Ocean plastics: How much do rich countries contribute by shipping their waste?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, Unilever, P&G, Mars, Kraft-Heinz ... etc.
Coca-Cola sells 1.3 billion liters of coke in 'poor' Mexico alone, most of which will be in plastic packaging. Coca-cola alone is creating 110 billion PET bottles _per_year_.
At the end of the day it is companies packaging products that have externalized the environmental costs of the _cheaper_ (for them) plastic packaging onto local governments and consumers. Why are we not discussing that?
Why is there no regulation to force non-plastic packaging when a viable alternative packing exists?
Why are these companies lobbying against plastic taxation?
Why are these companies lobbying against single-use plastic bans?
Sadly straws and q-tips ban is the most embarassing display of a collective of weak governments in the hands of corporate lobbying.
Let's not scapegoat a group that I'm a part of, and instead scapegoat a group I'm not a part of!
>Sadly straws and q-tips ban is the most embarassing display of a collective of weak governments in the hands of corporate lobbying.
"Lobbying" is a convenient bogeyman, but in this case, lobbyists are merely revealing the very real preference that Americans love using single use plastics. The internet thinks that lobbying is the corporations bribing politicians, but in reality, lobbying is corporations convincing politicians what is the best way to bribe their voters.
Ocean plastics from consumer goods is already a solved problem anyways. Developing countries need better trash infrastructure. Even, landfills and incinerators are better than dumping it in the ocean.
Citation needed?
So are you saying that it is the consumer that drives demand for single-use plastic? The massive cost reduction for the manufacturer has absolutely nothing to do with this push?
We need to restore the relationship between disposal and cost, by charging manufacturers a cost to recycle or trash. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-2-summer/notes-here-t...
To be clear I don't think the wallet-vote narrative is completely wrong-I just think consumers have less voting power than everyone thinks they do (in this narrative)
The real culprit for all the clear plastic was the anti-landfill environmental movement that deceived the public that plastic can be recycled in an environmentally beneficial way. I suspect this lie was backed by the manufacturers.
The other environmental scam brewing is how hard the oil and gas industry are secretly and falsely pushing hydrogen as a solution to carbon emissions. They are salivating at the idea of federally funded pipelines and know hydrogen from methane is going to be the cheapest source for decades.
The backup camera thing was regulation announced in 2002, with more than decade allowed to implement. The reason was because about 25 kids per year were being backed over and killed, often by their parents.
This isn't a great example because the government mandates all cars have a back up camera, so given the real estate that takes in the center console, you might as well make it a touch screen and outsource some functionality to it. Mazda cars probably come closest to what you're looking for though.
You’re not a victim. Don’t buy, or buy products you value second hand. I have a 2015 notebook that I can repair and still works great, an older car I can repair and works great, a 2009 professional camera that works great with lenses from 1970, etc.
Or people do actually prefer the slightly-more-expensive option, but it gets phased out and then there is only the cheap option and some artisanal bullshit version that costs 5x and much so only rich people buy it. Some combination of price discrimination via "quality bundling" and shrinkflation.
However I agree that the solution is to un-externalize these costs.
If the majority of people prefer plastic jugs of milk over reusable bottles of milk, then the milkman no longer benefits from economies of scale, so they have to increase prices. This causes more people to switch to plastic jugs of milk, so milkmen have even less economies of scale, etc. The only stable equilibrium is for the milkman to market his service as a luxury.
Consumers benefit from cheaper pricing, companies get better margins, everyone wins.
Now we see the externalities, or are forced to accept them. But it's not just the consumer's fault. Lots of cheaper items went directly to profit and not to consumers.
I've been advocating for decades the taxing of pollution to "internalize the externalities". In this case, taxing plastic.
> Even, landfills and incinerators are better than dumping it in the ocean.
https://www.no-burn.org/wp-content/uploads/Pollution-Health_...
I only interact with single use plastics directly as a Costco costumer, Amazon delivery recipient, and occasionally when I interact with some medical products like bandaids. Otherwise, here in San Francisco, in my day to day life, I do not interact with single use non-compostable plastics directly.
