A pollution expert on why any attempt to rid the ocean of plastic completely is doomed to fail—and what we actually need to be focusing on.
  • abbenm
    1·
    3 years ago

    I feel like this headline is a bait + switch hook, to talk about something else. Nothing wrong with that per se, but insofar as it purports to explain the thing promised by the headline, I don’t think it does.

    As far as I can tell, the case against cleaning up the ocean is (1) by and large animals eating plastic is not a real problem, (2) plastic exists on a geological time scale, so no matter how much you pick up it’s still going to be in our ecosystem. You can try to recycle, but there really isn’t a market for that, and (3) the real problem is we need to “turn off the tap” of plastic.

    With (1), I would say well, fair enough, but does that one example really capture the full spectrum of harms from ocean plastic?

    With (2) I think that’s more or less true, I think the idea that you can recycle all plastic is basically a myth but still, doesn’t it make sense to keep it contained and maintained somewhere and not have it loosely blowing about, contaminating our oceans?

    As for (3), that just feels annoying and confused as a response to the youtube Ocean Cleanup thing. Sure, we should turn off the tap. Meanwhile, let’s also clean up the ocean. Obviously it doesn’t save the world, it doesn’t address systematic issues, etc. etc. But that doesn’t make it bad to do.