Pernicious Plastics #1
Tags: Solutions, Crowdfunding, Pollution, Plastic Pollution, Appropriate Technology

I’m not a very patient person so when I am shopping in 7–11 and their tannoy is trying to #greenwash me into (more) mindless shopping I start thinking about practical solutions to the plastic problem.

I love Precious Plastics (and we are setting it up at Western Academy of Beijing.)

So, bear with me… here’s a short sequence of considerations building up to a solution.

We already know…

Around 8 million tonnes of plastics are carried into our oceans each year — this is the downside of a consumer boom wrapped in small colourful pieces of plastic. From noodle packets to coffee sachets the stuff we buy is wrapped for convenience and attractiveness in colourful thin-film plastics which end up in the sea.

This sucks. That BIC lighter looked so tasty. Now my chicks won’t survive and reproduce.

UNESCO says that plastic waste kills a million seabirds every year, (and 100,000 marine mammals).

20 rivers produce 90%* of that total.

80% of seaborne plastic waste comes straight offa the land — rain washes it into street culverts and it follows nature downstream.

* Down on the sunny banks of the Yangtze, Indus, Yellow, Hai He, Ganges, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Nile, or Niger.

7–11 Saves the Mariniverse! (not)

7–11 doing away with single-use plastic shopping bags — so that’s one bag fewer in a shop with 25,000 different things wrapped in single-use plastics.

Sorry about the sound quality. Maybe my phone has Novel Corona Virus.

So what should folk do to tackle the problem? Tackle it at source!

Baltimore Harbour’s solution: Mr Trash Wheel

Baltimore has fixed the problem with a simple bit of kit that takes up little space, advertises the value of community-based proactive solutions and generates useful recyclables — behold Mr Trash Wheel!

We love Mr Trash Wheel.

You can find him/her/it here. More still about this cool project, which cost the local harbour authority and some private partners back by $720k or so.

(Here’s the Wiki.)

If 20 rivers produce 90% of the polluton, then we need 800 Mr Trash Wheels !

You can build this from junk, kids!

Where there’s muck there’s brass as the trash-pickers sing. The estuaries are crawling with plastic pickers.

When plastic waste is gathered recycled and repurposed locally (as Precious Plastics demonstrates), then there’s every reason to expect that small local economies could thrive by protecting and maintaining floating trash-catchers.

What will it take? Well a good start would perhaps be one on each of the 40 major tributaries of those 20 rivers?

If Mr TP is the prototype then the VERY MOST that the production model should cost is 1/3rd of that total — and the least is perhaps 1/15th.

$200 million is a lot of money (unless you count in mansions, footballers or dead seagulls.)

What else can you buy for that much money? A loft mansion in LA. Or a celebrity soccer player from Brazil…

Mr Neymar Jr might even help if you asked him nicely, He’s not a known hater of marine life,

Solution time:-

Choose any river. If we install a few dozen around the world then the local authorities which govern those top 20 polluters will find us hard to ignore. Get some buddies together and Crowdfund (unless you are flush and can afford to do it without help, eh, Mr Neymar Jr, Mr 7–11). Build a new sibling for Mr Trash Picker. Open-source the plans. Show others how easy this is.

If I get 100 people to support this idea then I will begin doing the above.

So, are you in?