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the great pacific garbage patch

faz said:
Why does it have to be a walkable island of plastic at one extreme... or a total hippie bullshit at another?

I have started to reduce my personal impact on plastic waste based on some of the similar info I have seen recently. I am not totally changing my lifestyle... I am not planning on tree-sitting anytime in my life... but I am changing some bits of my lifestyle that can help here and there.

It is not hard to understand that every little bit helps... and then to do the little bit that you can here and there to reduce your negative impact on the environment.
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Stop being reasonable Faz, that'll never work here :hand
 
First Pearl Harbor, and now this, we should investigate the efficacy of a national protective sea net.
 
UDRider said:
Like a virus consuming, multiplying, destroying.
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Yep. Tossing your garbage out the window, and not putting trash in a can means you're just an asshole and lazy. There is no excuse.
 
Great reboot, Butch. Some of the "old" posts are funny, you'd think this thread was from the 1950's. The fact that legal ocean dumping exists drives me nuts.
 
msethhunter said:
Yep. Tossing your garbage out the window, and not putting trash in a can means you're just an asshole and lazy. There is no excuse.
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I think its much more than that now Mikey. We have to use less stuff. One use plastic anything should go away. There are just too many humans to go on as we have been.

The analogy that stuck with me went like this. If you walked into you kitchen and the faucet was on full blast and the sink was overflowing, you wouldn't grab a mop and frantically try to mop up the floor first. You would turn off the tap. We need to turn off the tap of plastic flowing into the environment and then start cleaning up after ourselves. Please everyone, try to use as few one time use plastic items as ya can.
 
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faz said:
Why does it have to be a walkable island of plastic at one extreme... or a total hippie bullshit at another?

I have started to reduce my personal impact on plastic waste based on some of the similar info I have seen recently. I am not totally changing my lifestyle... I am not planning on tree-sitting anytime in my life... but I am changing some bits of my lifestyle that can help here and there.

It is not hard to understand that every little bit helps... and then to do the little bit that you can here and there to reduce your negative impact on the environment.
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This
 
Anyone wants to buy some plastic straws? I got a colored ones, stripped ones, bendy ones.
 
Yeahhhh...is that just trivializing the issue, or something about using caution going too Orwellian and mocking a hypothetical plastic black market?
 
byke said:
Yeahhhh...is that just trivializing the issue, or something about using caution going too Orwellian and mocking a hypothetical plastic black market?
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Simple trolling. Don't over think it.
 
The simplest solution tends to be the right one, check.

The schadenfreude in me likes it when we do stupid stuff with an inevitable consequence. As in, "Oh you think this is a good idea because you don't want to make room on your vessel to store it until you get to shore? Okay, sure, do that then. We'll talk later."
 
So where's the photo of this garbage the size of a state?

You can't

The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles
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So it's overblown in that it's not a patch of "garbage" as we picture it. But yes its certainly worth us changing out habits over.
 
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HappyHighwayman said:
So where's the photo of this garbage the size of a state?

You can't

So it's overblown in that it's not a patch of "garbage" as we picture it. But yes its certainly worth us changing out habits over.
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Yes and no... this is the most current study. Ultimately it says that the pile is just too big to study. It’s larger than the continental US. Maybe before the Japanese tsunami it was all microplastics but that has since changed.

According to a three-year study published in Scientific Reports, the mass known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is about 1.6 million square kilometers in size — up to 16 times bigger than previous estimates.

Ghost nets, or discarded fishing nets, make up almost half the 80,000 metric tons of garbage floating at sea, and researchers believe that around 20% of the total volume of trash is debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

The bulk of the pile is made up of larger objects while only 8% of the mass is microplastics, or pieces smaller than 5 millimeters in size.

“We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered,” Chief Scientist Julia Reisser said in a statement.

“We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments, but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
 
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mlm said:
The core issue with so many things today.
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The crazy awsome thing about humans is we CAN recognize a problem and work to fix it. Provided we dont engage in willfull ignorance, stick our heads in the sand and say, "Naaaa. It's all good gimme, gimme, gimme mine, mine, mine fuck the future I need it easy NOW!" I mean what could be better than sipping a coke from a straw right?
 
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