Monitoring marine litter from space

One thing I find interesting is how much more traction the problem of litter in the ocean has gained, compared to litter everywhere else, or any number of the other problems we have.<p>I wonder why this is. Perhaps people can still see the ocean as a wilderness, where litter doesn&#x27;t belong, whereas we are very used to seeing highways etc lined with rubbish?

I wonder if this can discern for fishing nets pollution, called ghost nets, which entangle and ensnare marine animals. The scale of harm for these animals is unthinkable.<p>Edit: the ghost nets come from ships. We need to pinpoint the “fishing vessels who continue to dump their old nets into the sea with impunity.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plasticsoupfoundation.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;plastic-problem&#x2F;plastic-environment&#x2F;ghost-nets&#x2F;#:~:text=Nylon%20is%20plastic%20and%20it,due%20to%20fishing%20nets%20pollution" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.plasticsoupfoundation.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;plastic-problem&#x2F;pla...</a>.

Waste is a huge problem, clearly human made, clearly responsibility to address in every current generation.<p>Cost of products sold must include recycling and waste management costs.<p>Otherwise, the manufactures will keep making devices&#x2F;items with built-in-obsolescence to make it &#x27;fashionable&#x27; for consumers to replace them at the first opportunity.

What’s the use of tracking waste if no efforts will be done to stop its production? Cleanups are nice and all but you gotta stop the bleeding where it starts. Maybe I’m being too cynical?

At some point I wonder if its going to be viable to harvest ocean plastic, and use it to produce energy .. and every time I see one of my favourite remote-beach Youtubers climb over piles of plastic rubble on some remote tropical island, I can&#x27;t help get the feeling that there has to be some kind of way to make a portable, self-replicating 3D printer that can go out there and just reproduce itself.<p>But I guess the chemistry behind all of this is beyond me. It sure seems like the 3D-printing revolution needs to be followed up with a plastics-deconstruction phase, so that 3D printers don&#x27;t get factory-produced spools of future ocean-bound plastics, but rather a giant hopper into which one can pile collected plastics from the environment. Some sort of primordial proto-Feed, I guess ..

It&#x27;s good to see how to track it, but what&#x27;s more important is knowing how to clean it up. Additionally, dumping nuclear wastewater might pose an even greater threat.

The thought of this relentless deluge of plastic entering the seas is heartbreaking.

it does take a non-profit effort to be able to monitor the seas. iirc most image satellites make trips on land masses and the seas and oceans are just approximated in commercial settings.

I thought this article was going to be about all the satellites and used rocket parts we dump in the ocean all the time, which is a problem that doesn&#x27;t have a great solution other than launching cargo ships like Starship to retrieve old spacecraft for recycling.

Finally we can see niat from space. All that ancient spite towards the various occupiers who owned the allmende, visible in wild littering worldwide.

amazing, would be funny, liter? no nuclear submarine

I read it as if stuff from space was littering the sea....

Kind of sad to imagine the satellites doing this are also surrounded by orbiting trash in space