• Hazdaz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Did you just convert the units and magically now think that makes this any more achievable?! LOL

    You’d need 100,000x the effort to simply tread water. Not to eliminate waste, mind you, but to simply keep up with what is dumped in each year.

    • RedditWanderer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yes, it’s called perspective. 33 BilLiOn pounds sound like an insurmountable amount but it’s not. It’s 14 million TONS, the unit of measure the boat is using to assess how much it’s picking up. As I said, in the end thats a few thousand boats out there for less than a couple decades, assuming we don’t reduce our waste or make these machines more efficient, which isn’t likely. 2 decades isn’t a big cleanup time compared to how long we’ve been dumping shit in.

      I think the math confused you because you don’t need 100,000 times the effort.

      • Hazdaz@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Did you miss the part where there are 33 BILLION pounds of plastic added to the oceans EACH YEAR?! This isn’t a one-and-done problem. That is 2 decades of clean-up for EACH YEAR of waste dumped into the oceans. You are completely missing the scope of the problem. By orders of magnitude.

        • RedditWanderer@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes, the 14 million TONS is the 33 billion pounds added each year. We can get to 0 with the above math in no time, and get the total (the other 200 million) down in a couple decades. It’s you that’s not following the post. This is without us reducing the total total output of plastic in oceans, which we are and will continue to do.