notion parallax

taking a crack at a policy

This photo has been popping up all over the internet today. It has galvanised me into writing down an idea that I’ve been kicking about for a few weeks. I’ll try and be as structured as I can and rant as little as possible.

Starting with a pair of premises that I believe to be factual.

1. Global fish stocks are severely depleated. I don’t know much about Pacific stocks, but I’d imagine that there is a similar situation to the Atlantic stocks.
2. There are floating islands of plastic in the ocean gyres.

some that are slightly more open to debate, but I still consider to be facts.

• There is likely to be a collapse of the fishing industry if fish stocks reach a terminal point in their populations.
• They are also extremely heavily subsidised, up to 50% of the industries income is from subsidies.
• Fish and other marine animals, particularly filter feeders, are being found with significant ammounts of plastic inside them.
• Plastic in oceans degrades to smaller pieces of plastic as the polymer chains unwind from each other, but very rarely to monomers, or anything that can be digested.

So what can be done about this? Obviously, the simplest answer to the problem of the pastic is to stop putting it into the sea, but this is a global problem, and most of the plastic is not deliberatly put there.

Also we need to stop the part of fishing that involves taking fish out of the water and put some effort into trying to rebuild fish stocks. Probably somethign like 10 or 20 years of not fishing.

"Oh no!" I hear the cries from the fishing industry in disgust and terror for their livelyhoods. "You’ll bancrupt us, and even if you just pay us to stay at home* we’ll loose our craft – the next generation will become 7-11 staff". (*probably not that much more expensive than paying them to go and fish as the current subsidies do.)

My suggestion is that we should redirect the activities of the currently unprofitable fishing industry into fishing for plastic. The deep sea trawlers have the technology and infrastructure to go for long term trips to collect plastic waste. The low hanging fruit in this situation is the large pieces, i.e. plastic bags, detergent bottles, etc. so that’d be a good start. The onboard processing capacity could be put to use in catagorising the plastics, but also once the easy catch of large plastic is taken, the factory ships can set to work on filtering out the much smaller particles of plastic that are in suspention. This would maintain the fleet, and the fleet’s skills. The plastic that was landed could either be recycled or burnt to produce energy.

This would provide a rest for the fish, and also improve their habitat, so that when the stocks have sufficiently recovered, the polymer:meat ratio iside fish is a bit closer to what we’d hope it’d be.

I’ll probably revisit this as I get a bit better at scenario planning and future thinking. weigh in in the comments if you have anything at all to say, and if you are watching in black and white on facebook, go here to watch in green and white.