The 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

Ocean trash has interests groups supporting it. Plenty of groups taking money to deal with it (or not) and part of that is to advertise the issue to ensure more money keeps coming into this industry. There is are no large international organizations or government efforts going out there to remove all the trash outside the more commercial or industrial parts of town, no ones buying ads about it, so its not in the public awareness as much. It also doesn't help that over time people grow blind to it. Heres an experiment you can run: find some litter on the sidewalk and see how many minutes or months go by before someone bends over and picks it up who isn't paid to do so. Chances are it will be in the months to never category, unless the person picking it up owns the land under that trash.

Most of the places I've lived, litter isn't much of an issue. There's certainly more than I'd like, but you've got to go looking for it other than around overflowing public trash cans and such. Vegetation near highways has a pretty high carrying capacity for litter, too.

I've visited places where it's much worse. And have heard it used to be very commonly a lot worse throughout the US. But anti-littering campaigns with slogans such as Don't Mess With Texas and Litter and It Will Hurt and penalties seem to have had at least reasonable success.

It'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.

Huh… rubbish lining the highways always stands out to me due to its rarity.

What 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.

It 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.

I think indeed the ocean is often seen as one of the last frontiers of untouched wilderness

Ghost nets are haunting reminders of human impact, silently ensnaring marine life and disrupting ocean ecosystems.

The 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.

When 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.

They 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.

In 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.

How 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.

> 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.

Interestingly The Philippines is responsible for 35% of ocean plastic waste.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

I was assuming the UN has to deploy bouys or ships at river mouths to the anger of the country owning the territory.

Is there a principle or a name for how measurement leads to enhanced control?

I mean how much of that is because western countries take advantage of Vietnam and other countries in their region to cheaply produce their plastic crap?

>> 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.

It 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.

In garbage disposal in South East Asia? Almost all plastic comes from a few countries.

ah yes, get ready for the startup that will solve EDCs in my ballsack and the ballsacks of all my descendents.

Nature seems to be on the case already, for example: https://futurism.com/the-byte/plastic-eating-fungus-pacific-...

Many 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.

I'd prefer it had an off switch and an API entirely subservient to our needs, rather than DNA.

The ocean is a major source of energy which could be used to power the thing.

And I'd prioritize ocean cleanup over landfill, first of all. I mean, maybe we use the ocean to construct the fleet, and then when its nice and clean, send the fleet to land ..

As long as that means we also "don't need roads" too!