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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/

> 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.

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.

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...).

Good point

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...

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.

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.

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 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?

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.”

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.

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.

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?

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 ?

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.

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.

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