I live in NYC, we actually have tons of beaches here in the metropolitan area, and they're certainly not covered in plastic waste. Nor are our forests -- the hiking trails around here are great. And I'm talking about the single most populated metropolitan area in the US.

Sure there are a few strewn candy wrappers or something, but there really isn't any big problem. It's all quite nice.

What country do you live in that your beaches are so bad?

NYC probably has people actively cleaning trails and beaches.

Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash. Going through Shizuoka, Aichi, and islands of Kagoshima, they're increasingly looking like dumps. Some are completely covered in pieces of trash, and most of it isn't Chinese. It's washed up laundry detergent bottles and toys and stuff all from here. Some places like Okinawa and Kamakura beach are generally cleaned, but having visited Kamakura 4 years ago and again a year ago, it's noticeably filthier.

Major beaches are maintained and cleaned daily. Walk a few hundred meters beyond the crowds and there's a good chance you'll see trash everywhere. Two weeks ago I visited a beach I last went to a couple years back, and it was depressing seeing the state of it. The beach used to have crabs and isopods roaming the sands and crawling around the rocks. Now it's covered in shards of plastic and washed up tires and other things. Not a crab to be seen.

> NYC probably has people actively cleaning trails and beaches.

> Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash.

This is exactly my experience as well. Every place that I have been, if it is a remote site that no one is actively cleaning up, then it has weeks, months, years, or even decades of accumulated garbage. Popular destinations, like beaches around resorts, well-maintained hiking trails, private beaches; these all have people regularly picking up garbage.

Some of the most "pristine" beaches I've seen were on outer islands of Fiji. But they were pristine because they had resorts on them, or near them. Kayak over the other side of the island, where no one picks up, and it's trash city. The global ocean system deposits garbage everywhere, on every beach. Depending on where you are in the various gyres, that beach gets more or less washup. I've been to beaches in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Fiji, Africa, Europe, and both coasts of the US. The primary discriminating factor on how much garbage you see is how regular and thorough the pickup is.

Yes, agreed. I lived in Matsue a couple years ago and found a couple nice spots that were covered in ocean trash. Loads of plastic bottles both from Japan and other countries (there was a milk carton from Australia), styrofoam, polyester apparel, some random other stuff.

Pic: https://blog.qiqitori.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC0249...

Boring blog entry: https://blog.qiqitori.com/2017/08/beach-cleaning-in-matsue-j...

I found your blog entry very interesting, thanks!

The outer banks of North Carolina has miles of beaches linked to nature reserves that don’t get cleaned or accumulate such trash. Japan is surrounded by a sea of trash due to the countries surrounding it.

Litter ends up in streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. You can argue it’s an issue with plastics, but it’s equally an issue with trash.

>Japan is surrounded by a sea of trash due to the countries surrounding it.

I'm seeing mainly trash from Japanese companies that are Japanese products with Japanese labels. It's easy to recognize. Externalizing blame isn't the solution because it's not the problem.

Currents likely help carry trash away from certain regions. Japan's east coast isn't really being affected by trash that would be coming from, say, China, because currents don't carry most of it to our beaches. It's stuff being washed out locally and brought back by waves here. Much more is likely being passed out into the middle of the ocean.

Ok, a little digging shows Japan has a much larger littering problem than I thought it did.

That said, Asia really does have a much larger issue here than the rest of the world. 90% of plastic pollution comes from “Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.”

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

The link in the very first post I made was about the US and EU literally shipping their plastic to other countries as part of their "waste management" program.

> Upon implementation of the policy in 2017, plastic imports to China plummeted by 99%.[9] This led to waste stream backlogs across Europe and North America.[9] When they could find buyers, most European plastic was diverted to Indonesia, Turkey, India, Malaysia, and Vietnam.[9]

Western governments are sending trash to these places knowing it's finding its way into rivers just so they don't have to spend money processing it themselves. These impoverished countries are overwhelmed with trash that isn't theirs. It's a problem because Western countries are selling trash that they claim is recyclable and a valuable resource, but is literally useless trash. The moment one country bans the system (such as China), the EU and US find another place to dump it instead of processing it on their own.

