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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Name names. Most plastic in the ocean comes from Chinese rivers. Western countries don't just throw their garbage into the ocean like China does. Making westerners feel guilty doesn't help fix the problem.

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This meme needs to die. Developed countries produce much more waste than developing countries. The disparity is even more striking if you look at the figures per capita. The US generates almost 3 times as much waste per capital as China.

On top of that, a huge proportion of waste is exported by developed countries to developing countries. The US also only recycles 9% of its plastic waste, compared to 25% for China.

> Europe, the biggest exporter worldwide of waste plastic intended for recycling, depends largely on China: 87% wt. is exported to China either directly or via the Hong Kong SAR. The exported quantity is 46% of the overall quantity collected for recycling, and 12% of the entire plastic waste arisings in Europe. In contrast, Europe exports only 1.2% of its primary plastics products to China.

> The USA is the second largest consumer of plastics in the world and depends mainly to China and HK for absorbing its waste plastics. Neighbouring countries such as Canada and Mexico are also a small market outlet. According to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI) reporting data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the USA exported 2.1Mt of plastic waste to China

https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/galleries/Task_Forces/TFGWM_R...

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTURBANDEVELOPMENT/Resou...

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782.full

I think you make a good point, but there's a big difference between the amount of waste produced and the amount of waste that makes it into the natural environment, as opposed to a recycling center or dedicated landfill. Just because developed countries are producing more waste does not mean that they are contributing more waste to the bottom of the ocean. (I am not suggesting that we should not all aim to produce less waste and handle what waste we do produce better.)

The point is that a large amount of waste produced by developed is dumped/exported to developing countries like China, India, Bangladesh and Vietnam. And a large amount of waste generated by these countries is done so in the production of goods meant for Western consumption.

>a large amount of waste generated by these countries is done so in the production of goods meant for Western consumption.

Why does this matter? A factory polluting local lakes and rivers to make goods for export to another state definitely couldn't use this as an excuse. They control the process, so they are responsible for consequences of using that process. So why rules are suddenly different when we talk about countries?

Because we’ve exported our externalities. Global industry doesn’t choose to manufacture in China because of the great views. Their regulations are effectively non-existent. Those regulations in the West protecting the environment, the community, the workers etc? They have a cost that many consumers are unprepared to bear.

The rules are indeed different.

So other than feeling bad about the things I own and purchase, what can I do, realistically? Give up everything and live entirely off the land?

I'm fully prepared to bear the cost of these things if someone would actually give me a way to pay it.

The article points out that 89% of sea plastic is the throwaway kind, e.g. cutlery and plastic bottles. It's relatively simple to cut down on these. Switch to using aluminium cans instead of plastic bottles, they're much more likely to be recycled. Then obviously put the can in the recycling. Better yet, use your own water bottle. If you want bottled water get it in crates of glass bottles. Shops will often take the crates back to be washed and reused.

But isn’t most of the sea plastic also from the Yangtze and Ganges rivers?

I try and avoid single use plastic, it seems obscene to me it even exists, but my waste ends up in landfill. To solve ocean plastic we need bin men and landfill in the countries causing it.

The fight against single use plastic in the developed world is just, but a separate issue.

You don't recycle plastics in your country?

A problem in the UK has been that plastics have been passed on for recycling only to be sent to China, for example, and dumped.

The issue as I see it is that we expect waste processing to be profitable and only do it if it is - waste processing should be handled from the profits of waste production.

So many companies conning their customers with half-empty packaging, products designed to break, etc., seems to be a large part of the problem.

> You don't recycle plastics in your country?

I think it's become apparent that in pretty much every western country we were shipping them to China, as you described for the UK. That's now come to an end. Who DOES subsidise local industry enough to recycle in-country?

Perhaps advocate for changes in the rules, whether that be directly or indirectly (e.g. by supporting propositions that mandate better supply-chain/whole-product-lifecycle accountability). Perhaps make choices that preference those companies with better lifecycle/supply-chains (and if you can't tell which those are, then perhaps advocate for changes in transparency regarding those things).

Change is slow and hard. Throwing up our hands and carrying on with the status quo is a choice not an inevitability. If we each live our lives according to the world we want to live in, and make our personal choices accordingly, then at the very least we'll be able to tell our kids we tried.

