"Between January and October 2018, Germany exported 114,000 tons of plastic rubbish to Malaysia, an increase of 125 percent"
"Germans are great at separating their household waste, and the country is not allowed to export plastic unless it's for recycling. So why are there piles of German garbage all over Malaysia?"
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/the-plastic-trai...
That's about 3 cent per package if the average package weighs 42g. That's dirt cheap for a pretty clean solution. We suck as a society.
Plastic is a huge problem because it is a different beast and technology isnt there to efficiently recycle a lot of different plastics economically at nationwide scale.
Some plastic needs to be used as ignition help when burning other garbage in power plants (where filtration massively reduces negative effects from burning in a centralized manner).