No, this is a sadly common misconception.

Trash in rivers in Asia is from local littering, pure and simple.

Trash that Western countries send over is simply buried or burned. It's not the source of plastic pollution in rivers. There's real concern with it being a source of air pollution when burned... but it's simply not turning into litter.

The import bit was: “When they could find buyers”

The US and EU have plenty of landfills, their exporting plastic which was actively separated from the waste stream for recycling which can be profitable. If nobody wants to pay for it then the default is to burn it domestically for energy.

The link mentioned that a lot of it was "contaminated" recyclables.

Contaminated recyclables are just garbage. Countries are getting fed up with the EU and US sending supposedly separated recyclables because it's pure garbage falsely labeled as usable plastic. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48444874

Contaminated recyclables isn’t the equivalent of garbage.

The issue is the degree of contamination. Different municipal waste streams all have their own internal systems a 98% plastic stream and a 99.9% plastic stream are very different economically.

Completely separate from that it’s a political issue as nobody wants their country to be thought of as a dumping ground. “Malaysia says up to 3,000 tonnes of rubbish will soon be returned to the UK, US, Japan, China, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Norway and France.” what’s not mentioned is this represents 1% of plastic sent to the country. The don’t want to ban the process because the other 99% is quite valuable domestically.

The problem seems to be that the trash is getting into the water. Who is dumping laundry detergent bottles into rivers and oceans? Solve that problem. If the bottles switch to some other material, whoever is dumping them now will keep dumping them. Get trash into landfills and the water will be fine.

> I'm seeing mainly trash from Japanese companies that are Japanese products with Japanese labels.

My experience has been the exact opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025358

I was in North Carolina in 2019, in the outer banks. I did see plastic bags and such washing up on the shore, like I've seen everywhere else. They weren't "covered" in garbage, but it's there. It's a sliding scale, a spectrum, which has a lot to do with ocean currents. But yes, there are regular cleanup efforts for these beaches run by the parks service. They'd look much worse if it were not so.

Sitting at the bottom end of that scale you’re mostly seeing litter from tourists. North of Corolla is a long stretch of beach that lacks road access, it’s shockingly pristine and doesn’t see regular cleanup efforts.

Ok, I haven't been to those specific spots. But I bet you'll find small plastic debris (1-3cm in size) at the high tide line on beaches. They're everywhere in all oceans.

That’s possible. I never specifically went looking for it and could easily mistake something that small for bits of shell etc.

This is the unfortunate thing about giving a beach a deep clean. Now you start to see it everywhere.

It can also be under the sand.

I once spent a morning cleaning ~50 plastic bags in the wet sand of the beach at low tide. They were empty shopping bags, but had opened up and filled with sand, so they were basketball-sized and really deep; they required _digging_ every single one to get them out. Next day, 50 more were there. There was no way that many washed up in one night. So I did a little digging with a spade, as deep as I could go in the sand, all the way down to my armpit. And I brought up piece after piece of plastic from the depths, punching through bags on the way down; I don't know how many layers deep. Then I realized these "new" 50 bags had just been there under the surface. The layer of sand made free by yesterday's cleanup was now washed away by the tide to reveal them. That was just the worst feeling, knowing that that beach was basically a 1km-long landfill, riddled with garbage at least a meter deep. An extreme example, but it kind of broke me.

> Some places like Okinawa and Kamakura beach are generally cleaned

As for Okinawa that seems to depend on the island. When I was there some years ago, many beaches on the smaller islands were covered in trash (mostly of Western origin – one could often still decipher the letters on e.g. beer and shampoo bottles).

That doesn't necessarily discount it being local waste due to the large number of foreigners on Okinawa (American military, mainly) who get familiar products shipped in from abroad. The military base even has its own mall that locals can apply to visit and buy American products.

Personally, I'm not surprised Japan has a plastic waste problem, the shops and manufacturers here are addicted to plastic, and the culture is one of appearances above truth so I'm not surprised to hear about the differing levels of care dependent on whether tourists frequent a place.

