"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...
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.
> Systematic global coverage of land surfaces from 56° S to 84° 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
Source: work in the industry
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).
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
Most developing countries don’t have that infrastructure so plastic pollution is everywhere, regardless of how much they export to Western countries.
More than a third comes from The Philippines, India 13%, China 7%.
> Maybe I’m being too cynical?
Yes. What’s the point in spreading negative falsehoods?
>> 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.
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
There's a multi-trillion dollar startup just waiting for you to solve that problem.
As the saying goes: trust is good, control/verification is better
“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.
"Let's first fix the problem, and maybe later figure out if it exists" is much worse than the opposite order.
There's a great podcast called Plastisphere that had a lot of coverage of the most recent meeting in April: https://anjakrieger.com/plastisphere/
The west, or for that matter even most third world countries do not cause much plastic pollution at all.
This is naive given that consumption, production, and use of plastics is distributed worldwide, but with a heavy concentration in OECD nations.
You are correct that the issue is political, but pretty much everything else you've said is subjective and shifting blame. The truth is if you use and dispose of plastics you are part of the problem and your country should be working on solutions (the easiest of which is simply to not use plastic).