13 ms·

Planet’s ocean-plastics problem detailed in 60-year data set

171 points by sunraa 7y ago

bubblewrap 7y ago
"Fishing gear was the biggest culprit — involved in 55% of all entanglements." Is anything being done to address the fishing gear issue?
- acdanger 7y ago
  Eating less fish is something we could all start to do immediately.
  - spurgu 7y ago
    Correct. Fishing gear amounts for the largest portion of plastic by volume in the oceans. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
  - genericone 7y ago
    Replacing the commercial wild-caught fish with the more expensive farm-raised fish will bring the most roi if you enjoy fish.
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      Farm-raised fish are often treated with antibiotics, which means you have less plastic pollution but more antibiotics-overuse problems.
    - nikofeyn 7y ago
      farm-raised fish cause plenty of havoc in the ocean.
      - Joakal 7y ago
        They could be on land: http://www.uarahfisheries.com.au/ http://www.uarahfisheries.com.au/
    - askvictor 7y ago
      OTOH farm raised fish are often quite detrimental to the environment in other ways - unless it's a sealed system (which is only practical for smaller fish), they add massive amounts of nutrients and pollution to the local environment. Also, many farmed fish are fed smaller fish, which are caught wild, and require some 3kg+ of feed fish to produce 1kg of farmed fish.
      - imtringued 7y ago
        This is a problem with pretty much every type of factory farming. Food can be cheaply imported from any country around the world but the animals still produce feces locally. The factory farm owners do not own any land to use this natural fertilizer on. Therefore it is either stored in lagoons or in case of aquafarms just sinks to the bottom of the water until years later it becomes impossible to farm fish anymore because of excessive algae blooms.
      - specialist 7y ago
        Fish farms are future superfund sites.
- Joakal 7y ago
  On a tangent, there's a lot of overfishing leading to depletion. Sooner or later, countries need to start banning big wild fishing. Another reason to ban is that it's hard to monitor catching practices. Some catching practices wipe out whole ecosystems in one sweep, including taking endangered fishes, seals, etc. The boats will know they will get in trouble for keeping it and will throw them back in water, but not all of them will be alive. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-12-22/global-fish-stocks-under-threat-from-illegal-fishing/9276394 https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-12-22/global-fish-sto... On a side note: I wish the Australian government will have the balls to stop Japanese military from escorting Japanese whalers in Australian waters: https://www.news.com.au/world/japanese-navy-sent-to-assist-whaling-vessels-repel-protesters/news-story/9a16006ca5ff7d6b94f8b5c0e51db530 https://www.news.com.au/world/japanese-navy-sent-to-assist-w... Australia gets no royalty from whales hunted within its waters by Japanese government!
  - steve19 7y ago
    If its outside Australia's EEZ there is nothing they can do legally. An illegal military confrontation is the last thing anyone needs. The whole South China Sea issue is over this right to navigate freely outside a EEZ (and that man made islands don't count towards an EEZ)
    - Joakal 7y ago
      Well, that sucks. Surely there's oil rigs, etc outside of EEZ, does that mean anyone can set it up without approvals?
      - steve19 7y ago
        Those are governed by international agreements and treaties, but if the Continental Shelf extends further than 200 NM (the EEZ) then states still have rights up to 350 NM for mineral and hydrocarbon extraction. I am not sure what happens further out than 350 NM but I am sure there is some UN agreement on that too. Not sure if any drilling takes place more than 350 NM.
Proven 7y ago
One plastics span article per day, attempting to build alarmist mentality in HN audience... Well done!
carapace 7y ago
I've got a plan based on self-replicating swarm robots. The basic idea is to collect oceanic trash and recycle it into more robots (to collect more trash to make more robots, &c.) The geometric increase should allow for a (relatively) small "kernel" to grow to handle the global problem. Two primary recycling technologies seem promising: Thermal Depolymerization and Molten Salt Oxidation. I've acquired two boats, one to serve as a base and the other to get to/from it, and I hope to begin collecting trash (in SF bay to start) this summer. :-) Fingers crossed...
- blhack 7y ago
  Whats your plan for providing locomotion to the robots?
  - carapace 7y ago
    Sails for the most part. However, they can be made self-propelling (at about 0.5 to 1.5 knots) by giving them imitation whale-fluke-shaped tails. There will also be specialist "tugboat" drones for when ambient locomotion is insufficient.
- nsxwolf 7y ago
  Alien archaeologists will one day find this post and finally understand why the Earth is completely covered in a blanket of robots.
