Item — HN Reader

> Most captains would obviously want to avoid such a costly and dangerous situation, but the sheer number of nets draped on Stellwagen wrecks indicates that some are willing to risk it.

Nets are a great source of Microplastics in the ocean, whether lost during fishing or flying away of landfills [0]. New kind of ropes degrades slowly but that’s just a “timer on the bomb”.

What can we do ?

At a society level legislation does not work off the coast: near impossible to find consensus on international zones laws and even more complicated to enforce them. At a personal level you can stop eating fishes. You won’t change the world alone but still have a small but real impact, about the same as when you go to the polls.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X2...

3 comments

>Nets are a great source of Microplastics

It seems to me the solution is to require (and subsidize) the use of cotton (or other natural fiber) based netting, which is biodegradable.

Cotton in particular is a bad crop choice because it uses a lot of water. Cotton cultivation is a contributing factor to the shrinking of the Aral Sea.

Is cotton cultivation that bad in areas that were not artificially made suitable for the crop by the Soviet Union?

To produce a kilo of cotton (roughly equivalent to a t-shirt and a pair of jeans) takes 20,000L of water. It’s just fundamentally an extremely thirsty crop.

Not to mention that cotton is notorious for depleting soil nutrients, so it is often grown with very large amounts of fertilizer, which also polluted waterways and their outlets into the oceans.

> artificially made suitable

Don’t know what you mean by that but the Soviet having made worse does not mean other countries approach is water-friendly. See https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/files/6843583/water_footprint_of_c...

According to 2016 FAO data, roughly 59 mio people are directly involved in fishing. Do you consider taking away their ability to have some income "small impact"?

Besides, most of the fish I eat are sweetwater fish. I doubt me stopping to eat fish would have any impact with the micropastics situation.

Besides, what else am I supposed to stop? Breath, drink, think, or maybe exist?

Pretty much unnecessary rhetoric black-white argumentation though there are many shades in between? There are a lot of compromises that can be made without resorting to "am I supposed to stop existing" nonsense, come on!

if only there was actually any good evidence of microplastic impact on health instead of a moral panic. microplastics will sink to the bottom of the sea and get buried under dirt on land, becoming part of the geology anyhow. for something with no clear evidence of harm, is it really worth replacing it with materials that require multipliers more fossil fuels to produce, increase carbon emissions, which are very much proven to cause harm to both human health and ecosystems?

Microplastics is hardly the only concern about plastic nets. In garbage patches, nets are a major constituent. Marine animals, small and big, get strangled in the nets. Marine animals indirectly consume plastic nets which doesn't get passed on with feces and they die of gastric obstruction.

that is basically a fringe issue considering 80% or so of plastic pollution in the ocean comes from mismanaged waste streams in the third world. fix that and I’m sure marine animals will have a much easier time avoiding the rest

certainly the question is: every plastic alternative tends to have higher impacts with regards to emissions to produce it or transport it. knowing that netting is only a minor contributor to plastic pollution, it is worth trying to solve plastic pollution by worsening the problem of carbon emissions? everything is a trade-off, to solve one problem you have to contribute to another

The problem isn't plastic, the problem is everyone throwing it onto the oceans. And blaming the "third world" isn't gonna help

it’s not everyone, it is specifically poorer countries that contribute the vast majority to plastic pollution in the ocean via waste mismanagement. if you want an issue to be solved, it helps to look up and understand the specifics first!

e: since you basically asked

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

Google “global waste trade”, it’s the same mafiosi level as carbon credits: rich countries proclaims to have clean hands because someone in another juridiction accept their money.

Waste management is also a joke within the rich countries: landfills still exists and those recycling program seems nice on a consumer (=voter) side: you have a colored special bin, state flyers tells you how recycling (is supposed to) work and buy sometimes a (partially) recycled bootle or pullover. In practice 5% of stuff put in the bin is recycled, the rest goes to landfill or incinerators.

Both landfills and incinerators are good places for waste as long as they're not next to water bodies.

They don't contribute to the waste in oceans that this sub-thread seemed to be about.

Foremost I am absolutely of the opinion that plastic in the ocean is not a good thing.

But I was surprised to hear that at this point, according to at least one person that studies this, removal may have consequences as well. It’s been there long enough for new eco systems to evolve.

This was rather enlightening in that nothing is as simple as it seems.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/unexplainable/id155457...

Fear of microplastics is not a moral panic. A moral panic would be if we knew microplastics were harmless (making it irrational) and if microplastics were humans (point to a single moral panic were the subject was not human).

Also, the fear is rational when it's a conscientious observation of "we've made a change to the environment we don't understand".

Yes, let's just irrevocably pollute ourselves and our landscape until proven unsafe. This strategy has never failed us before.

well it’s only been 70 years or so since we’ve started using plastics at scale, and at least half that we’ve had some form of microplastics widespread in the environment. any day now

Not everything is life or death, plastics have been linked to hormonal/fertility issues. Micro plastics do cause problems but it’s systemic at this point.

The issue with pollution is it frequently becomes very hard to notice that everything is slightly worse. People used to think smoking was heathy as crazy as it sounds, but when most people experienced smoking related issues such issues where normal.

Have you seen the current #1 article on HN ?

> New study finds microplastics infiltrate all systems of body, alter behaviour

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37306427

is this really the first MDPI published article where people spent their grant money injecting random stuff into mice HN has seen?

Micro plastics break down into nanoplastics , many of which can function as hormone analogs in organisms.

that is simply false but it does demonstrate the level of understanding the general public, including HN, has on this issue. nanoplastics, once again, have no proven health effects. what does at least have some attested health effects are the various plasticiser additives in plastic. the only actual health concern with plastics is and has always been: will they leach plasticisers into for example food? it only takes a very small amount of thinking to realise that suspended micro and nanoplastics in a solvent volume as great as the damn ocean likely means even if the dreaded micro and nanoplastics make it into your system they will be long devoid of any soluble plasticisers, especially if those happen to be degraded by the sun or brackish conditions

Here's two studies that show changes in the gut microbiota of fish on exposure to micro- and nano-plastics.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32361245/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33199151/

But it's probably fine.

“Proven health effects” is a really high bar. Universal, long term, planetary contamination with a synthetic organic polymer seems like exactly the kind of situation that would warrant an abundance of caution rather than requiring conclusive proof of harm.

That said, perhaps the many studies I have seen showing that multiple plastics have hormone like effects on biological systems en vitro, especially when presented in fine particulate form were just wrong. Honestly could be.

But I’ve seen an awful lot of them supporting the biological activity of plastics and plastic decomposites, and only a couple suggesting failures of replication.

I’ll have to take a look into it again. Have you seen papers that strongly support biological neutrality in fine plastic particulates and decomposites?

Animals consume them. We consume animals. They re-enter the cycle and repeat.

They are made of fossil fuels, while alternative netting are not.

> microplastics will sink to the bottom of the sea

Huh?