this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
361 points (99.5% liked)
Futurology
1670 readers
73 users here now
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No one specifically, but in a lot of cases it feels like certain interest groups, tout projects like this as the be all and end all of solving the issue. I just fear for a sentiment where people go: "Look at what "The Ocean Cleanup" is doing! We don't need to abolish single use plastics. Any that end up in the environment is simply picked up!" That is of course a bit of a caricature, but at this point my trust in humanity as a whole, is not very high...
The kind of people who care about plastic at all don't seem the type to say "oh well we can clean it up go wild boys"
No of course not. It's the people who have an interest in keeping plastic around, who I fear might use an excuse like that.
People who don't care about plastic pollution aren't really the audience of efforts to combat it.
Or one could view it as regardless of efforts at future prevention, we still need to pick up from the past. If we stopped every scrap of plastic in production today that pile of junk would still be floating about for the next millennia.