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Plastic Pollution Is Killing Coral Reefs, 4-Year Study Finds (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A new study based on four years of diving on 159 reefs in the Pacific shows that reefs in four countries -- Australia, Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar -- are heavily contaminated with plastic. It clings to the coral, especially branching coral. And where it clings, it sickens or kills. "The likelihood of disease increases from 4 percent to 89 percent when corals are in contact with plastic," researchers report in the journal Science. Study leader Drew Harvell at Cornell University says the plastic could be harming coral in at least two ways. First, bacteria and other harmful microorganisms are abundant in the water and on corals; when the coral is abraded, that might invite pathogens into the coral. In addition, Harvell says, plastic can block sunlight from reaching coral. Based on how much plastic the researchers found while diving, they estimate that over 11 billion plastic items could be entangled in coral reefs in the Asia-Pacific region, home to over half the world's coral reefs. And their survey did not include China, one of the biggest sources of plastic pollution.
Global warming and ocean acidification are other reasons.
First, replace all carcinogenic toxic internal combustion engines with electric motors.
Just 10 rivers carry 90% of plastic polluting the oceans
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
I'm glad this is out here, because right now everyone is focused on CO2. The reality is that there is are so many other forms of pollution that are destroying our planet that are much more devastating. We have lakes of sludge in China as a result of all our cellphones and laptops.
To stop general pollution, we need to consume less. Our cellphones need to last 10 years, not 2. Everything doesn't need to come in a cardboard box from Amazon. We generate so much waste in our day to day lives and consume sooooo much. To really fight pollution, we need products that last longer, fewer factories with workers that get paid more, more durable goods and a restructuring of how we value things. Companies should be praised for good products when people don't buy more stuff because their previous line has stood up so well (like CPUs and memory).
It's a tall order. It's not easy. It probably won't happen.
And it doesn't matter if you believe climate change is man made or not. If we reduce general pollution, consume lest, demand better public transport (which can be a reality now, unlike self driving cars that might be a reality ten years from now, and won't even touch 10% of the capacity of trains), we can reduce all kinds of pollution, including CO2.
I personally don't feel this will happen until America runs out of countries to bomb and manipulate, fuel prices hit $9/gal and the US collapses. The vote is a joke. Trump is the 2 minute hate (really 24/7 hate) and Americans have lost sight of the real enemies that are present, no matter which puppet is elected.
Obviously we need to build about 10 walls...
Wall.
Not true. I am a scientist (Computer Scientist), and am definitely an untrustworthy bastard (I cheat at poker, and on my taxes)...and possibly part of a global conspiracy of evil (I write software for both world of Microsoft (the beast of Redmond) and for the open source community (who are all peace-loving hand-holding communists)...but I have never received any grant money from any government (Local, State or Federal).
So you see, you are quite wrong in your presumptions.
When 3 1/2 of the 4 contaminated countries they found in their study of 159 Pacific Ocean reefs lie in the Indian Ocean, you've got to wonder.
Net walls to capture the plastic and reuse it?
The only industrialized western country on the list of top 20 plastic polluters is the United States at No. 20.
The U.S. and Europe are not mismanaging their collected waste, so the plastic trash coming from those countries is due to litter, researchers said.
Smh. We have the money and organization to manage disposal properly, yet as individuals we ruin it by manually trashing the place.
Source for those who want it:
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/paul-allen-megayacht-destroyed-most-of-protected-coral-reef-officials-say/
Actually, as we were able to find out only recently, that 'disposal' consisted in shipping it to China and declaring it 'recycled'. We learned that, when China refused to take any more of that plastic wastes from the US and GERMany, upon which both nations are now facing the problem of keeping their statistics 'green'. ;-)
I believe the term to use here is "whitewashing". The western world is very good at this, thanks to our – totally independent – media.
Sources of ocean plastic From a peer-reviewed paper. (I apologize that I do not have a direct reference to the paper ready at hand).
So, I suppose what we should infer from this, is that we should help developing countries become developed countries, so they can clean themselves up, yes?
But we don't do that by redistributing wealth. The idea is not to drag everyone to the bottom, but to assist everyone to the top.
See my reply below.
By the way: China ASKED for the waste, for use in recycling and putting it to its own use. Nobody was foisting it off on them.
Learn the trash people to act like responsible educated people?
Americans don't seem to be all that great in this regard either. But maybe better. At least they collect their trash. Into one pile but ...
This was China's own plan to bolster its own plastics industry.
