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Study: 8 Million Metric Tons of Plastic Dumped Into Oceans Annually

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-for-the-high-score dept.

hypnosec writes: According to a new study (abstract) that tracked marine debris from its source, roughly 8 million metric tons of plastic gets dumped into the world's oceans annually. Plastic waste is a global problem, and until now, there wasn't a comprehensive study that highlighted how much plastic waste was making it into the oceans. "The research also lists the world's 20 worst plastic polluters, from China to the United States, based on such factors as size of coastal population and national plastic production. According to the estimate, China tops the list, producing as much as 3.5 million metric tons of marine debris each year. The United States, which generates as much as 110,000 metric tons of marine debris a year, came in at No. 20."

34 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like a business opportunity... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...go trolling for plastic, turn it into fuel or something else. We probably are reaching a point where oil exploration is going to remain diminished... a glut of current supply. With so much waste in our landfills and in the environment, we can just mine our waste for resources for a while.

    1. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The real problem *is* money.
      There's a fairly new technology out that uses plasma to melt and reduce landfill garbage into a non-toxic sludge which can then be processed into more useful stuff, the resulting heat from which can sustain the plasma reaction once it's started. The problem is it costs a lot to purchase and install. Landfills are *extremely* profitable businesses. I read not long ago that each truckload of waste driving out of manhattan is worth well over $10,000 in profit. One truck can probably make a couple of trips per day. Subtract a couple $100 for fuel and the driver's paltry salary and you can see how much of a cash cow it is.

    2. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Which is, yet again, a great example how every little thing in a society shouldn't be run on profit motive only. There are lots of things worth doing for the good of everyone that might lead to a fat cat getting a little less money but are still worth doing.

    3. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... by taiwanjohn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's been over a decade since I first saw thermal polymerization mentioned here. I've often wondered if it would be economical to build a ship around such a contraption in order to trawl through the great ocean gyres, scooping up plastic garbage, squeezing out the water, and rendering it down into some kind of fuel. I reckon the process could be made energy-positive, but whether it would be enough to turn a profit is a tougher question.

      --
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    4. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      I've often wondered if it would be economical to build a ship around such a contraption in order to trawl through the great ocean gyres, scooping up plastic garbage

      Short answer: No.
      Longer answer: Absolutely not. Not even close.

      The amount of fuel you would consume would exceed the amount of plastic collected by several orders of magnitude. There has been a lot of alarmism about the "giant island of garbage" in the Pacific Gyre. But if you actually went there, you would see nothing but empty water. If you strained with a fine net, you would find some flecks of plastic suspended in the water. To collect a kg of plastic, you would need to process roughly 20 millions tonnes of seawater.

       

    5. Re:Sounds like a business opportunity... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Why do people dump trash in the ocean, anyway? I've always found that puzzling.

      Because it is easy and cheap. Rich countries can afford more expensive waste disposal, but poor countries can not. But the trends are positive. Rich countries are doing much better, and poor countries will adopt better practices are their economies improve. China and America use about the same amount of plastic, but China dumps 30 times as much into the ocean. So there is plenty of room for improvement. China is actually ahead of America on some policies. They already ban free plastic bags, which encourages reuse. Only a few American cities do that. One of them is my city, San Jose, California.

      For this problem, like many other environmental problems, we need to stop focusing on cute "boutique environmentalism" that makes people in New York or San Francisco feel good about themselves, and instead focus on developing solutions that can scale up to six billion third world people, where 90% of the problem is.

  2. Not that much by CastrTroy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just looked it up, and the water in the ocean weights 1.5 Quintillion Tons (1.5 x 10 ^ 17 tons), which means we are dumping the equivalent of 0.000000005% of the mass of the ocean in plastic into the ocean. At those percentages, I wonder if the effects are really any different if we halved or quartered our pollution of the ocean. Really it would all be about the same to the ocean. Sure we should try to reduce how much we dump, but there's way bigger environmental problems to be working on.