I've also lived in other parts of Asia and I've seen some shocking things to do with waste. India was the worst. As another comment mentions, it's probably best that developed nations export knowledge and attitude towards waste, not just waste.

Vietnam. Cambodia. Laos. I spent 4 years living and traveling all over those countries by motorbike.

Not just the beaches, but every single waterway, alley, forest, jungle. Literally everywhere.

I have pictures of the waterways in Saigon at low tide and the ground is covered in plastic. At high tide, there are government run boats that go up and down some of the waterways to collect a fraction of the trash that people just dump in there.

Every single little town/commune/village has a spot on the way in/out of town with mounds of trash (mostly plastic). Usually partially burning, smelly and covered in bugs.

It is tragic.

Even worse in Indonesia. Cities like Jakarta and Malang are almost unlivable.

"By 2025, the ocean will contain around one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish"

It washes up on beaches. Uninhabited islands thousands of miles from the nearest settlement are covered in plastic:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/henderson...

You also live in one of the richest cities in the US, so I think your experience may be slightly skewed.

Im on the east coast and Ive never seen more than a plastic bag or two on any beach. Even less in forests. Any plastic waste Ive seen outside of a city area is an isolated incident.

Hong Kong. Beaches are littered with plastic garbage including bottles, bags, and wrappers for about 5 meters off shore. After that its microplastics. This is across the street from the Ferrari showroom.

Not GP but Maybe Somalia? Yeah the hysteria about environmental degradation in the USA is among some online people who don't even bother to go outside is absurd. Within 50 miles of NYC are pristine woods, mature second growth trees, deer and black bear. And yeah near the road side you may see a plastic bottle every couple hundred feet. The sky is not falling.

As others have said, the fact that beaches and trails are kept tidy near one of the world's wealthiest cities proves nothing. There are plenty of American beaches that are filthy with plastic. Look outside your bubble.

As an American, one of the things that shocked me the most in visits to Europe was how much litter there is. I lived in Italy, and it was astonishing how there was just trash everywhere, even though Italy is a wealthy nation. I’ve traveled all over Western Europe and the only part that felt relatively “clean” to me was London - clean as in comparable to NYC or other major US urban centers in terms of litter level.

By comparison, I’ve lived and traveled all over the US, cities and rural areas, beaches, forests, etc. Litter is rare. Where you will find it are freeway underpasses, neglected urban or near-urban waterways and railways: places where people aren’t really “supposed” to go, and are therefore loitered in and rarely cleaned.

There are many areas where the US lags Europe, but in my experience when it comes to litter, we have far less of it.

You must be going to different parts of Europe than I have. American cities (not suburbs, the actual cities) are absolutely filthy with trash and litter. European cities feel squeaky clean in comparison.

And what's with all that trash on freeways? I've seen a whole couch casually waiting to biodegrade by the side of the freeway. Discarded bumpers and tyres aren't even worth mentioning anymore there's so many everywhere. Large debris like that gets cleaned up immediately in Europe because it's a hazard.

Evidently making blanket statements about two geographically huge and economically / culturally heterogenous areas is misguided.

I had the same experience in Spain... we were doing some climbing around Costa Blanca and parked/walked along a few random stretches of highway and they are all covered in trash thrown from cars. That was really surprising, I had a stereotype of EU being more civic-minded/civilized than the USA, and there isn't much litter on US highways that I've seen in similar remote-ish areas.

I just don't even understand what process operates in a head of someone tossing an empty bottle out of a car... sometimes, I feel like I have trouble recognizing them as a fully-formed human, more like someone who needs house-training, like a dog.

Italy isn't that wealthy though. Wealthier people care more about a ton of things, like rates of automobile accidents and fatalities, the environment, etc.

Don't know what you're talking about. You can walk down any highway I've ever seen in America and pick up trash for miles and miles.

It's better than it used to be. The anti-littering "crying Indian" and "Give a Hoot" ad campaigns in the 1970s actually worked.

