Sure there are a few strewn candy wrappers or something, but there really isn't any big problem. It's all quite nice.
What country do you live in that your beaches are so bad?
Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash. Going through Shizuoka, Aichi, and islands of Kagoshima, they're increasingly looking like dumps. Some are completely covered in pieces of trash, and most of it isn't Chinese. It's washed up laundry detergent bottles and toys and stuff all from here. Some places like Okinawa and Kamakura beach are generally cleaned, but having visited Kamakura 4 years ago and again a year ago, it's noticeably filthier.
Major beaches are maintained and cleaned daily. Walk a few hundred meters beyond the crowds and there's a good chance you'll see trash everywhere. Two weeks ago I visited a beach I last went to a couple years back, and it was depressing seeing the state of it. The beach used to have crabs and isopods roaming the sands and crawling around the rocks. Now it's covered in shards of plastic and washed up tires and other things. Not a crab to be seen.
Litter ends up in streams, rivers, and eventually the ocean. You can argue it’s an issue with plastics, but it’s equally an issue with trash.
I'm seeing mainly trash from Japanese companies that are Japanese products with Japanese labels. It's easy to recognize. Externalizing blame isn't the solution because it's not the problem.
Currents likely help carry trash away from certain regions. Japan's east coast isn't really being affected by trash that would be coming from, say, China, because currents don't carry most of it to our beaches. It's stuff being washed out locally and brought back by waves here. Much more is likely being passed out into the middle of the ocean.
That said, Asia really does have a much larger issue here than the rest of the world. 90% of plastic pollution comes from “Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.”
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
> Upon implementation of the policy in 2017, plastic imports to China plummeted by 99%.[9] This led to waste stream backlogs across Europe and North America.[9] When they could find buyers, most European plastic was diverted to Indonesia, Turkey, India, Malaysia, and Vietnam.[9]
Western governments are sending trash to these places knowing it's finding its way into rivers just so they don't have to spend money processing it themselves. These impoverished countries are overwhelmed with trash that isn't theirs. It's a problem because Western countries are selling trash that they claim is recyclable and a valuable resource, but is literally useless trash. The moment one country bans the system (such as China), the EU and US find another place to dump it instead of processing it on their own.
The US and EU have plenty of landfills, their exporting plastic which was actively separated from the waste stream for recycling which can be profitable. If nobody wants to pay for it then the default is to burn it domestically for energy.
Contaminated recyclables are just garbage. Countries are getting fed up with the EU and US sending supposedly separated recyclables because it's pure garbage falsely labeled as usable plastic. [1]
The issue is the degree of contamination. Different municipal waste streams all have their own internal systems a 98% plastic stream and a 99.9% plastic stream are very different economically.
Completely separate from that it’s a political issue as nobody wants their country to be thought of as a dumping ground. “Malaysia says up to 3,000 tonnes of rubbish will soon be returned to the UK, US, Japan, China, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Bangladesh, Norway and France.” what’s not mentioned is this represents 1% of plastic sent to the country. The don’t want to ban the process because the other 99% is quite valuable domestically.
Trash in rivers in Asia is from local littering, pure and simple.
Trash that Western countries send over is simply buried or burned. It's not the source of plastic pollution in rivers. There's real concern with it being a source of air pollution when burned... but it's simply not turning into litter.
My experience has been the exact opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025358
It can also be under the sand.
I once spent a morning cleaning ~50 plastic bags in the wet sand of the beach at low tide. They were empty shopping bags, but had opened up and filled with sand, so they were basketball-sized and really deep; they required _digging_ every single one to get them out. Next day, 50 more were there. There was no way that many washed up in one night. So I did a little digging with a spade, as deep as I could go in the sand, all the way down to my armpit. And I brought up piece after piece of plastic from the depths, punching through bags on the way down; I don't know how many layers deep. Then I realized these "new" 50 bags had just been there under the surface. The layer of sand made free by yesterday's cleanup was now washed away by the tide to reveal them. That was just the worst feeling, knowing that that beach was basically a 1km-long landfill, riddled with garbage at least a meter deep. An extreme example, but it kind of broke me.
Pic: https://blog.qiqitori.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/DSC0249...
Boring blog entry: https://blog.qiqitori.com/2017/08/beach-cleaning-in-matsue-j...
> Japanese beaches that aren't ultra popular tourist destinations are currently flooded with trash.
This is exactly my experience as well. Every place that I have been, if it is a remote site that no one is actively cleaning up, then it has weeks, months, years, or even decades of accumulated garbage. Popular destinations, like beaches around resorts, well-maintained hiking trails, private beaches; these all have people regularly picking up garbage.
Some of the most "pristine" beaches I've seen were on outer islands of Fiji. But they were pristine because they had resorts on them, or near them. Kayak over the other side of the island, where no one picks up, and it's trash city. The global ocean system deposits garbage everywhere, on every beach. Depending on where you are in the various gyres, that beach gets more or less washup. I've been to beaches in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hawaii, Fiji, Africa, Europe, and both coasts of the US. The primary discriminating factor on how much garbage you see is how regular and thorough the pickup is.
As for Okinawa that seems to depend on the island. When I was there some years ago, many beaches on the smaller islands were covered in trash (mostly of Western origin – one could often still decipher the letters on e.g. beer and shampoo bottles).
Personally, I'm not surprised Japan has a plastic waste problem, the shops and manufacturers here are addicted to plastic, and the culture is one of appearances above truth so I'm not surprised to hear about the differing levels of care dependent on whether tourists frequent a place.
I've also lived in other parts of Asia and I've seen some shocking things to do with waste. India was the worst. As another comment mentions, it's probably best that developed nations export knowledge and attitude towards waste, not just waste.
Not just the beaches, but every single waterway, alley, forest, jungle. Literally everywhere.
I have pictures of the waterways in Saigon at low tide and the ground is covered in plastic. At high tide, there are government run boats that go up and down some of the waterways to collect a fraction of the trash that people just dump in there.
Every single little town/commune/village has a spot on the way in/out of town with mounds of trash (mostly plastic). Usually partially burning, smelly and covered in bugs.
It is tragic.
It washes up on beaches. Uninhabited islands thousands of miles from the nearest settlement are covered in plastic:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/henderson...