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Monitoring marine litter from space
- agomez314 2y agoWhat’s the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I’m being too cynical?
- teekert 2y agoAwareness is just step one.
- onion2k 2y agoCleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. There's a multi-trillion dollar startup just waiting for you to solve that problem.
- TrojanHookworm 2y agoah yes, get ready for the startup that will solve EDCs in my ballsack and the ballsacks of all my descendents.
- jeltz 2y agoIn garbage disposal in South East Asia? Almost all plastic comes from a few countries.
- voidUpdate 2y agoHave fun trying to persuade people to give you money to help stop it, when the corporations producing it can pay the same people a lot to stop you
- Tepix 2y agoIf you catch someone littering, you can fine them. Theoretically.
- yosito 2y agoThe more information we have about where waste comes from, the more we can target our efforts at reducing it to the biggest sources
- 317070 2y agoNow in the UN, or at the next climate conference, people can actually say: "Look, Vietnam, you are somehow responsible for 12.2% of the marine plastic in the ocean, with only 1.23% of the world population. We are making this trade agreement or that international investment conditional on that number improving by 2028." Before, there was simply no way of monitoring these things. I had to invent that number. That is a massive problem in terms of the politics. And it goes up the hierarchy as well. Vietnam can now also go "Ho Chi Minh City, look at this map, how on earth did that happen?" Now we can actually monitor it, it's a way of keeping countries on the promises they have already made: https://www.oecd.org/ocean/topics/ocean-pollution/marine-plastics-pollution-Viet-Nam.pdf https://www.oecd.org/ocean/topics/ocean-pollution/marine-pla...
- aitchnyu 2y agoI was assuming the UN has to deploy bouys or ships at river mouths to the anger of the country owning the territory.
- dewey 2y ago> Using a six-year historical series of 300 000 satellite images, the team scanned the entire Mediterranean Sea every three days, at a spatial resolution of 10 metres, on the hunt for windrows. Indeed, but I'd assume it's also a long way to go from doing it for a small section of the world to doing it everywhere and with multiple countries participating.
- 317070 2y agoThe Sentinel-2 mission is doing that [0]: > Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56° S to 84° N, coastal waters, and all of the Mediterranean Sea The constellation is not complete yet though. Sentinel-2C is planned to launch in September [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 [1] https://www.satnow.com/launch-mission-details/sentinel-2c https://www.satnow.com/launch-mission-details/sentinel-2c
- pkage 2y ago
- boringg 2y agoWhat isn't measured isn't managed.
- mulmen 2y agoThere are efforts to reduce the production of waste and to eliminate ocean dumping. There are thousands of such efforts. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. > Maybe I’m being too cynical? Yes. What’s the point in spreading negative falsehoods?
- sandworm101 2y ago>> to reduce the production of waste and to eliminate ocean dumping. >> Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. We need to stop conflating problems. Production of waste is different than disposal of waste. Reducing the volume of waste by a few percentage here and there isn't an efficient use of energies. Rather than teach developing countries to reduce/recycle, we need to get them to landfill garbage rather than dump it into rivers. That should be the focus.
- dylan604 2y agoSo you build a landfill. How do you get the collected waste to the landfill? How do you do collections? Then of course, there's the training/habit breaking to use the new collection system. I'm not stating this as a reason not to, but a realistic look on the logistics. It's a multi-generational solution, not a quick one in the least. So we should start now, not tomorrow
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- raincole 2y agoIt's just the very first step. How are we going to stop it if we don't even know where it comes from?
- wesleywt 2y agoYou stop production by showing it's harmfulness.
- ffsm8 2y agoNot cynical enough in my books. As the saying goes: trust is good, control/verification is better
- BenFranklin100 2y agoAs they say, you can’t fix what you can’t measure. This is a first step.
- paulcole 2y ago> Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts “Nice and all” is exactly what we’re going for. It’d cost us too much today (in terms of change to lifestyle and in terms of money) to stop the bleeding where it starts so we’re hoping that we can just fiddle around and that we die before the effect people have on the Earth gets really bad for us. We don’t care if it gets bad for other people though.
- mlhpdx 2y agoDon’t underestimate the power of ego and national pride. Shinning a light on the foibles of nations is generally very effective, for good or not. It’s clear from the images so far that there are local hotspots, and those areas aren’t incapable of mustering the resources to ~solve it~ [improve or maintain their national caché].
