• 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.