Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag

[wnissen]

You're picturing plastic waste in the oceans wrong. Most of it comes from fishing gear that's abandoned or lost, not disposal of waste like plastic bags. In total 80-90% come from Asian and African countries with poor environmental policies.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/07/26/asia-africa-cause-90-pl...

For the record, I am a scuba diver who has participated in the "Dive Against Debris", we use paper straws at home, I bike to work a couple days a week, and switched to reusable bags years before they were required in my locale, etc. I'm not saying that reducing single-use plastics isn't a worthy goal (and microplastics are just as bad as they seem), but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled. Your plastic straw is not ending up at the bottom of the Marinara trench.

[nicoburns]

> but developed country waste is getting safely landfilled

That's definitely not true in the UK. A lot of our "recycling" has been being shipped to China until recently. I believe that other countries have been doing that too.

[noname120]

While this does not invalidate your point, be aware that the American Council on Science and Health is predominantly funded by industries. For example: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Bayer Cropscience, Procter & Gamble, Syngenta, 3M, McDonald's and Altria. [1]

They probably have a conflict of interest on this specific subject (disposable consumer plastic) with some of the companies that fund them.

[1] Read the Wikipedia article for more information, the talk page is interesting as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Council_on_Science_an...

[xfitm3]

Yes, plastic straws are not single handedly polluting the oceans. It’s a feel good PR campaign that inconveniences those who need them.

[legulere]

That number comes from just one sample. In reality it's just around 20%:

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#ocean-plastic-s...

[chasingthewind]

> Marinara trench

Just FYI on the misspelling. Probably an autocorrect issue :)A funny one though!

[hawkjo]

The most exciting news is that they made several extremely deep dives in quick succession, advancing the way to a future of regular deep sea exploration. Congrats to the team!

[mc32]

Do you think this has the potential to result technologies allowing the exploitation (extraction) of deep sea natural resources (i.e. minerals and metals)?

It seems people are more excited by exploiting the Moon for resources, but deep sea should be more economical once extraction tech is figured out.

[whoopdedo]

Has anyone made a good guess at what the true purpose of these dives is? I'm not unconvinced this isn't another expedition in the line of Ballard or Glomar Explorer.

[erentz]

Instead of anthropocene we might be better to call the current era the plastocene.

[bdamm]

With some previously non-existent radioactive elements mixed in for good measure. This layer of plastic, radioactivity, and airliner exhaust will be forever buried in the geologic record at every point on the earth. What fun!

[PopeDotNinja]

My friend once joked that some future civilization will discover plastic and think it's a natural resource.

[arestifo]

Plastic reached where humans never managed to.

Great, just great.

[geddy]

I think about it this way - the planet will survive, humans will not. Within a year of us being gone the planet will take over everything we ever owned. Weeds will break through the streets and house foundations, and in a decade or so (blink of an eye in Earth time) it'll be like we were never here.

Well except for all the garbage we left behind. But even that will become food for something.

[sjclemmy]

The best thing about this is that the vessels’ names are inspired by Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels.

https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/names/

[JTbane]

There ought to be a principle that packaging is evaluated on how much harm a 'careless' disposal would cause: even though a paper bag takes many times more energy to produce than a plastic one, it causes less harm when disposed of by dumping.

[nealrs]

I believe we've known about plastic bags at the bottom of the Mariana Trench since [1998](http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/catalog/dsdebris/metadataDisp...)

[swarnie_]

Reading the comments here is a bit scary. Is taking the same 4-5 plastic bags back to the supermarket each week not super common everywhere?

[gambiting]

Of course not. I don't know where you live that it is. Where I'm from(Poland) you'd commonly go to a shop without any bags and just pack everything into single use plastic bags every time and then just throw them away. It's only started changing recently since shops started charging money for bags, but I don't recall ever going to a shop with our own bags for shopping - I think I'd even go as far as say that it would be weird to do so.

[avtar]

One would hope so but evidently not :( I've been trying to exercise more and use exercise videos on YouTube when I can't make it to the gym. People featured in fitness videos usually advocate for drinking more water but then it's crazy to see the majority of them reach for plastic water bottles while they're in walking distance to kitchen sinks in their own homes or studios. I just assume most U.S. and Canadian cities provide suitable drinking water via utilities.