Perhaps things are trending the other way lately. I do seem to notice more litter now than I did when I was younger. But there are more people now also.

A huge part of modern litter isn't people throwing out, like it was in the 70s and 80s, but it blowing out of the back of vehicles, even trash trucks.

Another big issue I see around where I live is when storms hit on trash night. They'll pick it up around 6AM so people bring it out the night before, but on a regular basis we'll get a strong thunderstorm that blows trash everywhere.

I just learned that depending on what reusable bags are made of, they can be many orders of magnitude worse than plastic. Cotton bags need to be reused thousands of times to make up for the additional environmental impact it takes to produce them. Organic cotton, even moreso. https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto...

This last bit is not directed at you but re: the issue in general: I get really frustrated with how distorted the notions of “right” and “wrong” behaviours are among many environmentalists — rather than being rooted in fact, they’re all about virtue signalling.

My local grocers are all eliminating plastic and switching everything to paper, and I highly doubt that decision was informed by a thoughtful analysis of potential environmental impact.

> Beaches are absolutely covered in plastic waste and it's noticeably worse each time I go.

No disrespect but I don’t think anyone can uniformly sample all the beaches. There might as well be prevailing currents that fill certain places disproportionately more, and leave others disproportionately pristine.

This “making a global inference based on the beaches we’ve personally been to” is going to be deceptive in either direction of the argument.

> This “making a global inference based on the beaches we’ve personally been to” is going to be deceptive in either direction of the argument.

I've been to beaches on four continents and every. single. one. The only place you do not see[1] trash is where someone has specifically picked up there, recently. That tends to be places around resorts and people's homes. Unless someone does it out of their own goodwill or is paid to, the trash just floats up and accumulates.

There's a place for healthy skepticism, but not denial.

[1] You don't see it, but microplastics are thoroughly distributed through the ocean by this point. There is literally no way of cleaning up microplastic pollution at this point. We can only improve the optics at our scale.

> There's a place for healthy skepticism, but not denial.

I’m not saying I’m necessarily denying your premise, at least not wholesale, but what is the point of skepticism if it doesn’t include the possibility of rejecting a premise?

It’s like saying “I’ll allow you to ask questions but ultimately you have to come my conclusion”

We can be passionate and rational at the same time.

We're in the middle of a discussion about plastic waste, and some people add to the discussion by posting their personal experiences as counter to people who have clearly no personal experiences, and some other people push back which what sounds like rational skepticism but is really just shifting the burden of proof to an absurd level, like they are going to dedicate years of their life to visit a representative sample of beaches to even post a comment.

There's a point where skepticism becomes more than just irritating, but entirely subtractive from the discussion. It's hard to know what your intentions are from that pushback, but it was borderline IMHO, and it certainly muddies the waters.

I'll be completely open about my intentions. I want people to stop fucking up my river and, damn it, it's not China or India's fault. OP is a complete distraction from a real problem that exists where I live. I'd like to dump a few bags of garbage I picked up from the river on their lawn and see what they think about some vague plan to clean up the Ganges.

I'll try to be as clear as I can.

There were several weaknesses with your argument that I was hoping you to strengthen;

- you were making yourself prone to availability bias; I've been to beaches recently and none of those have the problems you mention. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist, it means we don't get to make sweeping generalization from the partial reality we contact. Your original rebuttal to the OP was "have you ever been to a beach lately"

- appeal to emotions; I'm personally sorry to hear your local beach is in heartbreaking condition, but that alone does not amplify the strength of your claim that "beaches are covered with litter". In fact it makes it more easy to refute for anyone who doesn't readily sympathize with your story, and that would harm what I assume to be your ultimate goal which is a reduced pollution.

- overgeneralization: you're perfectly entitled to talk about your personal experience, but when you assert that as a method of establishing the global truth, that is the motion that brings the burden of proof on you, not me pointing that out. Maybe keep the strength of your assertion in proportion to the data you personally have.