I don't feel like I'm missing much.
However I am intellectually honest, I know that the goods that are delivered to Whole Foods and Rainbow and whatever are packaged in single use plastics. I know the hospital throws away a lot of stuff, including metal instruments, let alone plastic ones.
In an industrial context, it is possible to legislate a reasonable reduction in single use plastics.
> Developing countries need better trash infrastructure. Even, landfills and incinerators are better than dumping it in the ocean.
Some people never litter.
This comment is incredibly out of touch with reality. It completely ignores the fact that the consumer was NEVER given a choice of eco-friendly packaging vs single use plastic.
"In my experience" I never needed a straw to begin with, I am fine just drinking from a glass as humans have done for centuries.
So in "my experience" a plastic straw makes zero sense.
And what do these giant multinational companies have in common? /s
The issue is there is no unified multinational push to regulate these multinational giants.
You can't have local solutions to global problems, and these companies are as global as they get, constantly chasing the places with the lowest taxes, lowest wages, least amount of regulations, most corruption, and easiest to bribe officials for access to exploiting local resources, etc. while making record profits quarter after quarter at the expense of the environment and people in less afluent places.
We need global regulations for them. But that will never happen because China, the US and EU won't touch their giants as long as they're not doing anything illegal back home.
That is a pessimist outlook, all you need is for the EU bloc and the US to implement such measures and plastic pollution in the world would fall an order of magnitude.
The problem is not lack of _global_ regulations, just spineless politicians.
I can't tell if this is ignorant or ill-intended. The 'recycled' material from these markets is getting shipped to Southeast Asia and dumped in landfills as per the original link in this submission.
Ask yourself if what you say is real, then there would be no need for new plastic from crude oil since our market would be interely circular with recycled plastic.
Plastic recycling pelets have a very limited use and there are only a handful of countries were consumers care about it where manufacturers mix in some recycled pelets and claim the plastic is from (partially) recicled plastic.
Recycled plastic is greyish in coloration (you can't make it transparent) and far more brittle than 'new' plastic. Recycling plastic was a con all along to allow corporations to make a fortune on packaging cost savings.
- Plastic is cheap to produce but difficult to recycle. Create quotas for 'new' plastic and make packagers bid for plastic in a plastic market managed by plastic producers. Petro-chemical producers still make money with less volume manufactured, since packagers have to bid for new plastic, paying more for it. This also forces more recycling since it is more competitive in comparison than outbiding in a new plastic market.
- Ban single-use plastic except for medical/lab applications.
- Enforce return schemes for plastic and glass at consumer shops but payed for by packagers.
People will complain that prices go up but that should have been corrected a long time ago. There is no free lunch, you can't have near free cost packaging without some consequence, in this case we already have plastic in intra-uterine babies, I say the buck should stop here.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-2-summer/notes-here-t...
Plastic is the lightest, thinnest packaging material we have. Reducing its use may means trucks carrying less stuff that is heavier.
Though you could counter-act that with more local bottling plants so that transport is shorter. In other words, don't bottle the soda in George and ship it to New York or whatever, but actually have multiple local bottling/washing plants in New York itself.
It's always kind of strange how people how people never wonder how we got from a society where stuff got reused a million times to one where we don't.
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb176...
So might as well try something new and fix excessive plastic waste at a different point in the lifecycle.
So Coca-cola reaps all the benefits, while councils pay for all the cleanup. Being pragmatic here though, whoever is ultimately at fault doesn't matter, because the outcome is clear: councils are poorer, coca-cola is richer, and the earth is full of plastic. So do we wait for the sudden and unprecedented cooperation of consumers across the globe, or do we regulate plastic?
As for how to regulate, I would suggest that plastic recycling is paid for by the companies that produce the plastic, perhaps through levies per-kg of produced plastic that ultimately make it more costly to use than more environmentally friendly materials. This would help councils/countries afford recycling infrastructure for plastic that makes enough sense, and it would naturally be more economical to use less plastic. We need a way to set a "Tradeoff cost" at a community level, similar to how there are taxes on fuels for cars.
