[HN Gopher] Monitoring marine litter from space
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Monitoring marine litter from space
Author : bitschubser_
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-06-19 09:15 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esa.int)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| agomez314 wrote:
| What's the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to
| stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop
| the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I'm being too cynical?
| teekert wrote:
| Awareness is just step one.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding
| where it starts._
|
| There's a multi-trillion dollar startup just waiting for you to
| solve that problem.
| TrojanHookworm wrote:
| ah yes, get ready for the startup that will solve EDCs in my
| ballsack and the ballsacks of all my descendents.
| jeltz wrote:
| In garbage disposal in South East Asia? Almost all plastic
| comes from a few countries.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Have fun trying to persuade people to give you money to help
| stop it, when the corporations producing it can pay the same
| people a lot to stop you
| Tepix wrote:
| If you catch someone littering, you can fine them.
| Theoretically.
| yosito wrote:
| The more information we have about where waste comes from, the
| more we can target our efforts at reducing it to the biggest
| sources
| 317070 wrote:
| Now in the UN, or at the next climate conference, people can
| actually say:
|
| "Look, Vietnam, you are somehow responsible for 12.2% of the
| marine plastic in the ocean, with only 1.23% of the world
| population. We are making this trade agreement or that
| international investment conditional on that number improving
| by 2028."
|
| Before, there was simply no way of monitoring these things. I
| had to invent that number. That is a massive problem in terms
| of the politics.
|
| And it goes up the hierarchy as well. Vietnam can now also go
| "Ho Chi Minh City, look at this map, how on earth did that
| happen?"
|
| Now we can actually monitor it, it's a way of keeping countries
| on the promises they have already made:
| https://www.oecd.org/ocean/topics/ocean-pollution/marine-pla...
| aitchnyu wrote:
| I was assuming the UN has to deploy bouys or ships at river
| mouths to the anger of the country owning the territory.
| dewey wrote:
| > 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.
| 317070 wrote:
| The Sentinel-2 mission is doing that [0]:
|
| > Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56deg S
| to 84deg N, coastal waters, and all of the Mediterranean
| Sea
|
| The constellation is not complete yet though. Sentinel-2C
| is planned to launch in September [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel-2 [1]
| https://www.satnow.com/launch-mission-details/sentinel-2c
| pkage wrote:
| Additionally, the only sea covered in its entirety is the
| Mediterranean. Generally, constellations don't do
| captures over open ocean as researchers/customers tend to
| be much more interested in events on land; this makes it
| difficult to do long-term analyses of marine events as
| the data just simply isn't captured.
|
| Source: work in the industry
| bornfreddy wrote:
| True, but coastlines are well covered. Assuming the
| pollution comes from the coast it should be fairly easy
| to determine what the hotspots are (see Po river on the
| map in the article).
| gorkish wrote:
| > 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
|
| This probably isn't a good assumption. It's likely more
| about it being much faster to iterate/validate the
| methodology on the smaller dataset of just the
| Mediterranean (2.5 million km^2) before spending the effort
| to run it on the entire ocean (361 million km^2, 144x
| larger data).
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Interestingly The Philippines is responsible for 35% of ocean
| plastic waste.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-
| plastic...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| 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?
| throwup238 wrote:
| The US produces plenty of plastic waste on its own, but it
| ends up in landfills because of modern garbage collection
| and street sweeping infrastructure. Before the development
| of landfills and garbage trucks, trash was a much bigger
| problem in the developed world - plastics just weren't very
| common yet.
|
| Most developing countries don't have that infrastructure so
| plastic pollution is everywhere, regardless of how much
| they export to Western countries.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It's not "regardless" at all though. _Knowing_ they don
| 't have the infrastructure in place to deal with existing
| waste, it's easy to predict what happens when we
| outsource production there. However much uncontrolled
| waste they would generate, we are choosing to add to it.
| jeltz wrote:
| Most of the waste likely comes from their native
| consumption, not their production.
| snthd wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
|
| More than a third comes from The Philippines, India 13%,
| China 7%.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Not much? It's the habits of the society. Other places have
| similar economic situations without the pollution.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Is there a principle or a name for how measurement leads to
| enhanced control?
| cheschire wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
| boringg wrote:
| What isn't measured isn't managed.
| mulmen wrote:
| There _are_ efforts to reduce the production of waste and to
| eliminate ocean dumping. There are thousands of such efforts.
| Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
|
| > Maybe I'm being too cynical?
|
| Yes. What's the point in spreading negative falsehoods?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So you build a landfill. How do you get the collected waste
| to the landfill? How do you do collections? Then of course,
| there's the training/habit breaking to use the new
| collection system.