The main thing that needs to happen is the creation of a strong enough political consensus to force a strong limit to the production of unnecessary plastic objects as well as forcing proper disposal of the objects that are produced. This is would require international cooperation.

Obviously, this is far from where the world seems to be heading currently but it's still the only way.

I agree guilt-tripping is fairly useless.

Define “unnecessary.”

You can change what you purchase. Don't but so much temporary plastic, look for alternatives. Shop at markets where they don't wrap everything in plastic.

No you can't do that either. If you are old enough to remember the 80's and 90's, these same people that are whining about plastic now are the ones that forced us to use it because paper bags were killing the trees. Oh fun fact they are also the ones that brought us trans fats as a "safe alternative" to using animal fat.

Well, the real solution is to reuse bags instead of killing trees or creating plastic waste. And people have been saying that forever.

Hmm, the problem was not that paper bags inherently kill trees, it was that virgin forest was being destroyed and not replanted in order to make paper products. So the obvious solution of using sustainable forest growth and recycling was rejected (however, maybe by "The Market" - aka refusing to accept responsibility for externalities) presumably because plastics were marginally cheaper.

Market forces just don't work for these things because the negative consequences are decades away and don't necessarily affect the producers/consumers at all.

Your position that people who didn't want rainforest destroying for one-time use bags are responsible for one-time use plastics is way off the mark. Such people use reusable bags from sustainable sources invariably, for example.

When these issues hit the mainstream, and the public don't fully understand the position, then it's easy for the Capitalists to shift to the 'next-worst most profitable' thing rather than shifting to a sustainable production.

The mental acrobatics some people will do to fan the flames of western guilt is incredible. Ignoring the fact that the Asian market is massive, the fact that things are intended for western consumption doesn't mean westerners are somehow complicit in the pollution caused to make them.

I don't think Western-exported goods contribute massively to pollution in Asia. Local consumption drives most of it. You can't really blame disposable chopsticks or plastic bags in the Yellow River on Western consumers.

That being said, I disagree with the spirit of your comment. When ABC corp relocated to underdeveloped country so they can avoid regulatory burden (be it pollution, or labor laws), the end goal is to achieve competitive product pricing back home. A portion of the $$ they save in Asia is passed down to the Western consumer.

Whether you want to feel guilty about it ("they only make 50 cents an hour making my Nikes, outrageous!"), or proud ("they make a whole 50 cents thanks to me!") is up to you I guess, but the link is there.

You have hit the crux of the matter, it's almost entirely outside our control at the local level. Not using plastic as much has no effect on whether or not an Asian man throws his garbage in the river in China, or if the company contracted to deal with the waste does, but lies about it to us.

What you are proposing ends up as "don't do business with Asian countries because they can't be trusted to deal with the trash properly."

It's really easy to find photos of waterways all over the world, and it's abundantly clear which countries and cultures value clean water ways over cost/time to deal with the garbage. Where it comes from seems to be irrelevant.

I think all cultures value nature to one degree or another. Once developing countries accrete enough wealth, they will probably invest some of it into proper waste disposal. It's hard to justify diverting resources into waste disposal now, when you are still poor and hungry and in the midst of industrialization.

Western societies went through the same process. They polluted heavily through much of the XX century, while building up their own industrial economies, and didn't start cleaning up until the 1970s and 80s.

I am hopeful developing countries follow the same trajectory. China, for example, has been successful at tackling its air pollution. And googling shows that they began rolling out programs to combat river pollution as well. Eventually, we'll get there. Not soon, but eventually.

Seriously. The countries with terrible work conditions and poor records with humanitarian rights could care less about pumping trash into the ocean? That should shock nobody. Who are these apologists?

> This meme needs to die. Developed countries produce much more waste than developing countries.

Yes, but western countries also have better waste disposal infrastructure (land fills, incinerators) that is actually used, so in this case that is not very relevant.

> On top of that, a huge proportion of waste is exported by developed countries to developing countries.

This is because Chinese recycling companies underbid most of their western (more local) competition, essentially putting them out of business.