I really like this model, and it works over here.
Of course, you still need a working recycling chain, but at least it incentives individual people to properly bring their rubbish to the recycling places.
Collecting the waste is not so hard - today you have automated sorting lines that can separate plastic waste from other waste and some people are saying it's actually better than separating the waste during collection because maintaining separate plastic waste/other waste disposal infrastructures comes out as more costly and less ecological (2 specialized trucks instead of 1 general, etc).
This whole problem is about what's done with the collected waste after it leaves the garbage bins at stores or elsewhere.
Created in 2003, about 32 years after Oregon created the first bottle bill.
Which reminds me, I need to take the bin of cans to the local drop site.
The relative autonomy of US states often means that states can move very quickly to pass progressive laws, even though the US is well known for legislative friction at the federal level.
Yeah, that's exactly what we need but the politicians in the US and EU are too well greased and too vested in the valuation of these mega corporations because the ugly truth is these companies provide a lot of money and jobs in their home countries and regulating the amount of waste and environmental damage they can do globally (in poorer less regulated countries) would reduce the money and jobs they bring in their home countries.
Hahahaha wow, who would have thought it was that easy?
Also, politicians do nothing about a problem not because they are spineless (about losing popularity, I think, is what you mean), but because they gain something out of not doing a thing about the problem. Many of the poor countries cited in the article might be democracies, but they are weak democracies with regulatory capture of private enterprises.
No, but you can start locally and watch the dominoes fall. Take GDPR for example: EU mandates it so companies fall in line, and now California has their own version (and hopefully we'll see other states & countries follow suit). Forcing a company over a hump can certainly start a movement in the right direction. If the US were to outright ban single-use plastic bottles (which I think they should), these companies would have to make a huge shift in the way they source and manufacture materials and this would lessen the resistance to other countries doing the same.
Because, at least in the non-dictatorial world, regulation comes only as a result of the mass population recognizing a need to clean up the outliers who aren't comforting with the wishes of the masses.
When a population is consuming 110 billion PET bottles per year that represents the masses. They are not going to enact legislation to clean up themselves. There would be no reason to since voluntarily stopping the practice of consuming said bottles would achieve the same effect.
Picking the best of a bad lot doesn't mean people prefer bad things, if their selection is extremely constrained.
Let's not downplay how much power the consumer actually has. A business like Coca-Cola would end up bankrupt in a matter of days if it didn't listen closely to what consumers are willing to buy. It, again, delivers plastic because that's exactly what the masses want. Business is tightly bound the whims of the consumer. Business only exists to serve the consumer.
That doesn't mean people prefer bad things. The plastic bottle is clearly superior in many ways, even if has some negative externalities. There is good reason why the masses don't want to move away from it, even amid the good reasons to stop their production.
If Coca Cola switched to glass-only again, they wouldn't lose very many customers. People want the Coke. They might have feelings about the bottle it's sold in, but they're generally not going to stop buying the Coke because the bottle changes to one that they like less. Nor, for the most part, because the price increases slightly to make up the cost difference.
Whether the plastic is superior in many ways is not, in this case, indicative that the masses don't want to move away from it - the masses just want their Coke.
Which too is the most important consideration to the consumer. Coke could be served in a Yeti bottle at $50 a pop, but who wants to pay for that? Nobody. Coke is merely delivering what the consumer wants: Coke, served as cheaply and most conveniently as possible.
> If Coca Cola switched to glass-only again, they wouldn't lose very many customers
Ultimately not, but they also wouldn't make the customer happy in doing so. Given that business exists only to serve customers, why would you go out of your way to make your customers unhappy to risk rocking the boat? Even a few lost customers is lost revenue, and long term negative sentiment is never good. Individual unhappiness is unavoidable, of course, but leaving the masses unhappy over something arbitrary like this even if you won't lose their business is pointless. That is not how business works.
> the masses just want their Coke.