[CelestialTeapot]

I'd say it depends. Some grocery stores use plastic bags so thin that they rip or tear just getting the groceries to the car, rendering them non-reusable.

[butteroverflow]

Where I live, they sell everything in plastic bags. I buy everything I can in bulk, but still go through 2-5 bags each day. I wash them with small amounts of water and reuse as much as I can, it's still close to a thousand bags per year -- good luck keeping up with that.

Absolutely no recycling here, too. It all goes to the landfill, along with lithium batteries and laboratory chemicals. How about some fun examples of the stuff my friends have found on the landfill: a jar of mercury, a 1.5L of nitric acid, an ampule of bromine, some other stuff I fail to remember.

Ah, the joyful realities of living in the third world.

[josefresco]

Our local supermarket has a bin to recycle these bags. Most probably don't use it, but we do! Certainly is better than single-use paper.

[rohit2412]

Or cloth bags. Seriously, they are stronger, hold more stuff and hurt less because of sharp edges. All you need to do is just carry them

[ForHackernews]

Not in America, it's not.

[dfilppi]

Cool. That would be a good place to stick plastic bags.

[otabdeveloper1]

Trash flows downstream. Not very surprising.

[gedy]

I’m old enough to remember being berated by a family member for using paper bags instead of plastic bags because, quote: “Plastic is recyclable!”

[chrisseaton]

Well they’re reusable, which is even better than recyclable. They also use less materials to make and are stronger for the same weight, so they also reduce, which is better still.

Just don’t throw them into the ocean. But that much should have been obvious.

[bribroder]

http://www.allaboutbags.ca/papervplastic.html

> Fiction: Many believe that paper bags are more environmentally friendly than plastic bags because they are made from a renewable resource, can biodegrade, and are recyclable.

> Fact: Plastic shopping bags outperform paper bags environmentally – on manufacturing, on reuse, and on solid waste volume and generation.

Note: plastics industry website, but also see this NPR post which pulls in several independent studies: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/09/711181385/are-...

[ip26]

People today seem to look back and think the tree-hugging era of moving away from wood products was misguided, but today we are blessed with generally having moved past the "gobble-gobble" era of logging. It's not perfect but timber is far more renewable & sustainably managed today than fifty years ago.

[gerbilly]

Ironic because paper bags are recyclable, and nature does it for free!

[simongr3dal]

Many plastics can be recycled to a certain extent, some can even be composted, and if they can't they can be burned for their energy and heat.

Trouble is that we choose to dump them instead.

[astura]

...so is paper...?

[bluedino]

We used a paper bag inside of a plastic bag. Won't rip (and you can't see the contents through the bag), and you get handles as a bonus.

[bazooka_penguin]

Plastic bags are the cthulu we've always been expecting to find deep in the ocean

[Dirlewanger]

[flagged]

[dang]

We've asked you many times to stop being uncivil in HN comments. If you don't stop, we are going to have to ban you.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19902164 and marked it off-topic.

[fjp]

While you are correct, I do believe that these feel-good campaigns distract from the corporate polluters that cause the vast vast majority of these problems.

If you get people fighting over straws which are some exceedingly small amount of overall ocean plastics and pollution, then no one's gonna pay attention to the real villains.

[kyrieeschaton]

Single use plastics (eg diapers, syringes, many dressings, nitrile gloves, surgical tubing, surgical sutures, saline bags, and so on) are a primary medical supply.

[Footkerchief]

Absent a cost-benefit analysis, making the world a better place is not a useful heuristic for the effectiveness of policy.

[Nextgrid]

> superfluous byproduct of consumer capitalism

The same can be said about most quality of life improvements, doesn’t mean they’re unnecessary. I enjoy the time throwaway cutlery saves me so I can spend it on something more productive, instead of having to carry dirty cutlery around until I get home.

[7373737373]

Is there a list of governments, companies and other organizations that documents how much waste they direct into the sea?

Or is the majority of it individual people littering?