I strongly believe there should have been much earlier trade intervention by western (rather than Chinese) governments to prevent that. But on the other hand, western countries didn't aim guns at China's head to make them take their trash.

so western countries throw our trash into the ocean using Chinese rivers because westerners are too cheap to pay for good recycling?

still seems like the west is responsible.

Most of the trash in Chinese rivers is most definitely from Chinese sources.

Chinese companies decided to underbid for recycling contracts in western countries and then not doing the actual recycling. If you want to apply some blame the purchaser for trusting the Chinese companies, fine with me, but lets not absolve the Chinese from blame here.

This is because Chinese recycling companies underbid most of their western (more local) competition, essentially putting them out of business.

Because the Chinese do an inadequate job of disposing of the waste of Western countries, so their costs are less, so this Western waste winds-up in the oceans with stops in China and the folks in charge in the Western nations more or less let this happen.

But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was entirely at fault. A bit reflection should show the reader this isn't the case.

> But your post does a job of framing this chain of events as if China was entirely at fault.

I did say that Western countries should have proactively prevented this through trade restrictions. Free trade sucks when your trading partner doesn't care about pooping in their own yard for some short term gain. Sometimes developed western countries need to step up because the other country is being irresponsible and just can't manage to do the right thing for their own interests on their own.

Good point

Exactly. Free trade only works well if both countries are playing by the same rules. Which I guess is why trade deals take years and hundreds of diplomat hours to arrange.

There is no motivation to stop it. China doesn't want to do it because they would have to hike prices to offset the cost, thus making them less competitive. US companies don't want to change anything because they don't want to start paying for proper disposal either.

Also, free trade is freedom from regulations / tariffs, etc. I always thought it was free to compete (i.e. anti-trusts / monopoly). Silly me.

So it could be said this is a direct result of free trade in it's classical economic term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade

Considering that China has now banned importing most of this kind of waste, it seems likely that the waste operators weren't operating in accordance with government policy in the first place.

Yes, but since China lacks much rule of law its not like there was any hope they would act accordingly in the first place. The only kind of regulations that really work in China are heavy handed ones (ban to-recycle-waste from entering at all, ban coal from being used at all, etc...).

FYI, China has recently upped the purity requirement for recycling imports. This is causing a somewhat large and expanding issue in Australia, where waste exporters who previously could offshore recycling collections from municipal councils cheaply, now must warehouse and sort that waste before China will allow it to be imported.[0]

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australia-recycling-crisi...

Western countries generate more capita garbage and yet have figured out how to properly dispose it off. Not withstanding the tinfoil type environmentalists on HN, USA has damn good conventional waste management systems. Most waste goes to landfills which are very securely locked from all sides and once full they build resorts and amusement parks on top of it. Most landfills in USA will take centuries to actually run out of space.

Even in a filthy city like New York you can still swim in Hudson and come out alive and well. You can't do that in most rivers in India and China and in some cases even tap water.

What benefits does a landfill have over trash burning?

Here in Switzerland most non recyclable trash is burned in special clean burning power plants to produce heat for most of the cities.

1 Bag of trash is the equivalent of 1,7 Liter of heating oil.

[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/ted/de/index/entsorgung_recycli... (German)

Remind me what is the population of Swiss again ?

China is not a developing country. This meme needs to die.

Depends which part of China you go to, really.

Same is true of the USA.

The only study on this subject I'm aware of is the one funded by The Ocean Cleanup Foundation [1], which puts 86% of annually released plastic in Asian rivers, with the main contributor being the Chinese Yantze river, followed by the Ganges. This compared to a mere 0.28% and 0.96% for Europe and North America respectively.

They've also released an interactive map [2], although if you're just interested in the numbers I'd recommend reading the paper.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611.pdf

[2]: https://www.theoceancleanup.com/sources/

The disparity is even more striking if you look at the figures per capita. The US generates almost 3 times as much waste per capital as China.

China has 4.25x as much 'capita' as the US, so in absolute terms they produce more. I'll grant that the disparity is "more striking" if you phrase it in a way that obscures the full details.

In fairness, you're right that exporting garbage is bad, and we all need to be producing less of it.

It's not how much is produced but how much ends up in the ocean.