...served as cheaply and most conveniently as possible, which is where plastic wins. For better or worse, the masses have made their decision. They don't want to pay for glass and they most certainly will not put in extra effort to legislate that they must pay for glass just to get a Coke. It is flabbergasting that the original comment in this thread even thought for a minute that they would.
If Coca-Cola manages to reduce their bottling costs, they pass on those extra profits to their stockholders, not their consumers. The behemoth that is Coca-Cola production cannot slow down or speed up fast enough to respond to actual consumer demands: they must plan ahead to anticipate them. This is more easily done by influencing consumer demand via promotional deals, advertising, and market capture. They operate in a meta-stable fashion, constantly producing at a roughly constant (if always slightly rising) rate, and using influence over the market -- prices, exclusive contracts, quasi-monopoly, promotions, advertising -- to control how quickly it gets consumed to keep sales up and inventory costs low.
In reality, consumers can't choose what's not in front of them. If Coca-Cola wants to use only plastic bottles because they're easier to manufacture and transport, that's what governs their use of plastic bottles. Any price difference seen as a result of that will not be due to cost savings, but rather in response to the change in production processes that affects the market supply.
If glass reduces costs the market would likely go in that direction quickly, but we already agreed that glass is more expensive, hence primarily why plastic is preferred by the consumer. They don't actually care how the liquid arrives, they just want it cheaply and conveniently.
But let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Coca-Cola wanted to pretend to be more environmentally friendly and started making glass bottles more accessible, but also kept plastic bottles around to satisfy the actual customer demand. What reason is there for us to believe that Coca-Cola would simply eat the cost of glass bottles rather than pass that added cost onto consumers? It's not going to happen. At best you might see a short-term loss leader-type offer as a marketing stunt, but soon glass will cost more.
I mean, you suggest yourself that they will put profitability at the forefront of their decision making, profitability that is driven directly by consumer demand, so there is a contradiction here to think that plastic won't be sold for comparatively less. Glass costs more and they will, without question, pass that added cost on. Coca-Cola exists to serve the customer, not to give away things for free.
I do, indeed, assume that the added cost of glass will be passed onto the consumer because, well, why wouldn't it be? Coca-Cola isn't a charity and the price conscious consumer will just buy the lower cost plastic bottle anyway, so there is no risk to their market by charging more for the luxury of glass. In fact, it would only serve to harm Coca-Cola and its shareholders if they compelled consumers into choosing glass at the same price as plastic.
To think that Coca-Cola would sell glass at the same price as plastic, temporary marketing stunts aside, is even more silly than thinking that consumers would legislate their ability to buy plastic bottles, where they have shown a clear preference towards, away from themselves.
I mean, think about it. For argument's sake, assume a Coke sells for $1.00 and the net profit on plastic is 50¢ and the net profit on glass is 25¢. Every time a consumer chooses glass, Coca-Cola loses 25¢. Therefore, there would be incredible incentive to charge $1.25 for glass in this example to at least reach parity with plastic, and a company like Coca-Cola beholden to shareholder profit motive will have to comply, which means that the price has to diverge and the price conscious consumer will stick to plastic.
Which is effectively what has happened in reality. I don't know about you, but I'm old enough to remember when glass and plastic were sold side-by-side on the regular. The consumer absolutely could have kept on buying glass bottles. They were both readily available for quite a while to keep old glass customers happy, and if that's all anyone bought Coca-Cola would have had little choice but to keep producing them. But the mass consumer soon moved towards plastic because it was better in a lot of ways.
Not better in every way, of course. There are clear problems with plastic. As with everything in life there are tradeoffs that need to be made. But a winner emerged and until something changes about what the mass consumer wants to buy, nothing is going to change.
The mass consumer is known to change its habits so this isn't necessarily a lost cause. They've done it many times before. But change won't come from regulation as the mass consumer is responsible for that very regulation! The mass consumer has to already move away from plastic bottles before regulation to clean up the outliers still trying to buy plastic is tenable.
