Is this not misleading? I thought that most countries offload their plastic waste to regions in Asia (paying them to take it), so of course Asia comes off looking as the largest emitter.
I don't know how common this is but there have been several UK companies prosecuted for it. I've also seen stories where British reporters have gone to Asia and documented piles of obviously British waste in local dumps. These stories crop up in the British media quite frequently.
And I'm not absolving them of responsibility, but the richest countries pay to offload plastic on them knowing pretty well there is no way to get rid of it besides tossing it. Those Asian regions that burn it have awful air quality issues.
Should these regions refuse money for our plastic? Probably - but this paints an incomplete picture.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
Plastic garbage from Trader Joe's and an AARP card are peeking out of hillocks of plastic trash piling up in Indonesia.
It's a sign of a new global quandary: What should wealthy countries do with their plastic waste now that China no longer is buying it?
No.
> I thought that most countries offload their plastic waste to regions in Asia (paying them to take it), so of course Asia comes off looking as the largest emitter.
Why would that be the case? Asia's consumers - billions of them - are now the world's largest in terms of unit consumption/use/disposal of plastic.
I don't think anybody could miss the fact that China's consumer economy is now by far the world's largest in unit terms. And it's set to get quite larger yet. China has more plastic consumers than the US + EU combined at this point.
Just Indonesia + the Philippines = 380 million consumers. They buy, use and dispose of enormous amounts of plastic. These nations are not living in the 18th century, they have full access to plastic consumer goods/packaging, whether manufactured domestically or from China.