We don't intentionally throw our garbage directly into the ocean, but it still makes its way there. Follow a garbage truck for a while and note how much loose trash falls out either while it's driving around or while it's picking up a garbage can and collecting the contents. Realize that much of the garbage in the street will be washed down a storm drain, usually without a filter, and that the storm drain will dump into a creek or river.

Someone analysed the Thames in London and found it had 18 tonnes a year of plastic waste in it.

The Yangtze (which is longer to be fair) has 1.5 million tonnes of year of plastic waste.

Probably 1000x the waste per-river-km.

GPs point is entirely correct; plastic waste isn't a huge problem (unsightly perhaps) in Western world, it's the developing world which is causing nearly all of this problem. Be far better to focus resources on there, it would literally have a 1000x+ better RoI than the west.

One way to see it.

Another may consider population, the western world massively exporting trash, having decades of head start on polluting the oceans with plastic (micro plastic needs time) and totally fails to develop exportable clean consumer products or to build or sell the machines needed to produce them.

I don't like plastic in sea food, but it's probably to late with or without China. Pointing now at countries copy pasting our lifestyle is just ridiculous, they didn't invent plastic bags.

I think its a poorly understood cultural thing.

If you go to a beach e.g. in Phuket, Thailand, you'll find a mountain of rubbish just off the part where the tourists sit. Plastic bags and bottles, old car parts, tin cans, all sorts of shit. Same in Rarotonga, or many of what you might label third world countries that tourists go to. Right next to where people live and work, blowing around.

In some cultures, rubbish is just ignored. You'd think if you worked next to the beach, you'd at least clean up the little patch next to your stall when you had some downtime, but this just doesn't seem part of the mindset. I don't know if its some kind of "tragedy of the commons" type thinking or what it is.

Obviously if there's so much trash that it's overwhelming, you disregard it for the sake of your peace of mind. Picking up one bag out of millions in your immediate area feels futile. There also might not be any place to put it. First-world trash management programs don't magically spring out of nowhere. They are planned, developed, and maintained.

This is largely the way things are in Jerusalem. There is tons of trash all over the place, stuffed into crevices and just loose on the street. It seems to be largely ignored by the locals (it is like this even in very non-touristy areas as well, so it's not just messy tourists).

I took a quick look at the google on this topic and found this:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-total-rubbish-w...

That is incredible. I have been all over the US in many, many parks over 40 years and never once, anywhere, did I see a pile of trash like this. Even in the early 80s this never happened at a park. (I know many, many other countries are way worse, but being 3rd world is at least a partial excuse)

In a big city, in a few places, (I lived on the streets for a bit in a few big cities) there wasn't even trash like this. Even the worst places in Portland, LA and other big cities, unless it was a total slum, it was not like this.

Anywhere there their is a public interest, the US actually gives a crap about keeping it clean. It's surprising how other cultures give the US such a hard time about "recycling" and "being green", I am about to be sick of hearing it.

Considering the size and magnitude of the park systems in the US, we are one of the cleanest, greenest friggin nations the world as ever known. (besides the nasty pollution from factories, but that is another issue)

> I took a quick look at the google on this topic and found this: > https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/MAGAZINE-total-rubbish-w....

You wouldn't nothing close to Tel Aviv garbage piles in Givatayim, Raanana, Herzliya or Netanya, but at the same time Yaffo, but somehow, Jaffa, Acre and Jerusalem have it much worse. (And before I get accused of racism, Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim are just as bad, with Tiberias getting worse every year.)

Israel is a very heterogenous country, with different communities having radically different lifestyles and ideals - reality that this Haaretz piece completely ignores.

I suspected as much. It doesn't seem worth the flame war (accusation of racism) online to even approach discussing that one group of people are naturally "messy" (for lack of a better term) while another is not.

I find it amusing though that since I don't know the language or the area, I have no idea what any of the names you listed implies. Maybe that's good.

Jewish cities with a (relatively) not religious and wealthy population, Muslim Arab and mixed cities, and finally orthodox Jewish cities (which Tiberias, as many other northern cities, is rapidly becoming). Correlation with wealth and religion is pretty obvious.

>Correlation with wealth and religion is pretty obvious.

This seems odd, in the US, the more wealth (and I would say possibly some religions) the more likely there are either volunteer projects or budgets for cleaning up public areas.

