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Comment by ridicter | Hacker News Reader

I see comments pointing out that the majority of plastic pollution in oceans come from Asia/Africa. This is true, but there are two points worth considering:

1) Whenever you pay cheaply for anything made in any third world country, you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country (and if it gets into the oceans, to everyone). In other words, you're not paying the true cost of that item--economically and to society and the environment.

2) As linked elsewhere: first world nations often export their trash to third world nations, masquerading as recycled materials - see spat with Philippines - https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canadian-garbage-from-phi...

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I would also like to assert that non-western countries are very influenced by trends in North America and Europe. (Source: I am from such country in Africa, and am living in another in Asia)

Once the west establishes plastics as something for the uneducated and poor -- that they[the west] got away from, people will rush to use their fancy not-so-cheap bags.

Same with fossil fuels, recycling, carbon-related policies, ... etc

* I don't mean "uneducated and poor" literary, but just generally less fortunate people in the no-so-developed world

Yeah, we shouldn't be quick to underestimate the cultural influence from Hollywood :)

Besides, if they west goes in this direction, economies of scale might simply make single-use-plastic more expensive than the alternatives..

Opinion of mine is it takes a while for people to come to a consensus that something is bad and come up with rules to mitigate it.

Three things I think of.

One is a guy talking about visiting really poor part of South American. Used to be 'clean' because people were too desperately poor to throw away anything. And later as they became less poor there was garbage everywhere. And still later and better off, less garbage.

When I was kid in the 1960's in the US there was trash everywhere. People would throw trash out car windows, leave their trash behind at parks. Toss trash in the street and dump refuse in vacant lots. Now that is both illegal and considered boorish.

Another friend mentioned riding the bus in a country in South America. 40 years ago people just tossed trash out the window. 30 years ago they'd wait till the bus was a mile outside of town. 20 years ago the bus had a trash can and people would hold onto trash till the next stop.

I think societies are slow to come to grips with and deal with negative externalities that industrial culture makes possible. The whole thing is a process.

> Whenever you pay cheaply for anything made in any third world country, you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country

That's true maybe when it comes to atmospheric pollution, but not with plastic waste in rivers and the ocean.

The majority of plastic found in rivers and the ocean are not industrial waste but post consumer waste... things like cigarette butts, plastic bags, and food wrappers.

>That's true maybe when it comes to atmospheric pollution, but not with plastic waste in rivers and the ocean.

A large amount of that is waste exported to those third world countries, especially plastics for recycling.

I've seen this tossed around a lot the last few months, but I've yet to see any evidence of its truth. Do you have a link to a study or some other source for this?

"China has been a major destination for Australia's recycled waste, with around 1.3 million tonnes exported in 2016–17. This accounted for 4 per cent of Australia's total recyclable waste, but included significant amounts of recyclable plastics and recyclable paper (35 per cent and 30 per cent of Australia's totals)."

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Sen...

There was a Dutch journalist who went to Poland and saw those recycling centers just burn the plastics in open pits.

This is why countries need to clean up their own mess and not sell their waste to a foreign company to be recycled offshore. But out of sight out of mind I guess.

The US was a major destination for Toronto waste. Don't know where it ends up afterwards.

Uh, I don't think the US has declined quite far enough to be called third world yet.

Disclaimer (?): Am from Toronto

If that is the case then again, the issue is on the receiving nation.

Richer nations are not externalizing their garbage, they're literally paying for it. If the receivers are not doing their job and putting it in the Earth, then that's not just some industrial by-product problem, it's point blank corruption.

Also, if it's consumer items in the Ocean, then the issue will be about where most consumers are, and how much they pollute, given that the issue might be Asia.

But the West obviously has enough of it's problems so it's not like anyone can point fingers really.

>Richer nations are not externalizing their garbage, they're literally paying for it

They are externalizing it, selling what they can, paying others to take it but not paying the true costs of properly recycling it in the first place.

> If the receivers are not doing their job and putting it in the Earth, then that's not just some industrial by-product problem, it's point blank corruption.

If we know this and continue to sell it to them, are we any less at fault? the answer is no.

>Also, if it's consumer items in the Ocean, then the issue will be about where most consumers are, and how much they pollute, given that the issue might be Asia.

Its thrown away consumer items, which as explained are shipped to asia from western countries as waste.

>But the West obviously has enough of it's problems so it's not like anyone can point fingers really.

everyone sucks, everyone needs to do better. No exceptions.

Can we please stop using the term third world when referring to Africa and Asia.

This is an outdated term that no longer represents the political and economic reality of the world.