    --

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    1. Re:Not that much by wierd_w · · Score: 3, Informative

      Assumption based on uniform distribution.
      Plastic distribution in the ocean is not homogeneous.

      Please read up on the "gyres" in the ocean. Places where a large corriolis current causes mechanical concentration of suspened particulates in the oceans. The concentration of suspended microparticles of decaying plastic are sufficiently high in these locations that it is affecting bottom-tier filter feeders, which suck in the plastic particles as if it were plankton, then concentrate it further inside their bodies, which are then consumed by higher trophic level fauna, with toxic results.

    2. Re:Not that much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem is far worse than that. The plastic degrades into microscopic particulates which then enter the food chain. It affects *all* marine life--since it's all connected. They even discovered recently how much paint (from ship hulls) is floating around and being consumed by animals--which is also a problem.
      We need to stop dumping *anything* into the ocean--it's a primary source of food on our planet.

    3. Re:Not that much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But doesn't most aquatic life concentrate in a small percentage of the sea (ie: near the surface)?
      And isn't that where most plastic ends up?

    4. Re:Not that much by MightyMartian · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think the point here is surface area, not volume.

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      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    5. Re:Not that much by wierd_w · · Score: 4, Informative

      Because the excretory systems of simple invertebrates of this type (Corals, sponges, etc) preclude the existence of a dedicated GI tract as you would normally envision it. (A sponge is literally just two layers of cells that suck in water on one side, and push out water on the other, for instance.) They are unable to digest the particle, it stays large, and it cannot pass through. This is bad for the filter feeder, and toxic to the organism that consumes the filter feeder.

    6. Re:Not that much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How long are people going to take it up the ass from corporate america before you realize it is happening?

      Thank you, CEO, may I have another??

    7. Re:Not that much by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

      So who's gonna win? Plastic in the oceans, or global warming?

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    8. Re:Not that much by linear+a · · Score: 2

      I'd agree. Works out to about 22 milligrams plastic per square meter (annually - I don't know the half life). However, that gets concentrated in the lifeforms there with unpredictable effects.

    9. Re:Not that much by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      your asshole isn't always as large as your mouth

    10. Re:Not that much by wierd_w · · Score: 2

      Sponges dont regurgitate, any more than your heart can beat backwards. They are very, VERY simplistic colonial organisms. Again-- Literally-- Sucks water IN on one side, pushes water OUT on the other. They digest what gets caught. (Except when they can't, then it just sticks in there.)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

    11. Re:Not that much by PPalmgren · · Score: 2

      The volume isn't anything to scoff at either. I just did some numbers to get a visual perspective of the plastic mass we're talking about, in terms of container ships. 8 million metric tons at standard container size and weight (1 TEU = one twenty-foot equivalent unit, average loaded weight of 20 metric tons) and with high-capacity containerships averaging 15,000 TEU, thats 27 fully loaded ships. Thats approximately 350 meters long, 50 meters wide, and 15 meters deep of containers stacked 14-high per ship. That's a lot of material.

    12. Re:Not that much by orgelspieler · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I only put about 1 microgram of E.coli (about 1,000,000 cells) into this five gallon jug of water. That's like 0.000000005% of the mass of the water. Do you want to drink it?

    13. Re:Not that much by WrongMonkey · · Score: 2

      Might depend on the strain of e. coli, but sure, why not? Especially if the water is otherwise sterile and I don't have to drink it all at once.

  3. I have a solution by Iniamyen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Maybe retail stuff could be packaged in a simple cardboard box with biodegradable stuffing, instead of those stupid, stupid plastic clamshell containers that frustrate and then cut me when I try to get them open.

    1. Re:I have a solution by Higaran · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That won't work because it would be more expensive to package, so the the stores will close because the $1 item will be priced at $1.50 or $1.75, and people will stop buying krap they don't really need, or only use a couple of times a year.

