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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

North America is 4.5%. That is just shameful and inexcusable for a non 3rd world country. The US needs to get their trash disposal in check and I hope the infrastructure bill has something in it to get away from open landfills to more modern methods such as cleanly incinerating garbage. Banning plastic bags at the grocery store and straws at the bar is also not going to solve this issue.

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Your comment mistakenly conflates North America with the United States. The US is only 0.25%. North America includes Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Of those, Guatemala appears to be the “leader” at 0.73%, approx 3 times more waste than the US despite having about 1/20 the population.

NA could make a heavy duty zero maintenance plastic disposal box. Powered by solar panels, ideally. Then give them for free to countries that don't have recycling facilities.

One thing to be aware of though is all these numbers are in the 0.x% range per country, making it easy to draw "eh we're not so bad" type of conclusions.

But consider visualizing it like this: if the entire amount of ocean pollution was represented by a 10x10x10 pile of tires, 2.5 tires would be of American origin. So while not completely embarrassing, it's not exactly great either.

Considering there are some 200 countries in world, 0.x% contribution is within the same order of magnitude to the average contribution.

So although some countries have more slack to pick up, I think the alarmist tone about US isn't necessarily unwarranted.

So, there is some interesting data on this in the data. Most of the North American waste comes from central America and the Carribean. The US and Canada combined are responsible for .27% of global plastic emission. Guatamala emits .73%, Panama emits .53%, Haiti .71%, and the Dominican Republic .64%.

Banning plastic bags won't do anything here. This is about countries not having sufficient waste disposal systems. If you want to have an impact on this, don't push for bans on plastic bags and other single use plastics. Donate to NGOs that help build new waste management systems in affected countries and push for federal grants to such organizations (if in the US).

As a side note, SUP bans actually have a number of unintended negative consequences, and it is not clear that they are even a net positive for the environment. Depending on who you ask, the environmental impact of such bans ranges from significant to marginal, and CO2 emissions from plastic bags is likely far better than alternatives.

Source for C02 claim: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/04/30/plastic-paper-c...

I know the context is ocean pollution and my response is very anecdotal, and local watershed. Since the County & State put additional costs on plastic bags, the amount of them strewn all over the local parks, and the key creek in our area has dropped dramatically.

I still do see plastic bottles mainly from water, and aluminum cans both for soda and beer, but not much else.

These actions do reduce litter, but most ocean emission is the result of a complete lack of waste disposal systems. The quantities involved are always far larger in situations where a very large portion of waste is simply dumped into a river.

North America here refers to the whole N. American continent including the isthmus of Central America and the archipelagos of the Caribbean Seas.

The US is responsible for one half of one percent which is pretty good.

At first I thought the same, but their North American dataset includes countries in Central America and the Caribbean. The US does a relatively good job within its borders, but could do more to support waste management efforts in less wealthy countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ocean-plastic-waste-per-c...

The US alone is 4.25% of world population: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population...

Focusing on curbing emissions regionally is as futile as instating a "no peeing" section of the pool.

North America is not a country.

North America <> US

And when you are solving a problem, do you sort by % ascending or descending?

It is far from obvious whether the best strategy is for the U.S. to clean up its 4.5% contribution, or to use those same resources to help the Philippines clean up their vastly larger share.

We do not have a 4.5% contribution, most of the NA contribution (as shown in the linked data) comes from Central America and the Caribbean. We contribute .25%.

The best strategy imho would be to split resources and do both. Helping far-off countries without cleaning up your own backyard would seem condescending and like an attempt to shift all blame elsewhere. Starting an effort to clean up ocean pollution originating from the US while simultaneously helping Asian countries do the same appears much more genuine and has a much better chance to work based on perception alone.

That's actually a really good point. While I do think that a larger share of effort and goodwill should be spent on major pollution first (and helping with cleanup and implementation of proper waste management there), not doing anything in your own backyard at the same time seems hypocritical.

why are they mutually exclusive?

Because even the U.S. does not have infinite resources.

Why does it require infinite resources?

Edit: I'm being glib, but seriously, this isn't necessarily a resource-intensive issue for the US to engage in. This kind of thing should be achievable purely through diplomacy. Surely there are some attractive incentives a nation like the US can bring to the table in the interests of compelling a nation like the Philippines to clean up its act, you know, like bringing a Nike executive to the meeting.

While I think I agree with the straws and plastic bags (it's hard without actual data), I do wonder whether reducing plastic packaging on a large scale would not have a significant effect as well.

Close to a decade ago I moved from Europe to the US. I did, and continue to do, perceive how much more plastics my groceries are packaged with. This is especially egregious for things that you buy in bundles, where each individual item is wrapped in plastics again. Also, cheese for example seems to be packaged with plastics a lot more than, say, paper.

In order to solve the problem, it's probably more important and effective to address the larger sources first, though. Prioritization.

>Also, cheese for example seems to be packaged with plastics a lot more than, say, paper.

Sorry you are not taking my individually wrapped cheese single slices

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