Is this unique to the US?

Reverse correlation with wealth and proportional correlation with religion, I should've probably been more clear about that

This is the same in all the places I've been in Central America like Belize and Mexico. Its like a tropical paradise in the middle of a dumpster.

I suppose its part cultural, and I suppose more developed nations have more resources to throw at clean-up efforts.

I have a related story. I was on an island in Indonesia, and the small town next to the beach (mostly locals, but still tourist related businesses), was full of garbage. I have a photo of a local kid that was sitting on the beach, on top of garbage, because there was no clean place to sit.

Now, down the road a few hundred meters and over a hill was a little cove, with a beautiful beach. It was a little more touristy (about 10 people were there), had a restaurant and chairs to rent, and the beach itself was only about 40m wide with rocks curving around the sides. This beach was also full of garbage. Two tourists showed up, both women in their 20s with snorkeling gear. They wanted to clean up the beach, so they went in the water and start snorkeling around, while picking up the trash. Fairly quickly, they had so much trash they needed garbage bags. They went to the restaurant a few meters away and asked if they had a spare bag, because they're cleaning the beach. Well, they didn't have wallets to pay the local restaurant owner, so they were refused a garbage bag. In the end, they just left the garbage and walked off.

The situation was pretty shocking. This restaurant business relied on this small 40m beach, and not only did they not take the time to keep it clean, they couldn't even do the smallest gesture of providing a garbage bag when someone else offered to clean it for free.

This was something of a problem in America a few decades ago. People thought nothing of just throwing trash along the roads, in parks, etc. Informal dumps were everywhere on vacant lots, in roadside ditches and ravines. This eventuality motivated the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering campaigns that are credited with changing public attitudes.

But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.

> But in 3rd world countries where the priority is shelter and food, it's going to be hard to muster up a lot of concern about litter.

In the situation the GP described, how would concern about litter (i.e. cleaning it up) put the ability to have food and shelter at risk? In fact, one could argue that cleaning up a garbage-strewn tourist beach would attract more tourists and enrich the locals, increasing their ability to provide food and shelter for themselves.

I have a less dramatic but similar story. In Portland OR, there is a lot of Asians (ie, non-American born) and during a conference, we went out to lunch, and we saw a group of Asians, very nice clothes, gold watches, get in to a Lexus and just leave all their lunch (takeout) bags in the gutter. Their cups, straws everything. Just set it down and drove off.

This was in the mid 90s, we were all pretty shocked. But I have since learned, that is what is common in Asian countries, just set your garbage down wherever you want. I even read a blog article where a dev when to a tech convention in some large Asian city, and there were no trash cans anywhere, and that the only place to put garbage was on the ground, and there were people paid to pick it up.

I think there's a few confounding factors.

One is that there's no infrastructure in a lot of these places. When you're in South Ease Asia, there's nowhere to put your rubbish, there's no rubbish bins, and there's no proper waste collection for street stalls, so your chuck your rubbish on the ground.

At least in the larger towns and cities in Vietnam, they have workers that tow around a big rubbish bin on wheels and collect the rubbish off the street, but in smaller villages, they just occasionally pile it up and burn it.

Lack of infrastructure is definitely a problem there.

But on the other hand, a lot of people just don't give a fuck. Maybe it's because the place is so dirty anyway. My friend was draining the petrol tank, and asked if there was anywhere he could dispose of the water contaminated petrol at the hostel or nearby. They just told him to tip it on the street. They were surprised that he wanted to find a better place to tip it where it wasn't just going to run all over the concrete, then into drains and the sea, not to mention the fire risk of dumping a couple of litres of petrol on the concrete.

I guess you get used to your surroundings. It's certainly not an ingrained culture thing that's peculiar to Asia; Singapore and Japan are both very clean, and I remember Kuala Lumpur being reasonably tidy too.

>"But on the other hand, a lot of people just don't give a fuck."

I had a religious minister talk about Ghana, there were these plastic baggies everywhere, they were sold with water in them on the streets. So they got all the kids together to pick up the garbage.

One lady was in charge of the final collection, she took all the piles of garbage they collected (spent hours) and through it out the back of their shop on the ground.

