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Thank you for the well thought out response.
I know you didn't create this data, but wouldn't "by weight" or "by volume" have a more meaningful impact on reducing the amount of plastic in our oceans?
I feel like it's like going into an ice cream shop and claiming that "sprinkles are the most common thing being sold, by count.". Yeah, it is but it's dwarfed in comparison to the volume of ice cream being sold.
I'll certainly give you this. If I'm on a ship, with an open plastic bottle and a gust of wind comes along. It'll certainly blow the cap into the ocean before I'd lose my bottle.
On the other hand, I'm currently in a land-locked region - so the chance the wind will blow my cap into the ocean is low.
I did a bit more homework, which gives me a bit of a reason to pause. According to The Ocean Cleanup Project:
Other thing to note (from the link above):
So, I guess the intention behind the tethering is that the PET bottle will sink, taking the cap with it, which means it won't travel as far to get into the ocean (but is still sitting in in our waterways).
(rubbing my temples)... this seems like a really convoluted way to "fix" the problem and will only mitigate the issue, if you have these tethered cap near these 1000 rivers.
Yes, but that data is also harder to gather. It's very easy to count pieces, it's much harder to asses volume or dry weight. I'm also not entirely sure if that gives meaningful answers either, because a kilo of polystyrene is worse than a kilo of bottlecaps. If you're working with a huge of different stuff, all measurements are kind of arbitrary.
The marine litter in the paper is specifically about stuff that gets fished up. It covers floating AND seafloor debris, and floating stuff to a much lesser degree (since nets don't drag over the water surface). So if the bottles are mostly on the floor and caps mostly float, we would expect to find many more bottles in marine litter.
Mitigation is good though. If you can reduce the volume of plastic in the ocean by a noticable fraction, by basically just very slightly changing the manufacturing process, that's a good thing.
Oh no... You've triggered one of my ecological pet peeves.
The Ocean Cleanup Project is a terrible fucking idea. It's basically a scam that turns a HUGE amount of amount into a tiny amount of recovered plastic. The OCP reported on twitter in 2025 that they have, in total, removed 40.000 tons of plastic from all their activities. According to this they got about 300m in $A in funding since 2019. I'll just pretend that's all they've ever gotten, and conclude they spent 5300 USD to remove one ton of plastic waste.
So let me be extremely pessimistic and offer a vastly superior alternative to sailing around with boats and removing basically no waste:
Since OCP already knows where all the waste is coming from, what they SHOULD be doing is going there, buying up all the trash for 1000 USD per ton (which is an absolute fortune to most people there, so they will absolutely cooperate), shipping it to, I dunno, Australia for 100 USD/ton (which is again a fortune), and dispose of it for another 400 USD per ton (which is more than double what we pay here in Europe), and then they would still be 350% more efficient than what they're doing, assuming the most impossibly generous terms for them.
I agree that it's more efficient to reduce the amount of new waste from entering waterways than to remove what's already there, but at this point we need to do both.
Getting it out of the oceans is just more expensive, ton for ton.