to 7% of recycling that ends up in the ocean.
Obviously any amount is bad, but this isn't a significant source of river plastic.
And to really drive the point home: According to the article the plastic ends up in rivers because of bad local trash management!! (As opposed to deliberate dumping.)
So the solution is exactly as others have said: These countries need modern municipal trash pickup. The problem does not originate in Europe or USA.
BTW: This is a very poor study, for example they use numbers for San Fransisco Bay watershed to estimate numbers for India.
This is ignorant; China has in recent years taken a hard line on pollution of various kinds. They already put a moratorium on importing foreign trash (which was a huge source of river pollution) and are banning single use bags and straws: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51171491
The GP said that China/Asia produces 90%. You say China is at 60%, so if we add India and the rest of Southeast Asia, you are saying essentially the same thing.
And while China might be starting to cleanup its act, India is fast urbanizing and increasing its waste production, with less investment in infrastructure. In a few years, the proportions might be swapped but the problem is not going away soon.
>90% of trash in the ocean that comes from people dumping it (in rivers) comes from just 10 rivers, all in China/Asia
So you're saying with bubble barriers in just 10 places (as opposed to all around the world), we can clean up 90% of ocean trash from dumping? That's amazing. A lot easier than trying to get China et al. to implement more "actual municipal trash pickup and urban trashcans etc." The first world could crowdfund the barriers. I'll help.
If the rivers get sufficiently clogged up with trash, the bubble barriers aren't going to do anything. The pressure from the river on a lot of garbage will easily overcome the bubbles. Eventually, somebody is going to need to incinerate the trash or move it to a landfill.
Are you thinking that the bubble barrier is just meant to push the trash to the side, and that's it? Clearly, they are trying to push it to one location for easier collection. Try being a little more open to ideas, and a little more thought about next steps.
It's much easier to collect trash in dump sites in flood-prone areas for example than from a river. Concentrated trash in a smaller body of water won't be much easier to collect than the status quo given how much concentrated trash there already major Asian rivers, especially when you consider how much maintenance a great bubble barrier would require.
We don't need new solutions.
Developed countries have already solved the problem of river trash with waste management, but since it's not glamorous enough, people only fund these well meaning flashy projects that could create more environmental harm than they prevent.
But the other point is that it's way easier to build 10 barriers than convince thousands (millions?) of people to change their habits. Especially in the short term.
> reporters come here thinking this is the destination for old laptops exported from the United States [..] But this isn’t the destination at all. The computer shops are.
> According to the United Nations Environment Programme, 85 percent of the e-waste dumped in Ghana and other parts of West Africa is produced in Ghana and West Africa
I think "produced" is a massive misnomer here. For as far as I know, there are no high-tech electronics factories in Africa. What the 85% figure refers to, I guess, is the part of the waste that was part of the local economy before ending up at the dump. But from the first quote, that still means the site is filled with discarded items from the US and Europe, just not directly.
So .... discarded items from the US and Europe are given new life and reused in Ghana? And this is bad somehow?
Isn't reuse the ideal situation?
Not to mention e-waste vs plastic trash are rather different topics.
I repeat what I said: First world countries do not deal with trash by sending it to second world countries, despite being oft repeated, this is not actually true.
I haven't claimed anything about right or wrong. I'm just pointing out that the claims "much waste on landfills in Africa comes from first-world countries" and "first-world countries do not dump their trash in Africa" can both be true.
It very much is true. In the context of this discussion, the bubble barrier works on plastic pollution, so we're talking about plastics and recyclables.
Except we don't "send" the recycling to China, rather China buys (bought) it from us.
So because they bought it, they value it, which means they are not just dumping it wholesale.
> the bubble barrier works on plastic pollution, so we're talking about plastics and recyclables.
But we are not talking about plastic from the US or Europe, rather we are talking about local plastic. Because, as I said above: China is not dumping random plastic in rivers, they value the plastic because they paid for it.
(Yes, there is some waste mixed in, that needs to be disposed of, however that's a minor amount compared to waste in general, and especially compared to local waste. If you need a ref on that see my other comments in this thread.)
In summary almost zero plastic from the US or Europe ends up in the ocean via a third world country. That's simply not how it happens. If you want to solve this problem you need to look elsewhere instead of blaming first world countries as you did in your earlier post.
If there was a way to setup a nonprofit actually competent enough to carry this out, and maintain it, and fend off any local politicking that is bound to happen then this might be the fastest solution. Of course the difficulty is getting enough buy in from the countries with those rivers since using force is probably not possible.