- azulster 2y agoits useful to measure and track the problem if only demonstrate it's validity
- dennis_jeeves2 2y agoVery similar situation in medicine. Diagnostics seems to have improved but not the cures, or prevention. To add to the confusion often early diagnostics + treatment is presumed to be prevention. All in all, it appears to me that there is grand delusion of progress while somewhat regressing.
- BurningFrog 2y agoIf you don't measure the problem you don't know if it's getting better or worse, or even, strictly speaking, that it exists at all. "Let's first fix the problem, and maybe later figure out if it exists" is much worse than the opposite order.
- burkaman 2y agoYou are being too cynical, there are ongoing global negotiations over a UN plastics treaty that will govern plastic production: https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution. It is slow and difficult but it is moving. There's a great podcast called Plastisphere that had a lot of coverage of the most recent meeting in April: https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/ https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/
- jnmandal 2y agoNo, you are right. A lot of effort is being poured into monitoring and advocacy because that is the only place those interested in tackling these problems have to go. If there was an appetite for reform or mitigation, the folks doing high tech problem solving would be put to work in more meaningful ways. Worldwide though there is little interest in or support for changing our lifestyles, industrial systems, or resource flows to any significant extent (beyond extending them within poorer countries).
- jeltz 2y agoIt is not a technology issue. It is a political, infrastructural and educational issue. Almost all plastic pollution comes fram a handful of countries which do not care about proper garbage collection and recycling. The west, or for that matter even most third world countries do not cause much plastic pollution at all.
- jnmandal 2y ago> The west, or for that matter even most third world countries do not cause much plastic pollution at all. This is naive given that consumption, production, and use of plastics is distributed worldwide, but with a heavy concentration in OECD nations. You are correct that the issue is political, but pretty much everything else you've said is subjective and shifting blame. The truth is if you use and dispose of plastics you are part of the problem and your country should be working on solutions (the easiest of which is simply to not use plastic).
- boffinAudio 2y agoAt some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest ocean plastic, and use it to produce energy .. and every time I see one of my favourite remote-beach Youtubers climb over piles of plastic rubble on some remote tropical island, I can't help get the feeling that there has to be some kind of way to make a portable, self-replicating 3D printer that can go out there and just reproduce itself. But I guess the chemistry behind all of this is beyond me. It sure seems like the 3D-printing revolution needs to be followed up with a plastics-deconstruction phase, so that 3D printers don't get factory-produced spools of future ocean-bound plastics, but rather a giant hopper into which one can pile collected plastics from the environment. Some sort of primordial proto-Feed, I guess ..
- wffurr 2y ago"portable, self-replicating 3D printer" you mean bacteria? I am sure someone is working on plastic eating bacteria but it might not be a great idea to have it loose in the world.
- globalise83 2y agoNature seems to be on the case already, for example: https://futurism.com/the-byte/plastic-eating-fungus-pacific-garbage-patch https://futurism.com/the-byte/plastic-eating-fungus-pacific-...
- vmfunction 2y agoMany scientists/people only think about problem in the scope of the their discipline. Keep in mind this is the problem-solution knee jerk (treat the symptom) responses is how we got to our current situation in this world. Oh we don't like horse dung, we going with cars now! With bio-engineering such as this, many intergenerational horizontal studies need to be done before it even should be consider releasing in the wild.
- boffinAudio 2y agoI'd prefer it had an off switch and an API entirely subservient to our needs, rather than DNA.
- LorenDB 2y agoI thought this article was going to be about all the satellites and used rocket parts we dump in the ocean all the time, which is a problem that doesn't have a great solution other than launching cargo ships like Starship to retrieve old spacecraft for recycling.
- JR1427 2y agoOne thing I find interesting is how much more traction the problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have. I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a wilderness, where litter doesn't belong, whereas we are very used to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?
- IshKebab 2y agoIt's because litter in the ocean can travel and pollute anywhere else in the ocean. A landfill in Germany doesn't affect anywhere except the immediate surroundings. The ocean is a shared resource. Land isn't.
- mmsc 2y agoIt goes something like "not my fault, let's focus on others' problems not mine." You don't throw trash into the ocean so you feel like the real issue comes from something you are not knowingly contributing to with your hand.
- bitschubser_ 2y agoThe thing is most pollution and changes in the ocean are not visible right away, while hiking or on land in general I directly see consequences of littering and environmental impact and its possible to act upon (littering on highways) in the oceans on the other hand a lot of environmental impact is just not visible, thus it needs to be made visible, I see a nice beach... I don't see particles floating just under the surface, I don't see the destroyed eco systems by trawling, I don't see "death zones" where there is no marine live... so this is a good step into direction making these things visible
- api 2y agoWhat you are seeing is a ratio of awareness and ease of solving the problem. It’s a lot easier to stop throwing crap into the ocean than it is to replace a century of sunk cost in carbon emitting energy technology. We are plenty aware of climate change but almost don’t even want to face that challenge.