|
| I'm not stating this as a reason not to, but a realistic
| look on the logistics. It's a multi-generational solution,
| not a quick one in the least. So we should start now, not
| tomorrow
| raincole wrote:
| It's just the very first step. How are we going to stop it if
| we don't even know where it comes from?
| wesleywt wrote:
| You stop production by showing it's harmfulness.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Not cynical enough in my books.
|
| As the saying goes: trust is good, control/verification is
| better
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| As they say, you can't fix what you can't measure. This is a
| first step.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding
| where it starts
|
| "Nice and all" is exactly what we're going for. It'd cost us
| too much today (in terms of change to lifestyle and in terms of
| money) to stop the bleeding where it starts so we're hoping
| that we can just fiddle around and that we die before the
| effect people have on the Earth gets really bad for _us._ We
| don't care if it gets bad for other people though.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Don't underestimate the power of ego and national pride.
| Shinning a light on the foibles of nations is generally very
| effective, for good or not. It's clear from the images so far
| that there are local hotspots, and those areas aren't incapable
| of mustering the resources to ~solve it~ [improve or maintain
| their national cache].
| azulster wrote:
| its useful to measure and track the problem if only demonstrate
| it's validity
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Very similar situation in medicine. Diagnostics seems to have
| improved but not the cures, or prevention. To add to the
| confusion often early diagnostics + treatment is presumed to be
| prevention. All in all, it appears to me that there is grand
| delusion of progress while somewhat regressing.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If you don't measure the problem you don't know if it's getting
| better or worse, or even, strictly speaking, that it exists at
| all.
|
| "Let's first fix the problem, and maybe later figure out if it
| exists" is much worse than the opposite order.
| burkaman wrote:
| You are being too cynical, there are ongoing global
| negotiations over a UN plastics treaty that will govern plastic
| production: https://www.unep.org/inc-plastic-pollution. It is
| slow and difficult but it is moving.
|
| There's a great podcast called Plastisphere that had a lot of
| coverage of the most recent meeting in April:
| https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/
| jnmandal wrote:
| No, you are right. A lot of effort is being poured into
| monitoring and advocacy because that is the only place those
| interested in tackling these problems have to go. If there was
| an appetite for reform or mitigation, the folks doing high tech
| problem solving would be put to work in more meaningful ways.
| Worldwide though there is little interest in or support for
| changing our lifestyles, industrial systems, or resource flows
| to any significant extent (beyond extending them within poorer
| countries).
| jeltz wrote:
| 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.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| At some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest ocean
| plastic, and use it to produce energy .. and every time I see one
| of my favourite remote-beach Youtubers climb over piles of
| plastic rubble on some remote tropical island, I can't help get
| the feeling that there has to be some kind of way to make a
| portable, self-replicating 3D printer that can go out there and
| just reproduce itself.
|
| But I guess the chemistry behind all of this is beyond me. It
| sure seems like the 3D-printing revolution needs to be followed
| up with a plastics-deconstruction phase, so that 3D printers
| don't get factory-produced spools of future ocean-bound plastics,
| but rather a giant hopper into which one can pile collected
| plastics from the environment. Some sort of primordial proto-
| Feed, I guess ..
| wffurr wrote:
| "portable, self-replicating 3D printer" you mean bacteria? I am
| sure someone is working on plastic eating bacteria but it might
| not be a great idea to have it loose in the world.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Nature seems to be on the case already, for example:
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/plastic-eating-fungus-
| pacific-...
| vmfunction wrote:
| 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.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| I'd prefer it had an off switch and an API entirely
| subservient to our needs, rather than DNA.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You can engineer systems that effectively have an off
| switch (sterilized progeny with short life or a certain
| environmental lethality condition e.g. dependent on you
| constantly supplying certain substance) as well as even an
| API (e.g. built in features that enable integration with
| other genetic techniques such as insertion sites for
| cloning).
| lukan wrote:
| "At some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest
| ocean plastic"
|
| I hope not. You can harvest landfills much cheaper today. If
| that becomes more expensive than taking plastic from the ocean,
| then the oceans would be really full of plastic.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| 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 ..
| lukan wrote:
| You might want to learn something about engineering first.
| And run some numbers.
|
| And read about them, who tried something way less
| ambitioned:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ocean_Cleanup
|
| And still were not that effective.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Oh, this is just a thought experiment, the engineering
| isn't within our grasp.
|
| I'd imagine some sort of floating device which can build
| copies out of itself with the plastics it finds is not
| far away, but it probably does involve a fair bit of
| science before it becomes more than just fiction..
| lukan wrote:
| If we would have that tech, we also could then release
| the engineered plastic eating bacterias. Way easier.
|
| But currently we want some plastic to remain intact.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Landfill is also a source of energy. Some cities have built
| power plants that are fueled by landfill emissions or
| through incineration of excess materials.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > a giant hopper into which one can pile collected plastics
| from the environment
|
| A bit like Mr Fusion[0]?
|
| [0] https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion
| dylan604 wrote:
| As long as that means we also "don't need roads" too!
