Thread by @ElonBachman

1\ I always see these alarmist headlines about how many millions of tons of plastic waste are being pumped into the oceans

11 million metric tons annually sounds like a lot

But is it?

I did some rough math to put it in perspective...

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

2\ For ease of calculation, I assume all plastic takes the form of PET plastic water bottles. This is generous to the alarmists, because by volume they are mostly air

3\ So, something like 700 billion PET bottle equivalents dumped into oceans

Let's assume they never crumple or degrade (lol)

In that case, we're annually dumping enough plastic to make a cube half a kilometer on a side:

4\ A cube a half kilometer on a side is gnarly. I wouldn't want it in my yard.

But the planet is BIG. The world's oceans are 361 SqKm in area, so our cube is a paltry 0.00000014% of the surface of the ocean

5\ I wanted an everyday intuition about how big our cube is, so I rescaled the oceans to be the size of a 2,000 SqFt home

In such a home, annual plastic dumped would be a cube whose length is half the width of a human hair:

6\ In other words, if your home represents the world, then the amount of plastic dumped into the oceans annually would not, in a thousand generations, create enough lint under your couch to warrant grabbing the dust buster

The world is, to a first approximation, totally empty!

7\ Ok, I realized my methodology is wrong, because the plastic trash spreads out, it doesn't sit there in a cube

Fine: square the results. It doesn't change the punchline. That's how vast the world's oceans are!

8\ The funny thing is that most people carry around conflicting intuitions in their heads

We can all picture that 3rd world shoreline choked in plastic

But if you've spent time on the world's oceans (or looked out of an airplane), you know that away from shore they are EMPTY