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.