It might look like waters are muddied for you, but I think you might be the only one in confusion probably because you seem to be very emotional about this topic. Which is OK, like I said being passionate is OK, but the weaknesses in your argumentation will only hurt your cause.

This exactly the kind of snooty academic dialogue that is subtractive. A personal attack couched as some kind of psychological diagnosis. "You're being emotional." Please deal with the substance of arguments, and don't make the person the subject of discussion. That's textbook distraction and is a logical fallacy.

I'll be getting back to my representative sampling of the world's beaches. And you made a mistake in that I didn't claim that "all beaches are littered". Someone else posted that. I wrote, "I've been to beaches on four continents and every. single. one." That's about my experiences.

> appeal to emotions; I'm personally sorry to hear your local beach is in heartbreaking condition

You also misattributed this as an appeal to emotions. I have a local problem. People are arguing about problems in other countries as excuse to block action here. Stop doing that.

> overgeneralization:

Again, I didn't. I pointed out the scale of the problem is at least as big as my personal experience. It is, in fact, larger than that.

This side turn is subtractive from the discussion and I hope you would consider not replying again with how wrong I am and how my arguments are so bad.

> This exactly the kind of snooty academic dialogue that is subtractive.

It might feel like it is subtracting from your sense of being right, which I am not saying you’re definitely not, but I think some readers might find it valuable in terms of reaching to more well-thought-out conclusions.

> A personal attack couched as some kind of psychological diagnosis. "You're being emotional."

I'm sorry you felt attacked, that wasn't my intention. Having emotions is a human condition, not a psychological diagnosis, and I thought I made it clear that I didn't find anything demeaning about it. You just can't base your arguments mainly on it though.

> Please deal with the substance of arguments, and don't make the person the subject of discussion

It so happens you made your personal experience and your feeling about it the grounding of your argument; making rebuttals on that basis is not making it personal, it is actually an argument against making things personal. And at no point I invalidated your experience or emotions or your personhood.

> You also misattributed this as an appeal to emotions. I have a local problem. People are arguing about problems in other countries as excuse to block action here. Stop doing that.

Maybe the readers were mislead when you talked about 4 continents, especially after an opener of "have you been to any beaches recently". It wasn't clear, at least to me, you were interested in talking about the local phenomena. But thanks for clarifying that.

Let's get one thing clear though, since we can't read people's minds, it is equally undesirable ascribing intentions of blocking action and other negative predictions salient to you in your mind, to others. So I'll kindly ask you to refrain from that first.

> I hope you would consider not replying again with how wrong I am and how my arguments are so bad.

I've considered and still I think it would be to the benefit of the community to remove the confusion between the local-global, personal-general, emotional-rational. If you are upset about receiving responses, you always have the option of removing yourself from the discussion first. Asking others to stop talking is a bit censor-y.

> especially after an opener of "have you been to any beaches recently"

I didn't write that, please check the thread. That was someone else.

> > don't make the person the subject of discussion

Each time I replied I brought the discussion back on topic and strengthened my arguments but your entire reply is about me again, and there is precious little that steer it back to a good resolution.

> you always have the option of removing yourself from the discussion first. Asking others to stop talking is a bit censor-y.

There is a different, meta-level dialog embedded in our dialog, but this terribly ironic juxtaposition is exactly the kind of distracting, subtractive, thing I meant. I regret this exchange terribly at this point. I'll go back to picking up garbage, since in my experience, that is the only activity that reliably has impact.

> > especially after an opener of "have you been to any beaches recently" I didn't write that, please check the thread. That was someone else.

Sorry I was confused about this, but the context to which you seemed showed up in defense of; namely a personal "observable"ism as a sufficient means to define the nature of a global phenomena, makes the point stand.

> There is a different, meta-level dialog embedded in our dialog, but this terribly ironic juxtaposition is exactly the kind of distracting, subtractive, thing I meant.

I've been following that meta dialogue very closely and here's what I wish we can agree on. Distraction and subtraction hinges on our personal formulation to solve the problem at hand.

