Monday, July 09, 2018

A Pareto Diagram Would Show This Quite Nicely

Back in a previous life, when I was a manufacturing manager, I taught Statistical Process Control (SPC) to my employees, and we charted our processes using SPC.  The idea is that when our charts started going haywire we'd know there was an issue brewing, oftentimes long before our products were out of spec and thus unsalvageable.

One of the charts we'd generate was called a Pareto Diagram, which allowed us to track errors by type and quantity.  The idea behind a Pareto Diagram is to identify your biggest source of errors and fix that problem first.  This gives you the biggest bang for your correcting buck.

We've all read about the large "islands" of plastic garbage circulating in the our oceans.  Perhaps our environmentalist warriors should have generated a Pareto Diagram before starting their jihad against plastic grocery bags and straws to fight that problem:
A shocking study has revealed 90 per cent of the world's plastic waste comes from just 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.

As governments around the world rush to address the global problem of plastic pollution in the oceans, researchers have now pinpointed the river systems that carry the majority of it out to sea.

About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources - such as the Yangtze and the Ganges - could almost halve it, scientists claim.

Carried out by Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, it suggests that the most effective way of reducing the amount of plastic in the world's oceans is by addressing the sources of pollution along such waterways as these.

2 comments:

Pseudotsuga said...

I have seen many up-in-arms Facebook Warriors moaning about the plastic problem, and how it's right to ban straws, and so on... without any discussion of just WHERE all this plastic is coming from, and whether their proposed local "feel-good" policies will actually help the problem.
Virtue signaling is its own reward -- it's action without actually action.

Peggy U said...

And cities like Seattle banning drinking straws while handing out free syringes to drug users. Because we all know how neat and proper they are about disposing their used plastic in the proper receptacle.