I agree. Each of us can and should be doing something. There is the issue that the majority of the emissions come from large corporations, but we need to remember that our habits drive the corporations to create that waste.
Now, people have pointed out that this article is a little bit on the “fact-stretching” side, and, perhaps more importantly, we are consumers who buy things from those corporations, but still.
While litter is disgusting and plastic is filling up the ocean (I’d really like to hear a climate denier try to disagree with me on that statement), it’s such a tiny fraction of the problem. Just as straw bans seek to address less than 1% of a problem when fishing net regulation could solve 50% of the problem, everyone on earth taking public transit and waking up and going to bed with the sun and turning off lights and taking military showers and unplugging electronics when not in use and raising the A/C temp a few degrees in the summer and lowering heater temps a few degrees in the winter, etc. is only addressing a fraction of the problem. Absolutely do the things I just said and have said earlier on this page (like, don’t buy crap you don’t need. For the love of god, ban the claw machines!), but, at the same time, we need action against the biggest polluters, and that’s the corporations.
Although i 100% agree with you, the issue is the common folk, aka the public, are FAR too entitled. Imagine drastically limiting seafood. The onus is US, the people, to have some damn reasponsibility so that “they” dont need to mandate and impose limits on our freedoms. This is a conbcept everyone knows but never seem to want to do themselves.
We are agreeing on tge outcome, but probbaly have slightly different emphasis on the cause. If we use fishing nets as the example, you are pussed off at fishermen and i am pissed off at people eating all you can eat shit and throwing food in the trash. Both are wrong. I suppose all i am saying is that if we, the people, require the government to mandate such basic common sense policies, we are no longer allowed to claim intelligence for our species. I say it often, and will say it again. We are adapatable, we are curious and we are resilliant. But we are NOT intelligent.
Interesting open access, citizen science based study of (macro) plastics pollution around and in rivers of the Tamsui river system, involving my favourite NTU professor Alex:
Some findings:
The coastline was mainly polluted by derelict fishing gear
single-use plastics and illegally dumped waste dominated the upstream areas
A correlation between litter and population density could not be identified
it was noted that litter hotspots occur at cut banks and near mangrove vegetation.
If anyone wants to get involved in related activities:
A note, population densities are rarely going to work for complex and long river systems for very obvious reasons. Just as obvious why hard curves, geography and plant habitats (eg mangroves) will catch more garbage. As they also catch organic debris, sediment etc. They are filters, in the most literal on.senses. this is why taiwans getting worse for coastal erosion, we cut down all our mangroves and destroyed the natuural barriers to storms and replaced them with fairly shitty efficiency concrete blocks.
“We show that 8.4 ± 1.4 million tons of pandemic-associated plastic waste have been generated from 193 countries as of August 23, 2021, with 25.9 ± 3.8 thousand tons released into the global ocean representing 1.5 ± 0.2% of the global total riverine plastic discharge. The model projects that the spatial distribution of the discharge changes rapidly in the global ocean within 3 y, with a significant portion of plastic debris landing on the beach and seabed later and a circumpolar plastic accumulation zone will be formed in the Arctic. We find hospital waste represents the bulk of the global discharge (73%), and most of the global discharge is from Asia (72%)”
If it saves just one life it will be worth it! Are you suggesting we should have let granny die just to prevent a bit of harmless pollution?
It wouldn’t surprise me if this airborne pollution was coming exclusively from masks, given the research showing that the internal fabrics tend to shed microparticles; logic suggests that some of those particles would be going inwards, and some outwards.
The original article is here, listing various plastics identified:
polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polymethyl methacrylate, polyamide 6, polycarbonate, ethylene–propylene copolymer or polyethylene–polypropylene alloy, polyurethane, and epoxy resin
Obviously, masks are not the only source of these things, but I was surprised to find this proposing PMMA microfibre:
The changing value of life is a good philosophical question. I agree at a certain level that there is a point where the elevated value of the one, the individual, is not worth the savagery to the planet.
Humanity will break in ways we can’t expect. Poisoning every iota of living space though seems to be something we should be able to address if not immediately rectify.
But nah, the rich but giant fucking boats and fly their filthy fucking jets and we go waaaaa, so koooooo.