Japan has lots of trash cans, and is incredibly spotless. Downtown Tokyo, hardly any trash anywhere. (if any) I saw 1 single homeless guy there. One.

I saw 1 single homeless guy there. One.

Homeless people don’t count as trash.

>Homeless people don’t count as trash.

Oh come on, you know I didn't say that at all. A comment on the internet forum doesn't need to be a full story every time and so context matters, but that is a ridiculous implication.

It was humorous, I won’t bother again.

Welp, here we are again. Written words have no body language to facilitate most of the meaning. Your words didn't come across as funny, and mine seemed to come across as negative in some manner to you. If we had been talking, you would have seen a smirk, and I'd have slapped your shoulder with a "knock it off buddy". (next time add /joke, I'll add /ah-shucks)

/fix internet miscommunication

Even ";-)" would do the trick.

On the other hand, joke markers decrease humorous value for people who would get the joke without their help.

>there's nowhere to put your rubbish, there's no rubbish bins, and there's no proper waste collection for street stalls, so your chuck your rubbish on the ground. //

They don't have bags to take the rubbish home?

Fine, if there's no refuse collection domestically or commercially or you can't afford to have waste taken. But if you carried the waste to where you were then you can carry it to a recycling or disposal point.

That's more of a "broken window effect" than anything. Once your used to some trash, more trash doesn't seem that much worse.

Maybe they should get better garbage trucks. Ours load from the top, so there is no way for trash to fall out.

Like so? https://imgur.com/gallery/YiwxQKy

I knew it would be that gif before I clicked on it. It's compelling to watch, in a weird way. Sort of like the reverse effect of watching "satisfying" videos, the anticipation of waiting for something to go really wrong is nonetheless fascinating. I always end up staring at the one for a good minute or two.

https://goo.gl/images/MFrL2h

Hah! Yes exactly! Only I've never seen that happen ;-)

You're right, it's most likely our fault

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=8PavA4rUypE

Not sure why you got voted down. It seems HN users don't like snark or can't understand sarcasm? (need a /sarcasm tag?)

A little from column A, a little from column B. I've spent too much time on reddit.... HN likes their comments snark free and I understand, It really is better that way. Sometimes I just can't resist though.

That is an interesting idea, an entire social group that shuns the minutiae. It explains some of my bad experiences here. They should have a "social rules" next to the "actual rules". I like the idea though, thanks for mentioning it. Plenty of other places for humor and stupidity, doesn't need to be on HN.

Pretty sure that until recently, the preferred mode of trash disposal in NY was to tug it into the ocean and let it loose.

edit: Yep, see [1]

> Through most of its history until the mid-1900s, New York’s primary method for disposing of its waste was simply to dump it into the ocean. At one point, as much as 80% of New York’s garbage ended up out at sea.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/oct/27/new-york-rubb...

While true, there was a lot less plastic in the trash then.

We ship most of our "recycling" to Asia and smugly pat ourselves on the back that we are saving the world. It would not surprise me that the original source of a significant portion of the plastics in the oceans are domestic recycling programs.

That doesn't excuse the behavior of them turning around and dumping it in the ocean.

China banned foreign trash imports recently. That whole merry go round is coming to an end.

Yes, so we are shipping our garbage to other countries now.

Looking at you continent of Africa...

We aren't forcing it on anybody. They buy it, ship it, and make $$$.

"Junkyard Planet, Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter

> Minter traces the export of America's recyclables and the massive profits that China and other rising nations earn from it. What emerges is an engaging, colorful, and sometimes troubling tale of consumption, innovation, and the ascent of a developing world that recognizes value where Americans don't.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/junkyard-planet-9781608197910/

There's at least one nation that gets most, if not all, of their power from burning other nation's trash. Having a hard time remembering which, perhaps a Scandinavian country.

Sweden has since a long time been working on building out central heating for whole cities, connected to garbage/oil/electricity plants (with good filtering of gases). While doing this network of hot water pipes all over the place we also put down fiber so on top of it we have access to minimum 100 Mbps internet almost everywhere, even out in the northern forests. Our small town was doing this already 20 years ago, only 3000-odd inhabitants. Now we live in a bigger town and this area was built already new with central heating from the power plants about 15 years ago.

