Isn't it more likely that "recycled" plastic being shipped to Asia will end up in the ocean than if you just pitch it in a landfill?

So tossing plastic in the recycle bin is plausibly an environmental net negative.

Right, if the consumer put it in the ocean instead of the trash, that plastic wasn’t going to get recycled either.

If you put it in landfill in the US, it’s definitely in landfill. If you “recycle” it, it may get shipped to China (or now Cambodia) and then dumped somewhere.

How does plastic end up in the ocean? I would have assumed it was through littering or the fishing industry[0], but perhaps some of it is debris that blows from landfill to waterways?

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3298/7/10/73/htm indicates that a lot of the coastal debris is plastic bags, while a lot of the offshore debris is fishing nets

That’s plastic to-be recycled, not thrown away. We don’t put our trash on shipping containers, we have closed trucks bring it to landfills. We do put recycling on shipping containers and it often blows off into the ocean or ends up in their world countries that get paid to accept it for “recycling” when they don’t have the means to do so and it just ends up in low quality landfills that leak into rivers/oceans.

So that’s more of a reason to just discard plastic.