- ademup 7y ago
  Although I'm happy you are actually doing /something/ about it, and the limited information in this comment seems like the project may have flaws. A robot needs more material than just recycled plastic (glass/metals? power source? processing? fasteners/glue/resin to stick it all together? Plastic-collection device?). Undoubtedly, there will be an addition of material to the ocean system. Will the all-in cost of adding the additional material offset the all-in cost of the amount of plastic reduction? What damage can these devices do when they malfunction? What environmental harm can happen when they break? Is this even a good approach? What part of the problem does this tackle? It seems like the main problem is "How do we get the most plastic out of the ocean possible". The "Many Robots" idea seems to identify the least difficult of the problems, which is "What do we do with the material once it is collected". Indeed, I suspect 1,000 super durable metal robots made on land that have sufficient technology would be superior to 10,000 'recycled' bots. Indeed, 1 gargantuan vehicle cruising the ocean and pumping out giant plastic floating cubes would be even more efficient. Then again, if you've made a robot that can collect micro plastics from the ocean and reproduce itself well enough such that its prodigy can do the same, then you've already won.
krisrm 7y ago
Interesting - I wonder what's responsible for seemingly large variance in the data set between 2005 and 2008, or if it's just an anomaly. More importantly, hopefully this data can be used to increase pressure on governments to strengthen regulations against single-use plastic items.
- Junk_Collector 7y ago
  From the original work (linked at the end of the article) "CPR that has been towed within the North Atlantic and adjacent seas. 36% of the total number of CPR tows between 1957 and 2016 (16,725 tows) had faults logged, 4% of these faults were due to plastic entanglement and 1% were due to natural entanglement " They only had a total of 208 cases of their devices getting entangled out of those 16,725 tows of which 52 were discarded because they did not involve plastics. Then they did a normalization across each year. I think the large variance is probably due to the small absolute numbers of total incidence and the exaggerated scale that they chose (0-5%).
  - WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    I mean 0-5% starting at 0 isn't a terrible scale.
    - Junk_Collector 7y ago
      It's not terrible and it's clearly labeled which is great. It's just that the total numbers are small and small numbers give rise to the appearance of large variance simply by virtue of being small. It's a data set issue and one to be aware of because in other cases it is one that can be used to misrepresent data trends.
acd 7y ago
It would be interesting to run it against a data set with percentage of consumer packages in plastic wrapping. csv data set of plastic production https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
- devoply 7y ago
  Funny thing is that this whole packaging problem could be much improved with some regulation. You could force brands to put their products in large receptacles in the grocery store which would take the place of outer packaging from which you would remove them to buy them... the products you would buy would have a minimal amount of packaging. You could also regulate a certain set of standardized containers made of glass to contain items with easily removable stickers that could easily be cycled through the system. I would love to see some artist take this up as a project and create an art display with this sort of imagined reality of what things could look like in a modern store with a bit of regulation pushing business to make packaging reusable.
rupertdev 7y ago
Any idea if this is a free and open data set? I'd love to get my hands on it.
- dsaavy 7y ago
  Three supplementary data sets from the article source: 1 - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM4_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414... 2 - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM5_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414... 3 - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM6_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...
  - dsaavy 7y ago
    I ended up making a visualization for the second source just for fun. https://public.tableau.com/shared/X9CQJ7QKK?:display_count=yes https://public.tableau.com/shared/X9CQJ7QKK?:display_count=y... It's a path visualization from the starting and ending coordinates with classification of the entanglement recorded. The second data source was just natural entanglements that occurred, not the plastic ones... kicking myself for not starting with the first data source. I'll probably end up doing the same thing for plastics.
- Junk_Collector 7y ago
  If you go to the bottom of the linked article to the source reference and click article it takes you to the original work. The data sources are linked at the end of that work.