Garbage dumps have mostly been closed down and we recycle and compost what we can't burn. We also import garbage from our neighbors to burn. Handling our old dump sites is a problem still though, a lot of toxins there.

Aren't we just sending it back? If it was important, perhaps rather than not accepting the garbage, China could use their resources to guide the progression of the problem. I am aware that the Chinese didn't create this problem, but they are definitely in a position to do something about it and arguably have the most to lose given the size of the population.

No we don't. China just imposed a waste import ban.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4164821-waste-management-ef...

What gets me is the smugness of the "green movement" in that they are perfectly fine with ignoring facts such as the energy intensiveness to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/11/1411...

And they also conveniently ignore the fact that without the plastics industry, the average quality of life for the average human would be far lower than it is now.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3791860/

Top it all off, imagine the resources that would get used if the world stopped using plastic and went back to 100% paper, cotton, and glass. That's a lot of trees, plant material and sand. The first two would lead to an increase in fertilizers, which would lead to an increase in chemical runoff.

I'm not trying to shill the plastics industry here, I'm just saying that the green movement is rife with bias and hypocrisy, and the situation is far more complicated than anyone give it credit for.

Plastic is also a much lighter packaging material than glass or metal. So a substantial amount of fuel is saved in transportation of goods to retail outlets.

Transportation of other plastic items we didn't need in the first place. A lot of the food we eat didn't have to be packed in plastic if it was stored properly and taken care of. If we cooked our own food more than we do, even more plastic could be left for other usage instead. While we are on the topic we don't need to actually eat as much as we do. We don't have to supersize every portion, we can survive and probably be healthier on a much lower portion per meal.

I don't think this is smugness. The "green movement" (not that there is a single point of contact) usually advocates first and foremost for the reduction in consumption before recycling -- step zero is to use less of things, not just use greener alternatives, because even those require natural resources at some stage in their production.

Energy intensive processes used for example to create wind turbines can in the future be replaced by greener alternatives; just because the current solution doesn't immediately improve things in one respect, it can lay the foundations for future improvement. Think of it as rebasing a company's business logic from an old COBOL monolith to a bunch of modern, independent services that someone in 5 years from now has a chance of understanding (just replace "5" years with "50", which brings to mind the nuclear power plants designed in the 60s peppering the western world).

I think the argument for renewable energy would still be valid even if turbines and solar panels were much more expensive to build than traditional varieties, because they are tapping in to renewable energy supplies that make us less dependent on the whims of middle eastern dictatorships. The thing that sells the concept to governments isn't how much energy they require to produce, it's the renewable energy sources they tap into and the diversification of grid supply from monolithic, sparse power plants (and the geopolitics they couple) to local, maintainable facilities.

>they are tapping in to renewable energy supplies that make us less dependent on the whims of middle eastern dictatorships

Middle Eastern dictatorships like those in OPEC? OPEC doesn't have teeth anymore thanks to US shale.

https://www.icis.com/resources/news/2017/02/13/10078321/us-s...

Ironically (or by coincidence) shale gas gets turned into plastics in the US Gulf Coast.

> No we don't. China just imposed a waste import ban.

JUST imposed. If you follow any municipal news (Australia, Canada, who knows where else) you'll know that the RECENT ban is causing huge issues.

>No we don't. China just imposed a waste import ban.

Yes, we did. That ban does not invalidate that it was occurring, on a massive scale, up to that point. Right now several nations are amassing a stockpile of materials with no viable destination for it.

>ignoring facts such as the energy intensiveness to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels

First off, energy intensiveness becomes less of an issue as more of the energy supply moves over to renewables. There's more to be concerned about around use of rare/harmful materials and harmful byproducts in the manufacture of panels. Second, I don't see that those issues are being ignored, rather that most people will (reasonably) make the determination that between the tradeoffs available, this option is a good choice. Third, there is a bit of a myth of a 'pure environmentalist' you're conjuring here which I'm sceptical exists in significant numbers. Most people that consider themselves environmentalists are probably fine with 'better' in lieu of 'perfect'.

>conveniently ignore the fact that without the plastics industry, the average quality of life for the average human would be far lower than it is now.