The fact that they decided to end it suddenly and then blame the shutdown on others trying to "push" their waste onto China is a rather consistent pattern for the Chinese government.
I was interested to see what haopened here in Sweden since we like to think we're good at it. No idea about exports but I know we burn our own and others waste and before you were supposed to throw soft plastics with the rest garbage simply to burn it.
This is 17 years old so unlikely accurate but:
"Sverige Ã¥tervann, enligt PlastForum nordica 2001/7, 79 % av all plast, 17 % materialÃ¥tervanns och resterande 62 % energiÃ¥tervanns, dvs fÃrbrÃndes."
"Recycled" 79% but just 17% as material and 62% was burned. Yay. Recycling. Now if you burn waste in general what's the difference?
It doesn't appear from this study map (see comment below) that Sweden is a significant contributor to ocean plastic pollution.
Did you never hear about corruption in China? Somebody surely profited from this and it wasn't China as a total, so much can be sure.
You can get a Brazilian kid from the favelas to cut somebody's throat for a few bucks. That doesn't make it the child asking for the job...
...and as always the answer is 42, according to Oxfam. ;-)
Net walls to capture the plastic and reuse it?
You can only downcycle plastic. Eventually you still end up with a mountain of plastic garbage. A more interesting idea is to replace petroleum based plastic packaging with something biodegradable. The dilemma is that with petroleum based plastics you sequester the carbon in the packaging but you are stuck with mountains of plastic garbage clogging up your landfills and your oceans, bio plastics degrade but that means they release, methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas. However, if we could come up with a packaging material that could actually be composted into soil with no harmful residue and bring it into universal use you might actually have a situation where you could make money off of disposing of the stuff in a sustainable way and you would skip the problem you currently have when recycling petroleum based plastics of washing and sorting the plastic before you can downcycle it. With bio degradable plastic you just pile your used food wrappers and other packaging into a composer, let bacteria do the work and harvest the methane. There are already Bio-plastics whose environmental footprint ranges from 0 percent less to 42 percent less than petroleum based plastics depending on the material. However, even if the environmental footprint of a bio plastic was the same as that of a petroleum based plastic, the fact that the bio plastic bio degrades means that with the bio plastics at least you don't clog up the oceans with garbage that takes it takes natural processes millennia to break down. Also, if there is a way to make a profit off of disposing of bio plastic there is an economic incentive to collect and dispose of it. If you compost the bio plastic and capture the methane you can at least burn the methane, turn it into less harmful greenhouse gasses and do something with the compost. Either way, there is no way around the fact that we need to seriously rethink our laws and regulations regarding product packaging starting with how much of it we even need and what materials we are going to have to banish because petroleum based plastic packaging will have to be eliminated sooner or later and I'd rather see it happen sooner. Why does a package of cookies have to consist of a cardboard box, with a plastic bag inside it that is full of smaller plastic bags each containing one or two cookies? ... and I don't remember Coca Cola tasting any worse when it came in mutli use bottles (who can be made from plastic) or that a Mars bar tasted worse when it came wrapped in paper.
Yes. A wall will solve this problem. Walls solve every problems nowadays.
They tried something like that. It was made from trees, if I remember well.
Never caught on.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Haven't stopped two of them from starting some ocean focus group like yesterday to get a head-start of some UN thing after 2020 or whatever it was.
That of course line up nicely with yesterdays or so /. post about how Sweden was #2 in how innovativeness (well, USA being #11 or whatever it was, but the second placement was in there too.)
They would of course prefer if one could show Swedish solutions or ideas on the subject. As for whatever that cause economical returns I don't know. I guess the group by itself may not be very expensive.
Last time I was in the bay area, most of the 'plastic' disposable things I picked up were compostable biomass. I've not seen them much elsewhere, so I don't know if there's some subsidy or penalty that means that it's only economically feasible in California, but it seemed like a good replacement.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I believe the term to use here is "whitewashing".
I think Greenwashing is the term that you're looking for.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A lot of plastic is colored and even the "clear" plastics can develop scratched surfaces that block some light. It's not clear that will bother reef corals, but the algae that coexist with, and presumably help nourish, the corals might not be happy with less light. In any case, most reef corals feed at night. I know that causer the Internet told me so.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
"The dilemma is that with petroleum based plastics ..."
Nitpicky, I know, but at least in the US, most plastics are made from Methane or Ethane -- i.e. Natural Gas. You CAN make them from petroleum or coal, but NG or Natural Gas Liquids (Ethane, Propane, Butane) are cheaper feedstocks.