171 points by sunraa 7y ago

"Fishing gear was the biggest culprit — involved in 55% of all entanglements." Is anything being done to address the fishing gear issue?

acdanger 7y ago
Eating less fish is something we could all start to do immediately.
- spurgu 7y ago
  Correct. Fishing gear amounts for the largest portion of plastic by volume in the oceans. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastics-environment/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
- genericone 7y ago
  Replacing the commercial wild-caught fish with the more expensive farm-raised fish will bring the most roi if you enjoy fish.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    Farm-raised fish are often treated with antibiotics, which means you have less plastic pollution but more antibiotics-overuse problems.
  - nikofeyn 7y ago
    farm-raised fish cause plenty of havoc in the ocean.
    - Joakal 7y ago
      They could be on land: http://www.uarahfisheries.com.au/ http://www.uarahfisheries.com.au/
  - askvictor 7y ago
    OTOH farm raised fish are often quite detrimental to the environment in other ways - unless it's a sealed system (which is only practical for smaller fish), they add massive amounts of nutrients and pollution to the local environment. Also, many farmed fish are fed smaller fish, which are caught wild, and require some 3kg+ of feed fish to produce 1kg of farmed fish.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      This is a problem with pretty much every type of factory farming. Food can be cheaply imported from any country around the world but the animals still produce feces locally. The factory farm owners do not own any land to use this natural fertilizer on. Therefore it is either stored in lagoons or in case of aquafarms just sinks to the bottom of the water until years later it becomes impossible to farm fish anymore because of excessive algae blooms.
    - specialist 7y ago
      Fish farms are future superfund sites.
Joakal 7y ago
On a tangent, there's a lot of overfishing leading to depletion. Sooner or later, countries need to start banning big wild fishing. Another reason to ban is that it's hard to monitor catching practices. Some catching practices wipe out whole ecosystems in one sweep, including taking endangered fishes, seals, etc. The boats will know they will get in trouble for keeping it and will throw them back in water, but not all of them will be alive. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-12-22/global-fish-stocks-under-threat-from-illegal-fishing/9276394 https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-12-22/global-fish-sto... On a side note: I wish the Australian government will have the balls to stop Japanese military from escorting Japanese whalers in Australian waters: https://www.news.com.au/world/japanese-navy-sent-to-assist-whaling-vessels-repel-protesters/news-story/9a16006ca5ff7d6b94f8b5c0e51db530 https://www.news.com.au/world/japanese-navy-sent-to-assist-w... Australia gets no royalty from whales hunted within its waters by Japanese government!
- steve19 7y ago
  If its outside Australia's EEZ there is nothing they can do legally. An illegal military confrontation is the last thing anyone needs. The whole South China Sea issue is over this right to navigate freely outside a EEZ (and that man made islands don't count towards an EEZ)
  - Joakal 7y ago
    Well, that sucks. Surely there's oil rigs, etc outside of EEZ, does that mean anyone can set it up without approvals?
    - steve19 7y ago
      Those are governed by international agreements and treaties, but if the Continental Shelf extends further than 200 NM (the EEZ) then states still have rights up to 350 NM for mineral and hydrocarbon extraction. I am not sure what happens further out than 350 NM but I am sure there is some UN agreement on that too. Not sure if any drilling takes place more than 350 NM.

Proven 7y ago

One plastics span article per day, attempting to build alarmist mentality in HN audience... Well done!

carapace 7y ago

I've got a plan based on self-replicating swarm robots. The basic idea is to collect oceanic trash and recycle it into more robots (to collect more trash to make more robots, &c.) The geometric increase should allow for a (relatively) small "kernel" to grow to handle the global problem. Two primary recycling technologies seem promising: Thermal Depolymerization and Molten Salt Oxidation. I've acquired two boats, one to serve as a base and the other to get to/from it, and I hope to begin collecting trash (in SF bay to start) this summer. :-) Fingers crossed...