That implies a binary choice where we either have all the plastic products and the extent of modern usage, or we have no plastic products. Again that polarized view is not useful or realistic, most will take a more nuanced view where a world with less plastic use but not no plastic use is preferable. Wanting to reduce or eliminate single-use plastics for things like shopping bags and packaging does not have to also imply that beneficial uses of plastics should be verboten.

>Top it all off, imagine the resources that would get used if the world stopped using plastic and went back to 100% paper, cotton, and glass.

As above, I'm not convinced that the majority of 'environmentalists' are quite as hardline as you imagine, but I'll indulge the idea for a moment:

>That's a lot of trees, plant material and sand. The first two would lead to an increase in fertilizers, which would lead to an increase in chemical runoff.

You've made several leaps here that are not implied by the premise. First, paper and cotton are renewable resources, the renewal of which does not require increased use of fertilizers (in any form, artificial or natural e.g. intervention composting). Allocation of more land mass, yes, plus 'sustainable forests' has been a thing for decades. Even mainstream political views are light years ahead of the naïve position you've put forward here, see the current UK plans to re-forest almost the entire north of England, coast to coast, as a great example. Second, the amounts of materials you're imagining needed to replace plastics, and the single-use behaviours that go along with them are entirely up for debate. This is intrinsically linked to my first point, because what happens when a paper or cotton item is no longer useful and is discarded, even littered in the wilderness? Oh yeah, it decomposes. Becoming.... compost.

>I'm just saying that the green movement is rife with bias and hypocrisy

I don't disagree, but will point out that it's a fallacy to call someone living in a system while also advocating to change that system a hypocrite.

>and the situation is far more complicated than anyone give it credit for.

I do disagree with that assertion. Many people are giving this lots of headspace. Overwhelmingly, the output of those considered positions is messages to the effect that we need to make gradual, incremental improvements in whatever areas we can identify, and that we should do this even when those improvements are less than optimal. The alternative, decision paralysis, cannot be allowed as various windows of opportunity draw to a close.

Throwing shade at any effort to improve simply because it is not entirely 'pure' doesn't advance the discussion and the point is not as novel to proponents as you might imagine.

I used to hear that quite a large portion of plastic that you think you are "recycling" is in fact simply landfilled because there is no market for it. Not sure that is still the case; hopefully it has improved in recent years.

it depends on the price of oil

Recycling should really be called downcycling. With plastic as with paper, the quality of the recycled product is lower than the original, unless enough new material is mixed in.

Landfill sites amount to a very small portion of overall land usage of human industry. Beyond making sure reusable and affordably recyclable stuff is not being wasted, the wider environment is not improved or significantly relieved by expensive efforts to reduce landfill.

The immediate environmental action priorities should surely be:

  - Taking waste out of habitat 
    ( collection and filtration )
  - Reducing waste going into habitat 
    ( biodegradable material use, 
      design re-usability and reliability, 
      affordable recycling )
  - Study and assist heavily disrupted natural systems.

We don't have to be able to reprocess all of the waste collected since there is relative space to simply store it while we work on the technology and clean energy supply to make it reusable.

I believe advanced landfill as a long term waste curing and storage ability should be considered a big part of urgent clean industry and not characterised as a major problem in itself.

A recent study found a UK river to have the highest recorded inshore levels of micro-plastics in the world.

I suspect there are few records, but still.

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/uk-rivers-micropla...

As long as Americans insist on dirt cheap Chinese labor, how can we imagine ourselves innocent?

We have not taken responsibility but merely abstracted or outsourced that responsibility to another party.

Not just China, but many countries across Asia.

I don't know much about Africa, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same wasn't true there.

Can anyone speak to that?

Does that somehow make it all right?

What happens to westerners plastic bags? They end up in landfill. not a whole lot better in my opinion.

But you'll never succeed in making the Chinese feel guilty. Why should they care that their trash flows into Chinese tributary states or - as they increasingly claim - Chinese oceans?

We need to get Trump on the Twitter bully pulpit (actually, he's been there since before being inaugurated) and chide China. He's already got the trade war narrative going, what's one more issue?

Have you seen the vast region of plastic bags floating in the Caribbean, between Puerto Rico and the Northeast US? I'd wager that is all American trash, one way or another.

Where does everyone else's trash go?

How much gratuitous packaging do they use?

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