Biodegradable plastics? Nifty idea. But how do you keep them from biodegrading on the shelf? Most folks want containers to ... like .. contain.
I actually do think that overuse of plastic is a genuine problem, even if I don't have any answer for what to do about it. ... Maybe significant refundable deposits and significant non-refundable recycling fees on every plastic product ...
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Errh ... The Indian Ocean and GBR are where they looked. Nowhere does it say they wouldn't have found plastic pollution to be a problem in Biscayne Bay (Florida) had they looked there.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Don't be silly, Paul Allen couldn't do that all by himself. He had help. Some folks claim it was the illuminati who did it. Others blame Hillary Clinton. I'm told there's video of her in an old fashioned diving suit meticulously killing individual coral polyps with a poison dagger of some sort that she took off Vince Foster after doing him in. Me? I'm keeping an open mind.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I won't forget the time I learned about small plastic fiber pollution. Most of us are familiar with the dryer lint we have to clean, but just as much or more lint is ejected by our washing machines. The plastic based fabrics we wear and wash are emitting tons of these microfibers into the waterways and ending up in our seafood.
I'm trying to wear more cotton and natural fibers and have put a better trap on my washing machine.
I fear that we are one of the last generations to enjoy the level of natural beauty of our planet currently offers. The future of our planetary ecosysem is pretty bleak because the likelihood of humanity addressing pollution to the extent required is nil.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Now if you burn waste in general what's the difference?
Depends HOW you burn it.
Burning it in open air, low temperature fires, is not the same as plasma gasification.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You've literally posted this after someone posted the source. You didn't even have to Google it, you disingenuous hippy.
Someone posted a source, you didn't even have to Google it.
We have too much plastic in the environment. Where does plastic come from. Silly frivolous packaging. Who demands all the silly frivolous packaging. White liberals. We need to ban white liberals. Redneck crackers pretty much drink straight from the faucet. Disadvantaged blacks and brown people do likewise. Smug white liberals on the other hand love their fancy plastic bottles holding tap water distilled from springs in Mt Kilimanjaro.
If we get rid of the white liberals, I think rednecks and black would get along just fine.
There's always thermal depolymerization, which can turn all that plastic (and other organic materials, to some extent) into a rough approximation of crude oil. And that material in turn should be readily convertible into various kinds of plastics, unless I'm missing something.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Blech. Plastic isn't overused. In fact, if there's anything that would become better (or remain as good, but become cheaper) if it were made out of plastic, then I would argue that plastic is still underused.
The problem is not that plastic is being used, but rather that some of the plastic isn't getting reclaimed (whether by recycling it or by burying it for future recycling). That problem can be largely solved by levying heavy fines against garbage haulers that leave litter behind. That garbage doesn't end up in the ocean by chance. It ends up there because the people handling municipal waste are often careless. If you make that carelessness expensive enough, those people will be more careful.
Ideally, we should also filter municipal runoff before it enters a major body of water. That small change would dramatically reduce the amount of plastics ending up in the oceans. Basically, I'm envisioning a giant holding pool with huge, high-volume inlets, huge, high-volume outlets, and a fine mesh across the middle of the pool, with scrapers that periodically pull the detritus to one side for collection. But I digress.
Blaming plastics for ending up in the oceans is like blaming oxygen for forest fires.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Depends HOW you burn it.
Burning it in open air, low temperature fires, is not the same as plasma gasification.
But if anything I assume generic waste is burned at an even higher temperature than just plastic waste?
Municipal waste is usually a mix of various waste products, but the temperature is more determined by the kind of plasma technology and configuration used.
E.g. The pyrolysis stage will run at around 600 C, to separate most of the gases, but then the gasses are "cleaned" of particulates by plasma at about 1200 C.
Or, plasma arc can burn the mix at 6000-15000 K (hot electrode) or 7000 K (cold electrode).
It's not yet a world-wide standardized technology, mainly due to attempts to make it both economically viable as an energy source and to minimize solid waste output in an economical fashion.
Places which can't waste land area on garbage dumps, and which produce a lot of waste, like Japan, get most out of it.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Thanks for the info. Seem like ours was "at-least 9000 degrees C."
Actually...due to the coin miners, and the low reviews for the AMD Vega Frontier Edition...which has twice the RAM and precision of the AMD Vega 64, but is a few FPS slower...I was able to snag one for $750.
Nice card that makes sense business and game-wise.