- 2y ago
- maga_2020 2y agoWaste is a huge problem, clearly human made, clearly responsibility to address in every current generation. Cost of products sold must include recycling and waste management costs. Otherwise, the manufactures will keep making devices/items with built-in-obsolescence to make it 'fashionable' for consumers to replace them at the first opportunity.
- jeltz 2y agoIn many countries it already often does. My guess is that in most of the biggest polluters it does not. Either due to corruption or lack of regulation.
- barbazoo 2y agoWhen I buy packaged groceries I often decide whether I'll buy it again based on the packaging used. And I feel like from my perspective things are getting better slowly. Lots more paper where plastic used to be, good stuff. Now the other day I went to my ethnic neigborhood store that I usually only buy veggies from but this time I got some imported roti breads and good lord, the amount of plastic they use is just insane. It opened my eyes to the fact that probably the vast majority of the world still packages their food like there's no tomorrow. Every roti was wrapped in 2 sheets of plastic, packaged in a bag of plastic. 5 rotis in bags in another bag, 5 bags of those in the large bag you see in the store. They tasted great but I'm not going to buy them again, it's just too much garbage, most of it isn't even recyclable where I am. It's completely unreasonable what we're doing here.
- saagarjha 2y agoI’ve seen rotis sold in grocery stores and they look almost nothing like you’d typically get in the actual country they’re imported from. I wonder if the plastic is added on to appeal to our sensibilities?
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThey need to work out a way for the costs to actually go towards targeted local cleanup operations which is no easy feat considering you need to extract them from all of society that produces trash. You'd have to create probably a new government agency that staffs cities with sufficient trash pickup. It would probably be in the billions in labor considering trash is often just as prolific in a tiny town of 400 people as it is in the big cities. What would be perhaps more realistic is regulating packaging and other materials such that they can degrade safely in place with the assumption they will be littered and not properly recycled.
- user3939382 2y agoKind of sad to imagine the satellites doing this are also surrounded by orbiting trash in space
- ctoth 2y agoHow much space trash is there in total from less than a hundred years of space travel? How large is the surface of the earth? Would you really consider yourself "surrounded" by trash if there was one piece of trash a mile away from you? Your intuitions about this space trash problem are way, way off.
- amelius 2y agoThe problem is that this space trash is flying at 20,000 miles/hr relative to you.
- user3939382 2y ago> Your intuitions about this space trash problem are way, way off I'm not sure that's true, for example (with many more available) "Analysis: Why trash in space is a major problem with no clear fix" https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-trash-in-space-is-a-major-problem-with-no-clear-fix https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-trash-in-s... Also, I'd say "intuition" is a mischaracterization of the source of my sentiment. I've been passively hearing about this issue for years.
- Log_out_ 2y agoFinally we can see niat from space. All that ancient spite towards the various occupiers who owned the allmende, visible in wild littering worldwide.
- hbarka 2y agoI wonder if this can discern for fishing nets pollution, called ghost nets, which entangle and ensnare marine animals. The scale of harm for these animals is unthinkable. Edit: the ghost nets come from ships. We need to pinpoint the “fishing vessels who continue to dump their old nets into the sea with impunity.” https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/plastic-environment/ghost-nets/#:~:text=Nylon%20is%20plastic%20and%20it,due%20to%20fishing%20nets%20pollution https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/pla....
- veunes 2y agoGhost nets are haunting reminders of human impact, silently ensnaring marine life and disrupting ocean ecosystems.
- murderfs 2y agoThe scale of harm seems miniscule to me: it seems unlikely that discarded fishing nets would entangle more animals than when they're actually used to fish, and they're presumably used more than once before being discarded.
- jimnotgym 2y agoI read it as if stuff from space was littering the sea....
- jcun4128 2y agoamazing, would be funny, liter? no nuclear submarine
- veunes 2y agoThe thought of this relentless deluge of plastic entering the seas is heartbreaking.
- rlhf 2y agoIt's good to see how to track it, but what's more important is knowing how to clean it up. Additionally, dumping nuclear wastewater might pose an even greater threat.
- rldjbpin 2y agoit does take a non-profit effort to be able to monitor the seas. iirc most image satellites make trips on land masses and the seas and oceans are just approximated in commercial settings.