That's not the point I'm challenging, though. I agree that it gives Coca-Cola the option to reduce consumer prices further than some competitors. I'm saying that the causation is likely not as you describe -- any reduction in consumer prices is the result of CC's intention to sell more stuff in a particular location or another, and cheaper production means they have more room to manipulate the market via a wider range of prices they can accommodate. All else equal, they will still charge just as much as they can. The company is not some benevolent force bestowing savings on the people who drink Coke. I don't know if/where you work but clearly you have not seen the inside of a company that moves massive volumes of physical goods.
The "let's just assume I'm right and move on" approach you have is pretty annoying. I don't think you have taken the time to consider anything I've said. We're not in high school debate club.
It is recognized that you invented a fake point and are trying to challenge something that doesn't have any relevance. My previous response was pointing out your error and attempted to salvage the train wreck that you created. Curious how that went unnoticed.
> I'm saying that the causation is likely not as you describe -- any reduction in consumer prices
What are you talking about? There has been no description of any reduction in consumer prices. Why would Coca-Cola charge less than the market has already shown it is willing to pay just fine? This doesn't make any sense or have any connection to the discussion taking place.
> The "let's just assume I'm right and move on" approach you have is pretty annoying.
I can assure you that the "I won't bother to read your comments but will reply anyway" is far more annoying. Logically, if something doesn't seem right, thus implying a misinterpretation, one would ask questions to find clarification rather than doubling down on the misinterpretation. What is to be gained from this bad faith approach we are witnessing here?
> We're not in high school debate club.
Clearly. High school debaters have sensibilities.
>> Ultimately not, but they also wouldn't make the customer happy in doing so. Given that business exists only to serve customers,
Fair enough, but saying that Coke has provided something that consumers like better, so they will be unhappy if it's taken away is a very different argument than saying consumers have chosen plastic.
> ...served as cheaply and most conveniently as possible, which is where plastic wins I mean... no. The price has been steadily climbing for as long as Coke has been a thing (outside of their first ~70 years where it remained USD0.05). When they switched to plastic, prices did not drop. It was never a consumer choice at all.
It cost them less because it expends less energy to ship them, therefore contributing less to global pollution in that aspect.
I find it frustrating that a lot of environmental actions these days only examine one part of the total environmental impact of something and disregard other aspects which may make the proposed solution worse.
Paper straws often contain those forever chemicals everyone talks about. Corn based alternatives take more energy to make in some cases. "Recycling" plastic has spectacularly backfired in that we shipped it across the world to be "recycled" and it just ended up being burned or dumped into the rivers feeding the ocean. We could have just tossed it in a landfill and had less impact.
Because democracy requires agreement with majority of people. Most people have their own problems and they don't care about PET bottles or whatever. Also, corporation are always lobbying government to not take any actions.
Lobbying works because companies can get direct benefits. But many people who cares about climate changes seriously wont lobby as they don't have that much money to lobby politicians to take actions.
In theory these bottles can then be washed and reused, or ground up and reused or recycled. I don't know if that actually happens though.
Hint: plastic cannot be recycled. Burning it is carbon positive. Burying it underground is closer to carbon neutral. We should bury plastic bottles.
Aren't the majority of plastic drink bottles made from PET, which has high recyclability?
I agree that many plastic waste products should be burried.
Because it's not one company that's a bad actor, is every company that sells anything anywhere. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to just blame every company.
Even if the US banned single use plastic, (which would have a ton of other negative environmental effects, due to the higher carbon and water footprint) it still wouldn't have much of an effect on where most of the Plasti CI coming from, poor countries.
The blindingly obvious solution is to figure out how to help/incentivize/fund better trash management systems in poor countries.
> Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, Unilever, P&G, Mars, Kraft-Heinz ... etc.
I think the essence of your post is that we should consider both sides of the coin: supply and demand. Both should not be immune to criticism and I agree completely with that sentiment.
> Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, Unilever, P&G, Mars, Kraft-Heinz
US, Swiss, US, UK, US, US, US company, respectively.
All those companies have massive volumes of sales across the world. You have rich and middles classes everywhere, buying these products all over the world.