For all the reasons you've stated, that's why it's simply not going to happen.
Can you think of any major environmental project funded by foreigners that just goes in and successfully helps out?
They don't work because they're seen as an affront to the nation's autonomy. It's not seen as help. It's seen as invasion.
I'm not even joking: in Brazil most of the population believes that any effort by US private citizens/charities to purchase land in the Amazon to protect it is just a front to make a future US military invasion of the Amazon easier. It's ludicrous to Americans, but it's just "common sense" to Brazilians.
> So you're saying with bubble barriers in just 10 places (as opposed to all around the world), we can clean up 90% of ocean trash from dumping?
Careful, this is about hating the inhuman Chinese who enjoy putting rubbish everywhere. If you think to hard the whole idea might fall apart. Facts and thinking things through kill ideas like this.
Chinese people as a whole, no, but the Chinese Government is literally putting millions of people in in humane concentration camps. I believe the criticism China gets is well beyond justified.
Last year I was swimming in Corsica and every evening when the tide rolled in, the plastic rolled in as well. This is an island in the mediterranean, so lots of the plastic will probably come from first world, European countries, not Asia.
Though I obviously cannot rule out that a lot of the plastic actually comes from the Nile.
> First of all, one common statistic is that 90% of trash in the ocean that comes from people dumping it (in rivers) comes from just 10 rivers, all in China/Asia.
> but that's not where the problem is.
Maybe we should stop using them as our factories for 80% of the gadgets, tech, clothes, &c. we consume.
The Chinese do eat seafood. They don’t sacrifice growth for the environment, but passing up something relatively simple (and extremely clever) like this?
This is the opposite of a localized solution. It attempts to do waste collection at an aggregated point. Where does all the waste go that doesn't end up in river with managed waste collection, is the issue
>First of all, one common statistic is that 90% of trash in the ocean that comes from people dumping it (in rivers) comes from just 10 rivers, all in China/Asia.
>So while still very clever, I sadly don't think this could ever make a difference.
I get what you mean by this, but why can't these solutions be used in places that are willing to make a difference? Anywhere this is deployed is making a difference locally. In the grand scheme of the world, yes we do need some big solutions to get some places up to speed but if a bubble wall cleans up some of the 10% other plastic in the water, then I am all for it. We can't keep our heads in the sand over the 90%, but we need to be happy about the small victories we can get.
I remember hearing about the machine that picks up trash in Baltimore at the Inner Harbor. It would take the current and push the trash into the machines conveyor belt. It was probably pick up a percent of a percent of the total world trash, but it made the harbor area much cleaner.
>I get what you mean by this, but why can't these solutions be used in places that are willing to make a difference?
Our efforts (and resources) might be better allocated in an area that has a bigger impact. This is basically the idea behind cap and trade. Why spend $10 to pick up 1 ton of plastic waste in the first world (made up numbers), when you can spend $10 to pick up 5 tons of plastic waste in asia? A more concrete example would be the water conservation measures in calfiornia a few years ago. The vast majority of the water usage is by agriculture, but residents were asked to engage in water saving practices (not watering laws, short showers, opt-in water at restaurants) at great inconvenience to them, even though any savings would be a drop in the bucket overall.
I see what you mean, but at the same point, the $10 to pick up 5 tons of plastic in Asia doesn't seem to be happening for whatever reason. My reasoning is that $10 to pick up 1 ton of plastic is still a good option since the $10 to pick up 5 tons is not a guarantee.
Another big problem is that rivers in the developing world aren't particularly well controlled.
Just this summer, a massive flood in the Yangtze basin displaced over 60 million people and inundated a number of large cities. The flood carries anything that will float downstream, and eventually dumps them in the ocean. As it happens, plastics tend to float pretty well.
So even if the Chinese government declared that they will shoot anyone who throws trash in the rivers effective immediately, the rivers themselves come into people's homes, snatch plastics, and carry them into the ocean every year.
> First of all, one common statistic is that 90% of trash in the ocean that comes from people dumping it (in rivers) comes from just 10 rivers, all in China/Asia.
Just thought I'd factcheck this: turns out this statement is not accurate. The original paper [1] lists the countries, and two of them are in Africa, 4 are in China, 1 is on the China-Russia border. Jurisdictionally, there seems to be a few parties involved and the insinuation that "they" don't care about the problem seems like an oversimplification and a projection.
Secondly, that snapshot was a while ago and assuming that nothing hasn't been done since then is also incorrect [2].