    2. Re:I have a solution by c · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Online shops is the obvious place to enforce this. No packaging for simple stuff like cables, plain bags for non-breakable loose stuff, plain boxes for everything else. People are buying from pictures and reviews and shoplifting is a non-issue, so packaging only needs to be minimally functional. I think AmazonBasics products use this approach, and it'd be nice to see Amazon push it back a bit on their suppliers.

      Ideally, it should be the responsibility of the retailer to display the product attractively rather than the job of the package, but blame Walmart. They've done a pretty solid job of unloading a lot of traditional retailer jobs back on the manufacturers.

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    3. Re:I have a solution by Penguinisto · · Score: 4, Informative

      The clamshell packages weren't made for you the consumer... it was originally designed for the retailer to slow down shoplifting.

      After all, it's much harder to smuggle out a bigger-than-your-pocket-sized plastic container with a 64GB geek stick in it, than to simply smuggle out the geek stick itself. Being hard to open w/o damaging it prevents a shoplifter from just taking that 64GB geek stick out of its original package and putting it into a 8GB package (with an obviously cheaper price tag) before strolling to the checkout stand with it.

      --
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    4. Re:I have a solution by argStyopa · · Score: 2

      Blame your fellow humans.
      Believe me, companies would rather NOT have to spend more $ for expensive shell packaging, but its very challenging nature of opening significantly reduces pilferage and shoplifting.

      --
      -Styopa
  4. Re:Sure, 8 million tons, but that's the free marke by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, you're quite right. All that really counts is money, so providing someone is making money by not dealing with plastic trash entering waterways, that's good. Aquatic life, future generations, they don't really make us that much money, so fuck them, each and every one.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  5. Simple solution by F34nor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Put a deposit on everything sold. The company gets an interest free loan for the life of the product and people are motivated to pick up trash. Yes I know its complicated but microdots or chemical signatures make even plastic bags traceable.

  6. Re:"Metric" tons? by Tobenisstinky · · Score: 3, Informative

    Because there's a few countries that haven't seen the shining light that is the metric system.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

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  7. Re:"Metric" tons? by netsavior · · Score: 4, Informative

    ton(UK) 2240lb
    ton(US) 2000lb
    Tonne or Metric ton 1000kg (2204.62lb)

    so yes, it matters.

  8. Re:"Metric" tons? by PPalmgren · · Score: 2

    Another name for these:

    ton(UK) 2240lb = Long Ton
    ton(US) 2000lb = Short Ton
    Tonne or Metric ton 1000kg (2204.62lb) = Metric Ton

  9. re: profit motive by King_TJ · · Score: 2

    Except usually, it requires someone who ALREADY HAD a profit motive and was successful in some way, to be in the position to opt to do these "costly, but for the good of everyone" things.

    And really, they do happen all the time. Most big businesses I can think of sponsor all sorts of things for their communities. The entire tax code is designed to encourage you to make charitable contributions.

    The alternative to this is the classic "big government" advocate, who wishes government to act as forced charity, taking enough money from everyone else to spend it on various projects it believes benefit the whole. (As you might have guessed, I'm not exactly sold on that being the optimal way to handle it.)

  10. Re:"Metric" tons? by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2

    A ton is and has always been metric. No need to specify.

    Interesting theory you have.

    But wrong.

    They were measuring ship displacement in tons long before the French started beheading their royalty. And the metric system came out of that particular mess.

    Note also that the PROPER metric term for 1000 Kg is the Mg. Too bad so few metric worshipers ever use the "mega" prefix....

    --

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  11. Re:Umm.... by chihowa · · Score: 2

    Let's not go overboard, here. A lot of design went into making the product look like what you want, but making products meet consumer expectations when actually being used or handled costs too much.

    The more destructive one needs to be to actually get to the product, the less likely disappointed people are to demand a refund.

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  12. Costco stamps by justthinkit · · Score: 2

    So you take the Costco stamps approach. You carry the ridiculously-large-cardboard-covered-in-fancy-printing thingy to the cashier...and they give you a tiny roll of stamps. Ridiculously-large-cardboard-covered-in-fancy-printing thingy then gets reused by Costco.

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