Environment

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Environmental and ecological discussion, particularly of things like weather and other natural phenomena (especially if they're not breaking news).

See also our Nature and Gardening community for discussion centered around things like hiking, animals in their natural habitat, and gardening (urban or rural).

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"Significant global ecological disruption": Plastic is destroying Earth — and recycling won't help (www.salon.com)

submitted 2 years ago by gloating_swann to c/environment

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[–] remington 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I believe that Boyan Slat and The Ocean Cleanup are leading the way on solving this.

[–] Hirom 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Boyan Slat, Ocean Cleanup founder, wrote an opinion piece on plastic pollution a few days ago. He says, among other things, ~~that his effort won't solve plastic pollution~~ plastic leakage will increase if we keep increasing plastic production.

Producing less plastic is the way to solve this. Cleanup operations can then help bring the remaining plastic pollution further down to less-hazarbous levels.

Edit: Correction on Boyan Slat's claim. He actually say we should assume plastic production will keep growing, so cleanup would be needed. But I doubt cleanup efforts would be enough if plastic production (and leakage) continuously increase. They can however give us more time to reduce plastic usage.