What if solving the climate crisis were as simple as playing a game? … is what we would write if we were trying to bullshit you with happy talk, because getting the world off fossil fuels is going to require serious, sustained government policy actions and systemic changes, like the US finally started doing under Joe Biden, with the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and a whole bunch of regulatory changes that Donald Trump has been trying to reverse.
But here’s where I suddenly change course again, because I am in some kind of mood today: We definitely can build communities and work together, and even have fun doing it, to help move those larger changes along, which is why hell yes, individual choices still matter.
Which brings us to these nutty Hungarians who compete with each other to pull plastic waste out of the Tisza River, a major tributary of the Danube, and one of the most plastic-contaminated rivers in Europe. They call it the Plastic Cup, or PET Kupa, and they’ve been doing it since 2013. Small teams build boats and rafts out of wood, with collected plastic bottles bundled together to provide floatation, and then they head out with canoes and small boats to scour the river and its banks for plastic trash of all sorts, using the raft as a mothership to collect their haul. The team that collects the most wins bragging rights.
Here’s a video from one of the competitions this year; click on the “settings” and set the captions to auto-translate to English.
We’ll admit we got a little teary-eyed around the 5:50 mark, where after a day of playing on the river while collecting plastic trash, the teams come ashore and trashbag-brigade their hauls to a central pile, with little kids happily pitching in. Damn dramatic soaring soundtrack.
The guy who came up with the idea for the Plastic Cup, documentary film director Attila Dávid Molnár, was making a movie about birds nesting along the Tisza’s banks in 2008 when he and his crew came on a stretch of the river that had so many plastic bottles floating on it they could hardly see the water.
“I knew we had to do something special about it,” he says. “This was not something that called for individual action or a warning video, it rather called for a movement.”
The Tisza, which drains into the Danube, is one of Europe’s most heavily plastic-contaminated rivers. Together, these rivers contribute the bulk of the plastics polluting the Black Sea. Globally, plastics make up 80 percent of all marine pollution, and scientists predict that at this rate, by 2050, they could outweigh all the fish in the sea.
Molnár took inspiration from David de Rothschild, who in 2009 built a sailboat out of 12,500 plastic bottles and recycled plastics, named it the Plastiki — after Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki — and sailed the sucker from San Francisco to Sydney to call attention to oceanic plastic waste. Out of that grew the Plastic Cup, which started with just four teams and boats in 2013 and now has between three and five competitions every year.
Over the years, competitors have removed over 450 tons of plastic waste from the Danube and tributaries, and the organization has branched out into preventing new waste from going into the rivers, as well as an outreach program in schools and universities. “Thousands of volunteers from five countries have participated in hundreds of river clean-up actions. And the project has also demonstrated that over 60 percent of riverine plastics can be recycled once properly treated.”
That’s especially important, given that so much of the “plastics recycling” business in the US is little more than a greenwashing scam promoted by the plastics industry and Big Oil.
As we like to say, go read the whole thing; it’ll give you a nice recharge of hopium —while also putting the challenges of dealing with plastic pollution in a larger context.
So with that in mind, we started wondering if there are other ways to “gamify” the fight against climate change, and by gosh, it turns out that’s also a big topic in the environmental education field. We found out, for instance that there’s an expansion pack for the classic “Settlers of Catan” board game called “Oil Springs,” in which players have to decide whether they’ll limit oil use for the common good, or be a sleazy Donald Trump type and trade the good of everyone for a pyrrhic victory. We aren’t sure whether a player winning that way is then shamed by the other players; we hope so.
Other, more hands-on efforts educate kids about pollution through augmented reality games using air quality sensors, which sounds kind of neat, and reminded me of that bit in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of “Cosmos” where he said it might be easier to motivate people to care about greenhouse gas reductions if we could actually see the CO2 coming out of car tailpipes and the like.
Those of us driving electric cars could brag about our batteries using far less of that purple shit from the local utility, or none at all if we charge using home solar.
We also found ourselves thinking of other group games around climate, like maybe having teams debunk Donald Trump by visiting wind farms and counting all the dead eagles that aren’t at the base of each wind turbine, and then tracking how many members of the group don’t immediately get windmill cancer.
It’s sort of a work in progress. If you have ideas for gamifying ways to address climate (no, competing to set fire to the most SUVs is not allowed), bring ‘em up in the comments, which of course we do not allow.
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[Reasons to be Cheerful / Decision Lab]
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