My formulation strongly presupposes that rational argumentation can scale through time and people better than an emotional and personal appeal, at least in forums similar to this. Your formulation seems to presuppose that concentrating on the emotionality of your personal experience and impressing the audience to action through that is a better way to get results. You seem to feel any poking holes in the logic is a disservice because it takes away from that concentration of emotions and impressions.

To the extent these approaches are at odds (and I don't think they necessarily are) any one could accuse the opponent formulation of being subtractive, distracting, action stopping etc.

My plea is for you to see that you're willfully asserting a supremacy of your particular formulation in this meta-dialogue, without clear evidence that it is the case, and with a desire to evacuate alternative formulations out of an open forum.

> I'll go back to picking up garbage, since in my experience, that is the only activity that reliably has impact.

Since you've shared this, it is fair game to ask about it, and I know it might piss you off but bear with me because it has a point; is it an impact to the environment or impact to your conscience? One could cut their arm to feed the hungry, but how far could that go for making a change?

I'm bringing this up because it ties back to my original point of taking time to make sure we have the right formulation. The observable, the immediate, the emotional is super-salient to us but that doesn't automatically mean more true, more effective and ultimately the best thing to follow.

There is a huge difference between seeing a piece of "trash" like a soda bottle or two every couple acres of sand and a beach "covered" in trash. In my life I have only seen one "beach" "covered" in trash in person and that was Race Point at Fishers Island New York. It is where much of the water exchange with the open ocean and the eastern end of long island sound occurs so it stands to reason that stuff would collect there. A mile away there is a pristine sand beach. At race point there was also a lot of drift wood when I visited including whole tree trunks that had washed up. Much of the human created waste was old, including metal debries like very old very rusted rifle bullet casings presumeably from soliders at the now abandoned pre world war two fort behind the beach. Who knows the beach may have been the fort's dump.

But the question was about why there was such an obsession with plastic waste. If a lot of it was accumulating at your beach, that would be all the sample size you need to form an opinion.

The US had problems with littering that were mostly quashed with some public efforts in the middle to later periods of the last century. Our beaches are mostly clean and our forests and wild places are too. Not pristine and littering still happens but so do efforts to cleaning it up like “adopt a highway”.

The vast majority of plastic doesn’t last that long when exposed to the elements. Micro plastics are a significant concern but their extreme surface area to volume ratio is associated with a short individual lifespan. What’s going on is new plastics are introduced from littering and fishing nets which continuously replaces the plastic which is breaking down.

>Micro plastics are a significant concern but their extreme surface area to volume ratio is associated with a short individual lifespan

Isn't the whole issue that they DON'T break down? Yes they can wear into smaller pieces of plastic, but chemically they're still plastic. And when they get to a certain size, they become small enough to easily absorb into the body.

More that the don’t break down fast enough. Most individual plastic molecules on their own doesn’t last that long. Polyethylene the most common plastic is simply a very long chain of carbon and hydrogen it’s a ready food sources for many different kinds of bacteria and is broken down by sunlight etc.

There are of course more and less chemically stable plastics, but they all last much longer in a landfill than the vastly more harsh aquatic environment.

True, and educating all people in a country to not leave their trash where it does not belong is a part of managing our trash as well, which is very neglected.

It is just assumed, that everyone knows what to do with plastic bags and stuff, but the reality is, that many people do not have any sense of responsibility and throw stuff everywhere. Every week I see new heaps of trash in forests, which were definitely not there the week before. We need to start educating dumb/lazy/irresponsible people not to throw their trash everywhere, if needed by leveling up punishments and rewards.

If anyone is caught throwing trash into the forest, there should be hefty fines for that. If anyone takes time, for example on their weekends, to clean the forest, there should be rewards.

I’m posting this from an east coast (U.S) beach. I’ve walked up and down multiple beaches in the last two days, and I haven’t seen any plastic trash at all, although I did see someone find an old rusty fish hook today.

>> Forests are steadily becoming filled with plastic that either gets tossed there or blown there

The forests would be a lot nicer if we spent more time raking and cleaning them, like in Finland.