My point is that focusing on the 'rich nations are sending their garbage to poor nations' (which is still true) deviates from the cause which is a handful of companies forcing plastic packaging on consumers to reduce their packaging and shipping costs all while painting it as convenient for consumers, lying about the packaging 'recyclability' (just because it technically is recycable doesn't make economically feasible), and externalizing the environmental costs of their packaging (you now have microplastics circulating in our water cycle, embedded in glaciar ice, plastic in breast milk, plastic in intra-uterine placenta, etc.).
But this is exactly the definition, in your own words, of: 'rich nations are sending their garbage to poor nations'.
And if it makes you feel better the plastic lining in a can is still a fraction of the plastic in a PET bottle.
By the way Coca-Cola is the sponsor of COP27 (the annual meeting of the Paris Agreement on the climate) which is meeting in Egypt next month.
Also, how much would that increase CO2 emissions in the worst case? Plastic pollution and climate change are separate problems. If we are solving plastic pollution effectively, wouldn't it be worth a hypothetical .5% increase in global CO2 ?
It explains why plastic is so favored, but it’s also depressing, as I consider branding mostly zero-sum.
I’d like to see standard glass bottles that are universally reusable and washable, but there are claims it’s more energy to wash than to make new (which I suspect is funny accounting).
> Glass bottles compose nearly one-third of all beer volume in the United States and nearly two-thirds of above premium segment volume.
I think the "premium" is what I'm noticing; I kind of ignore all the large packs of aluminum beer cans (though to be honest that's the only beer I have on hand right now).
What I have very rarely seen is plastic beer - only at stadiums where they don't want you throwing the bottle at the players, basically.
Of course, the only proper beer container is a giant keg.
But to follow your reasoning, do you have any data on the CO2 emissions of extracting, transporting and transforming crude oil into PET bottles, versus some 30% added weight to a delivery truck?
And even those loaded by volume could probably go to glass without hitting weight limits.
And if the result is more local bottling plants, that’s even better.
I would imagine glass bottles also take more space though, so still I guess there might be more traffic.
We know they did it in their home countries. It is frankly inconceivable that they didn't do it to poorer nations.
How many deposit return schemes and extended producer responsibility laws did they prevent while selling products in disposable containers?
https://plastics.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/epr
Washington Could Get European-Style Recycling. Lobbyists Are Mad About It
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2022/01/25/65471068/washing...
They are indeed a dumping ground for the rich. Whether they should they be so is another question.
Are their data faulty? Incomplete beyond what they themselves show?
Of course supporting that argument also isn’t clear cut in a way where just stating it outright makes sense, and the article does indeed do a good job of showing that direct waste exports are not really a major contributing issue.
I'm just taking issue with the words choice of that sentence.
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
Most of those are fishing nets. That seems easy enough to fix: Ban plastic fish nets!
We're overfishing the ocean anyway, so lowering the efficiency of fishing seems fine. (In the same way fishing with dynamite is illegal in most places.)
I do know though, that on a per-capital level, the Western world still produces more waste, but there was no thought of hey maybe this much plastic is bad?
Sounds like the USA too. Things have only started to change in the last 2 years or so, as some municipalities start banning plastic bags and foam food containers, and companies like Starbucks are starting to put on a show of biodegradability.
Meanwhile now we have paper straws coated in PFAS. We definitely don't need the plastic bags, but I'd rather have the plastic straws!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_soup_fog
> From as early as the 1200s, air pollution became increasingly prevalent, and a predominant perception in the 13th century was that sea-coal smoke would affect one's health. From the mid-1600s, in British cities, especially London, the incidence of ill-health was attributed to coal smoke from both domestic and industrial chimneys combining with the mists and fogs of the Thames Valley. Luke Howard, a pioneer in urban climate studies, published The Climate of London in 1818–1820, in which he uses the term "city fog" and describes the heat island effect which concentrated the accumulation of smog over the city.
> King Edward I of England banned the burning of sea-coal by proclamation in London in 1272, after its smoke became a problem.
They knew it was a problem. The economic benefits were simply too much to pass up. Sound familiar?
The issue is causing problems for everyone. We don't even have a relocation plan for the ultra-rich. Amazing that we all still have something in common.
