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by digitalscribe 1297 days ago
This is misleading.

Fishing gear killed the whale. Coca-cola has nothing to do with it.

If you want to rid the ocean of the vast majority of its trash, station a person to monitor each fishing boat, and permenently plug up all the rivers in asia that empty into the oceans. The vast majority of ocean garbage comes from asian rivers and fishing boats.

3 comments

> permenently plug up all the rivers in asia

Stop shipping all the rubbish to Asia.

Even then you'd need to plug them up (or filter, and in the first place not dump into rivers), because there is plenty of domestic consumption in Asia too.
Domestic consumption is actually the vast majority of plastic pollution in the rivers.
> Fishing gear killed the whale.

Fishing (eating) killed the whale.

"... fishing takes 2.7 trillion fish from oceans globally each year. If this rate of fishing continues, the oceans will be “virtually empty” by 2048, according to marine biologist Dr Sylvia Alice Earle."

https://earth.org/facts-from-seaspiracy/

"More than 640,000 tonnes of nets, lines, pots and traps used in commercial fishing are dumped and discarded in the sea every year, the same weight as 55,000 double-decker buses."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/06/dumped-f...

> If you want to rid the ocean of the vast majority of its trash, station a person to monitor each fishing boat

Doesn't work. There is 4.5 mil fishing boats in the world. On some of them there are people monitoring by-catch (protect dolphins & turtles), but it doesn't work (corruption, death threats, system inefficiencies etc.).

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14152756/ - Seaspiracy movie talks in length about this problem

> Coca-cola has nothing to do with it.

"While Coca-Cola topped the list of the wastage in a dozen countries including Bangladesh, Argentina, Malaysia, Kenya and Turkey, PepsiCo topped the list in both the US and India as the top polluter this year."

"The soft drinks company had, in 2019, admitted that it produces 3 million tonnes of plastic packaging a year — equivalent to 200,000 bottles a minute."

https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/2022/11/15/coca-cola-i...

"With Coca-Cola and her allies producing so much plastic, eight million tons of plastics every year end up in the ocean, eaten by whales ..."

https://adetokunbo.substack.com/p/whales-dying-from-consumin...

Getprotyn.com

Replacing fish meal with fly meal.

Misleading or not, vast numbers of plastic drink bottles enter the ocean from non-Asian First World countries when they need not do so, and we could solve this almost immediately by having effective deposits on bottles, etc. (I don't even need official stats to verify that, all I have to do is to walk down to the harbor near were I live to witness the fact.)

You are no doubt correct about the source of the majority of the trash but we can't start pointing the finger until we've cleaned up our own mess.