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Comment by tedivm | Hacker News Reader

Extracting oil is an expensive process that has environmental consequences, and storing plastic after the fact requires land and can result in plastic leaching into the environment. There are also other petroleum byproducts between extraction and having usable plastics.

With that in mind being able to recycle plastic cheaper than creating it from oil would be an economic and environmental win.

As a small factual change I can not find any evidence for the statement that most plastic waste comes from shipped recyclables. I'd love a source for that.

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90% of river-borne ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

Almost all plastic recyclables in the US is shipped to Asia and Africa. It’s simply not profitable to process here.

From the article:

> Recently, however, China has made efforts to curb waste.

> For years the country had imported millions of tons of recyclable waste from overseas, but a growing recycling burden at home prompted the government to shift its policy.

>Almost all plastic recyclables in the US is shipped to Asia and Africa. It’s simply not profitable to process here.

>90% of river-borne ocean plastic comes from 10 rivers in Asia and Africa

Sounds like it isn't profitable there either, so why are we shipping it

It is profitable to recycle plastic if you can pay people a few dollars a day to sort through it all to find the valuable pieces.

China’s change in recycling policy was caused by, among other reasons, a documentary on the workers who sift through the countless volumes of plastic waste. It’s quite sad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6qZwo6U5YFY

The packed that waste on fishing ships who dumped it on the way out and brought back fish. So basically, we dumped our plastic into the ocean, but with a clean consciousness after a convuluted process..

Can we stop pretending that whatever bejing decrees becomes reality in the country it claims to rule over? Its a nice play-pretend facade and the socialist inspired reality below is usually quite dystopian..

We pretend to recycle and they pretend to care..

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