So over in Namibia there is a group that goes down to the beaches and frees seals from the trash that they are entangled in. Sometimes the seals have serious injuries from the fishing line looped around them. They might manage to save a thousand of so seals per year. This activity isn’t going to save every seal with netting or hooks or plastic bags or lengths of rope or electrical wires wrapped around their necks and flippers, but it sure is important to the ones they do rescue.
While we need to keep plastics from getting into the oceans, saving a few thousand seals is also a good thing. Neither is the complete answer, but both are necessary.
I completely agree that reducing plastic use is critical to reducing plastic pollution, and developing new materials to replace them where plastic-like materials are necessary is definitely an engineering problem, but getting humanity off of cheap and disposable plastic is a political issue because of the legal and regulatory measures that are required to be implemented by governments to make that happen.
If tomorrow I realized a way to suck up all the plastic from the oceans, with minimal impact on sea life…the next step would be seeing what goverments care to spend the money it takes to implement it. Everything is at least partly a political issue too.
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