blhack 7y ago
Whats your plan for providing locomotion to the robots?
- carapace 7y ago
  Sails for the most part. However, they can be made self-propelling (at about 0.5 to 1.5 knots) by giving them imitation whale-fluke-shaped tails. There will also be specialist "tugboat" drones for when ambient locomotion is insufficient.
nsxwolf 7y ago
Alien archaeologists will one day find this post and finally understand why the Earth is completely covered in a blanket of robots.
ademup 7y ago
Although I'm happy you are actually doing /something/ about it, and the limited information in this comment seems like the project may have flaws. A robot needs more material than just recycled plastic (glass/metals? power source? processing? fasteners/glue/resin to stick it all together? Plastic-collection device?). Undoubtedly, there will be an addition of material to the ocean system. Will the all-in cost of adding the additional material offset the all-in cost of the amount of plastic reduction? What damage can these devices do when they malfunction? What environmental harm can happen when they break? Is this even a good approach? What part of the problem does this tackle? It seems like the main problem is "How do we get the most plastic out of the ocean possible". The "Many Robots" idea seems to identify the least difficult of the problems, which is "What do we do with the material once it is collected". Indeed, I suspect 1,000 super durable metal robots made on land that have sufficient technology would be superior to 10,000 'recycled' bots. Indeed, 1 gargantuan vehicle cruising the ocean and pumping out giant plastic floating cubes would be even more efficient. Then again, if you've made a robot that can collect micro plastics from the ocean and reproduce itself well enough such that its prodigy can do the same, then you've already won.

krisrm 7y ago

Interesting - I wonder what's responsible for seemingly large variance in the data set between 2005 and 2008, or if it's just an anomaly. More importantly, hopefully this data can be used to increase pressure on governments to strengthen regulations against single-use plastic items.

Junk_Collector 7y ago
From the original work (linked at the end of the article) "CPR that has been towed within the North Atlantic and adjacent seas. 36% of the total number of CPR tows between 1957 and 2016 (16,725 tows) had faults logged, 4% of these faults were due to plastic entanglement and 1% were due to natural entanglement " They only had a total of 208 cases of their devices getting entangled out of those 16,725 tows of which 52 were discarded because they did not involve plastics. Then they did a normalization across each year. I think the large variance is probably due to the small absolute numbers of total incidence and the exaggerated scale that they chose (0-5%).
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
  I mean 0-5% starting at 0 isn't a terrible scale.
  - Junk_Collector 7y ago
    It's not terrible and it's clearly labeled which is great. It's just that the total numbers are small and small numbers give rise to the appearance of large variance simply by virtue of being small. It's a data set issue and one to be aware of because in other cases it is one that can be used to misrepresent data trends.

acd 7y ago

It would be interesting to run it against a data set with percentage of consumer packages in plastic wrapping. csv data set of plastic production https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

devoply 7y ago
Funny thing is that this whole packaging problem could be much improved with some regulation. You could force brands to put their products in large receptacles in the grocery store which would take the place of outer packaging from which you would remove them to buy them... the products you would buy would have a minimal amount of packaging. You could also regulate a certain set of standardized containers made of glass to contain items with easily removable stickers that could easily be cycled through the system. I would love to see some artist take this up as a project and create an art display with this sort of imagined reality of what things could look like in a modern store with a bit of regulation pushing business to make packaging reusable.

rupertdev 7y ago

Any idea if this is a free and open data set? I'd love to get my hands on it.

dsaavy 7y ago
Three supplementary data sets from the article source: 1 - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM4_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414... 2 - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM5_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414... 3 - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-019-09506-1/MediaObjects/41467_2019_9506_MOESM6_ESM.xlsx https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs414...
- dsaavy 7y ago
  I ended up making a visualization for the second source just for fun. https://public.tableau.com/shared/X9CQJ7QKK?:display_count=yes https://public.tableau.com/shared/X9CQJ7QKK?:display_count=y... It's a path visualization from the starting and ending coordinates with classification of the entanglement recorded. The second data source was just natural entanglements that occurred, not the plastic ones... kicking myself for not starting with the first data source. I'll probably end up doing the same thing for plastics.
Junk_Collector 7y ago
If you go to the bottom of the linked article to the source reference and click article it takes you to the original work. The data sources are linked at the end of that work.