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Already being done?
|
| https://theoceancleanup.com/
| LorenDB wrote:
| I thought this article was going to be about all the satellites
| and used rocket parts we dump in the ocean all the time, which is
| a problem that doesn't have a great solution other than launching
| cargo ships like Starship to retrieve old spacecraft for
| recycling.
| JR1427 wrote:
| One thing I find interesting is how much more traction the
| problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter
| everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have.
|
| I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a
| wilderness, where litter doesn't belong, whereas we are very used
| to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?
| mmsc wrote:
| 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.
| bitschubser_ wrote:
| 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
| api wrote:
| 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.
| JR1427 wrote:
| This is my feeling, too. I'm all for clean oceans, but we
| shouldn't think that this is the biggest threat right now.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Huh... rubbish lining the highways always stands out to me due
| to its rarity.
| JR1427 wrote:
| There are some stretches in the UK where rubbish collects by
| the roadside in large amounts, tangled in hedges etc,
| presumably because winds concentrate it there.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Even in my area, the most visible litter is along waterways.
| Regardless of where the trash originated, it will pretty much
| always find its way to waterways. Which might be part of why
| it's rare for you to see along the highways unless you have a
| very active group working off their community service hours.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| None?
|
| Ohio has a pretty well-established Adopt-a-Highway program
| that ultimately exists to help with removing litter, and it
| works mostly in places that are absolutely not "in town" at
| all.
|
| It has been operating for decades and is advertised on signs
| alongside these highways.
|
| Elsewhere in Ohio, I've seen ODOT employees picking up trash
| -- and I assure you that they aren't doing this [or anything
| else] for free.
|
| (But the state of Ohio only maintains ~49,000 miles of
| roadways, so maybe none of this can combine to equal a "large
| effort".)
| veunes wrote:
| I think indeed the ocean is often seen as one of the last
| frontiers of untouched wilderness
| maga_2020 wrote:
| Waste is a huge problem, clearly human made, clearly
| responsibility to address in every current generation.
|
| Cost of products sold must include recycling and waste management
| costs.
|
| Otherwise, the manufactures will keep making devices/items with
| built-in-obsolescence to make it 'fashionable' for consumers to
| replace them at the first opportunity.
| jeltz wrote:
| 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.
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I've seen rotis sold in grocery stores and they look almost
| nothing like you'd typically get in the actual country
| they're imported from. I wonder if the plastic is added on to
| appeal to our sensibilities?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Kind of sad to imagine the satellites doing this are also
| surrounded by orbiting trash in space
| ctoth wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| The problem is that this space trash is flying at 20,000
| miles/hr relative to you.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > Your intuitions about this space trash problem are way, way
| off
|
| I'm not sure that's true, for example (with many more
| available)
|
| "Analysis: Why trash in space is a major problem with no
| clear fix"
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/analysis-why-trash-
| in-s...
|
| Also, I'd say "intuition" is a mischaracterization of the
| source of my sentiment. I've been passively hearing about
| this issue for years.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Finally we can see niat from space. All that ancient spite
| towards the various occupiers who owned the allmende, visible in
| wild littering worldwide.
| hbarka wrote:
| I wonder if this can discern for fishing nets pollution, called
| ghost nets, which entangle and ensnare marine animals. The scale
| of harm for these animals is unthinkable.
|
| Edit: the ghost nets come from ships. We need to pinpoint the
| "fishing vessels who continue to dump their old nets into the sea
| with impunity."
|
| https://www.plasticsoupfoundation.org/en/plastic-problem/pla....
| veunes wrote:
| Ghost nets are haunting reminders of human impact, silently
| ensnaring marine life and disrupting ocean ecosystems.
| murderfs wrote:
| 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.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I read it as if stuff from space was littering the sea....
| jcun4128 wrote:
| amazing, would be funny, liter? no nuclear submarine
| veunes wrote:
| The thought of this relentless deluge of plastic entering the
| seas is heartbreaking.
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