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

1. How do we know if we paid extra it doesn't go into the pocket of a middleman? We may pay $150 for Nike shoes but at the end the person who stitches the shoes might get $0.25. This will only work if there is accountability with consequences along the entire chain.

2. I've certainly disappointed by this one but I put the blame on our city and county politicians who allowed this to happen while charging us extra on the claims that they will be properly recycled.

We should just do the right thing no matter what everybody else is doing. That's called leadership.

"you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country (and if it gets into the oceans, to everyone). In other words, you're not paying the true cost of that item"

It's not the responsibility of buyers a long way down the value chain and 1/2 way across the world to manage the social policies of other nations.

Do you want colonialism? Or not?

The 'pollution' is 100% the fault of the people doing it.

Also, I don't see why the manufacturing/creating process should be necessarily considerably more 'plastic waste intensive' than the end product itself - in fact, this would be economically wasteful and more expensive possibly.

So ... we could start putting big tarriffs on importers with bad environmental practice and human rights laws ...

It's the same inane naysaying that pops up on anything about environmental concerns. "Look those other people are bad too, therefore we don't have to improve".

That logic is bullshit and lazy, and we should call people out when we see it.

Western countries already do so much to protect the environment from plastic that there's not much room to improve. It almost all gets buried in landfills or burnt, not spilt into the ocean. Since we've pretty much solved the problem already, why not invest that money into something we're not doing well, like CO2 emissions? Even if we were to reduce plastic waste in the ocean, perhaps there are less costly ways, like fining people for littering, putting nets on the stormwater drain outfalls, or, shockingly, stop trying to recycle if that's how it's getting into the ocean.

All environmental efforts have a cost and it's a mistake of hyped-up media consumers to assume that the latest popular cause must be fought at any cost. There may be other, more effective, uses of that money on things that aren't in the news right now.

We need an "effective environmentalism" movement to parallel effective altruism.

> first world nations often export their trash to third world nations

Not anymore, pretty much all Asian countries have stopped accepting plastic trash.

They still have tons of it to dispose of, and still have lower regulations/controls on how it gets disposed of.

And now there is a backlog of recycling plastics in north america that is increasingly likely to get thrown in landfills, some of that may make it to waterways.

Past 10 years, Europe is increasing burning waste for generating electricity, and heat for district heating. Especially Sweden is burning 50% of the waste they generate. Waste plastic makes pretty good fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration#Incineration_in_E...

And emits CO2. No more plastic, less CO2 from production and from the waste. And it’s clearly our major crisis of the century.

Sweden (5.1) is very close to the world average (4.9 tCO2/capita/year) in fossil CO2 emissions, so they're doing really well for a developed country. (2017 data from Wikipedia.)

There is a caveat in per country carbon accounting. It doesn't include imported goods, nor shipment of those goods. Having said that, Sweden is indeed doing relatively good compared to other developed countries.

Imagine how much better they could do without such high emitting activities

Let me put it that way: CO2 might be mitigated at some point, but plastic in oceans is a lost cause.

Yes, it emits CO2, but is that really a problem? If they didn't burn plastic to produce heat and electricity, they'd likely be burning fossil fuel, which is going to emit probably about the same amount of CO2. Is trash burning really offsetting the use of non-carbon energy sources?

Plastic pollution didn't just happen in the past few months. It's been decades.

The damages has been done. It could take hundreds of years and an order of magnitude's financial resources to clean it up land and underground water pollutions. But the air/ocean/atmosphere/carbon footprints are shared and affecting globally.

We should take a break from games and adtech and save the earth.

There's no money in it.

Imagine you live in a place that has no waste collection services. You have the same kind of inorganic waste such as plastic food packaging as people in the US, albeit a bit less.

What are you going to do with your trash? You could burn it, but that would release a lot of noxious fumes and make your neighbors unhappy. So you just throw it in the river, and it floats away, out to sea. Problem "solved".

I don't know what the solution is, but the problem cannot be solved by the west at a distance.

Also, if we come up with sensible solutions then mass production of whatever packaging we decide on will also happen in Asia/Africa.

I like that we are doing something about plastic polution - yay! But I fear over fishing is actually more of a problem.

I see these two points made often yet I've never seen a comprehensive meta analysis that shows how true any of it is. Yes as you linked ppl will often give an article that supports that these things happen, but relative quantity is important. Otherwise this is just empty rhetoric, and environmentalism doesn't need any more of that.

> Whenever you pay cheaply for anything made in any third world country, you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country

Much of the disposable stuff I've seen here in California were made in the US. The Solo cup company, and its parent Dart Container, are both in the US, for example.

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