The best way to keep it out of the water system is to stop using it.
The second best way is to incinerate it and scrub the output gases. It’s even possible to route the CO2 to industrial greenhouses for things like tomatoes.
Anything to keep plastic out of the water cycle.
There’s a company in Canada that specializes in making them too.
So comparative advantage works once again, to our detriment.
it seems we need to reverse the flow of plastics so that the countries good at reprocessing plastics reprocess more plastic around the world, even the ones produced by less developed countries. unfortunately a lot of waste processing industries in these countries are built on lies and corruption, so the economic cost and benefit is warped, leading to flow that is not optimal to humanity. poor countries are not being dumped on to the extent that they are paying to be dumped on. when the issue is legal and economic structures of individual countries, where do we even begin to fix the problem?
> ... rich countries would contribute between 1.6% (in the best case) and 11% (in the worst case) of ocean plastics through shipping waste overseas.
So, even in the most generous case, 89% of plastic waste comes domestically from Asia. The only solution is to get Asian countries to take waste seriously. As the article says, stopping all shipping of waste would have a negligible effect on the amount of plastic entering the ocean.
But there is a lot of intertia.
This is THE PROBLEM. It is mesmerizing how article shifts blame to those terrible "rich countries". Me in that rich country collect every bit of plastic to trashbin, sort it out just to read than my asian friends dumped it to river zero F's given. And it's my fault!
But we also need to be clear that this is ALL our faults. We may say we dutifully collect our plastic bottles and separate them but do no further research to learn that most of it goes right to a landfill. We don't demand product packaging that is known to be easily recyclable, we want cheap and convenient. We don't demand clean water for other countries around the world anymore than we demand clean working conditions and humane treatment. Everything is out of sight, out of mind. We are so privileged that we forget ourselves.
Humans are a very selfish species and we keep losing sight of the fact that this planet can't support this many selfish humans. The planet is just now starting to fight back. We have been f'ing around and are now starting to find out and it won't be pretty. Until we get serious about sustainability writ large, we will continue to receive our comeuppance.
Woah right there! Hang on. No need to get personal.
While I commend you for doing your job with recycling, it takes a government and its recycling policies and programs to make any meaningful difference. Conversely, it takes poor government policies to produce poor regional handling of plastics.
Let’s keep it at that level and not include ethnicity into the picture.
I suppose “poor” countries get a free pass because corrupt politicians accept to turn those countries into dumping grounds and we have no right to raise that issue. Even the suggestion that everyone should do their part is censored here on HN. Not by HN but by extremist nationalists from the region.
I would even be fine with that, if there was some highly specialized recycling facility in one of those poorer countries.
Seems like they are just building landfills with all of that, or just dump it somewhere, though.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/importing-and-exporting-waste
I don't think the article blame the west at all, the opposite rather. It also says that the 5% figure is probably inflated, because traded plastics are likely to have more oversight and less likely to end in rivers. I think this article is perfectly balanced.
Also:
> Me in that rich country collect every bit of plastic to trashbin, sort it out just to read than my asian friends dumped it to river zero F's given. And it's my fault!
It's your government that permit companies who exploit local populations with little to no oversight (regulations are bad, oversight is bad). That's basically what "neocolonialism" is. I dislike the word and i think this is more related to capitalism than colonialism anyway, but that's the accepted definition.
If recycling or protection of environment in general was the actual goal, we'd never do it. But, in reality, it is mostly just greenwashing and/or protecting just the local environment (who cares if rivers in Poland or China will become toxic, as long as US or Germany or Italy are clean), so "out of sight, out of mind" policy works well.
"Most of the world’s waste is handled domestically and most of the waste that enters the oceans stems from these countries."
"... around 2% of waste is traded."
There are efforts to return to the old pre-plastic days as it's a relatively new invention and the Balinese aren't used to having to use bins and shipping plastic off to far away lands.
They expect it to all degrade back into the ground, perhaps rightly so.
Changing that entire culture for the worst because we introduced plastic to the world seems incredibly ignorant.