I have to admit I felt uncomfortable with the cultural assumption expressed in the sentiment about "having a hard time believe they'll bother with bubble barriers". It felt a little presumptuous because it assumes a culture is immutable. The sentiment that these types of solutions are something "only first world countries would implement" also seems a little bit dismissive.
I work with people in non-first-world countries every day (I work in a global company) and have often been surprised how ahead of the curve they can be in certain areas, and I've learned not to make assumptions without first informing myself of the true situation on the ground (which is often more complex and nuanced than the tropes we have in our heads).
I wouldn't call that cynical, just a recognition that the "missing ingredients" in any plan usually turn out to be leadership, courage, compassion etc., not technology.
So if those countries don't care about their rivers spewing plastic into the oceans, could a billionaire simply pay to build one of these things and then pay boats to clean up the waste it collects?
I wonder what it would cost to just put one of these in somewhere and run it. (Including all the bribes/lobbying to allow it to be built in the first place)
What's nice about this solution is that it's not trying to change people's behaviors. Instead, by angling (no pun intended) the bubble barrier across the current the rivers and canals can be used to sort the plastics into recycling bins.
Is there a source on that actually being nonsense? I recognize that it might have a trivial effect overall given the global situation, but it still seems like a good step to me. I know next to nothing about this though, so I'm interested to hear more.
I was mildly against it, but now that it’s implemented I feel a little different about it.
I think the main impact is going to be cultural - people are going to start feeling weird about using disposable plastic in everything. It’s going to nudge everyone just a little bit away from plastic.
The kids growing up now, hardly ever seeing a plastic bag, will grow up to be designers in the future. Predisposed against plastic.
I’m now mildly for banning plastic bags. Where paper is not yet optimal, we will eventually iron out the kinks with engineering and science.
It might seem ridiculous in the grand scheme but we don't live on the grand scale anyway. The first world can sacrifice a little bit while demanding change from larger entities.
You deny the concept of collective impact. One person using a plastic straw isn't a big deal. Three hundred million people using a few dozen straws per year is additive. Same with all disposables.
Furthermore, ocean pollution isn't the only kind. Look at any urban creek/bayou bank after a hard rain and look at the trash that is washed up in the grass.
The right-wing pejorative is "virtue-signalling" but is that always bad? Is it bad to set an example, a cultural marker, that we want to encourage re-use and biodegradable materials?
I agree, but I would say the danger is that people will feel like they have now done their part - "My straw is waxed paper! I'm not destroying the planet!" when in fact plenty of other things in their day-to-day lives have a much larger impact - insulating your home would do more for the world by orders of magnitude (admittedly that doesn't keep straws out of sealife, but choose your battles?)
Throwing someone in a cage for not following your admittedly not very effective "cultural marker" is evil. If you want to use public shaming to convince restaurants to use paper straws, fine, but please leave it at that.
Is there a jurisdiction somewhere where using plastic straws has been made a criminal offence with jail time as a punishment?
Here (Australia) it was implemented as a civil fine and I assumed it would be similar elsewhere. But if that were the case where you live I’d agree that’s awful.
If that’s not true then you’ve just made a straw man argument.
Hell, even if there _was_ a place where they locked someone up for providing plastic straws to customers I’d argue that the issue is that particular law. Not the broader issue of legal ‘nudges’ to foster positive cultural changes.
If we don't comply you'll continue to escalate until we do comply or we're dead. That's what happens if I refuse to pay your unjust civil infraction.
The fundamentalist faith that is evangelical progressivism allows nothing and no one to fall outside its purview.
Every aspect of everyone's life must submit to its edicts.
But the cynic inside me fears it would never make a difference. First of all, one common statistic is that 90% of trash in the ocean that comes from people dumping it (in rivers) comes from just 10 rivers, all in China/Asia.
And if they cared about the problem, they'd already be doing something about it. But it seems like they don't. Because the real solution there is the same as what is done in the first world -- to implement actual municipal trash pickup and urban trashcans etc. If they can't even do that, I have a hard time believing they'll bother with "bubble barriers".
So this seems like something first-world countries would implement... but that's not where the problem is.
But second, it's also common to hear that a large majority of overall ocean plastic comes from discarded industrial fishing gear -- nets and the like. Which this obviously does nothing for.
So while still very clever, I sadly don't think this could ever make a difference. We need to actually solve the much messier human problems of installing trash collection around the world and figuring out ways to monitor and punish fishers who discard their equipment.