Ending the behavior doesn’t clean up the problem.
Mr. Trash Wheel has done great things for the Baltimore harbor. What happens is the Jones Falls River gets a lot of runoff during rainstorms, and trash washes into it, which ends up to the harbor. Mr. Trash Wheel sits at the mouth of the river, where it meets the harbor and has collected over 1500 tons of trash since it was installed back in 2014.
Trash wheels aren’t a solution to the problem, but they are a useful tool in helping to fight climate change and protecting local ecosystems.
fight climate change
What does ocean plastic have to do with climate change? Am I missing something?
I mean, yeah. People who develop technologies don’t change the systems, and it’s very, very wrong if we ask them to. If you rely on technology company to come up with the system, hyperloop happens. Don’t let another hyperloop happen, don’t come to technology company for the change of the system.
The thing is, by and large, we’re already almost “post scarcity”. We have no problems requiring technical solutions; we already have the tech. There’s no polio that requires Salk. We’ve solved most of our problems, we just don’t like the solutions.
Better tech won’t fix that because that’s not a tech problem.
Developing technologies means mitigating negative externalities. You don’t just design a pressure cooker and ignore the possibility it might explode because you “can’t force people to not leave it unattended”, you spend the extra time and money to design and install a safety valve.
Tools help problems, but not all risks should be on the manufacturer. If they hurt the environment, sure it is their fault, but people end up weighing is it better for the environment overall. The trash wheels in rivers were.
No one is reasonable to say a kitchen knife manufacturer should be liable for people cutting their fingers off while cooking. Could someone design safer knives, of course.
Can’t fish just swim out? I don’t think there’s a net under the water.
There is a net, but it’s shallow, allowing the fish to swim underneath, while trapping most plastics, which generally float.
They can, it’s harmless to the wildlife.
If large complex lifeforms and ecosystems began to evolve to live on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, would it be immoral to remove/clean the garbage patch?
As immoral as creating it was.
The immorality is habitat destruction and negligently killing.
The garbage patch isn’t intrinsically bad, beyond being ugly, which is an aesthetic rather than moral judgement. It’s bad because of the impact it has in the life around it. If life has adapted to live on it it’s no longer purely damaging. If they adapt such that more benefit than are harmed then cleanup would be more damaging than beneficial.A real example is the USS Arizona. If we were given the choice, we shouldn’t have sunk a massive battleship with 1.5 million gallons of oil onboard.
Now though, it’s become a coral reef and is full of life that would be destroyed if we removed the ship (to say nothing of the risk of spilling the remaining 500,000 gallons of oil).Nothing is ecologically dependent on the garbage patch though, and it’s most likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, so it’s a moot point in the end.
For that to happen it would take an extremely long period of time. Like think about how long humans have been around. We probably wouldn’t necessarily be around to see it. So while we’re here we should try to fix it.
“Adapt” would probably be more appropriate here instead of “evolve”.
Life makes the best of what is thrown at it, but I think we should always try to clean up our messes.
At some point after we have reduced pollution significantly, we’re gonna have to clean up all the trash we already put out there. Microorganisms can regrow, but plastic can’t, so we just need to find the maximum collection speed that the environment can sustain.
Adding components to a system alters the output therefore changing the system.
Make the polluters pay fines/taxes and use the money to improve the cleaning robot
¿Por qué no los dos?
