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Comment by soheil | Hacker News Reader

If we want to create a chart by country that is actually fair we need to normalize for GDP per capita and population. This is a very crude way to single out countries based on incomplete data.

I'd like to see the list of worst offender countries that can do something about preventing plastic pollution, but aren't doing as much.

How is it helpful to know that India is one of the highest polluting countries when half a billion people live in abject poverty?

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I think that per-capita normalization in particular is interesting. I have a spreadsheet where I did that, and the Philippines stands out even more then, as does Brazil. GDP is a bad normalization factor here, as the trend is weird. High income countries have very low emissions in general. Low income countries sometimes have high per capita emissions, but not usually. Middle income countries are the most likely to be high emitters, as they are most likely to be consuming large amounts of plastic without having developed the infrastructure to process the waste.

Are you proposing some inverse scale or what?

When it comes to emissions, poor countries are generally way lower than wealthy countries per capita. If we readjusted these charts to be plastic pollution per dollar, the Philippines would be several orders of magnitude higher than anywhere in the west.

No, use this formula:

  GDP x pollution / population

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