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I think this allocation of blame is unfair. I moved from a developing country - the plastic culture originated from the west

He didn't assign blame; you did.

All he did was observe the pretty commonly known fact that plastic pollution is out of control in the region. You're the one who started pointing fingers.

> He didn't assign blame; you did.

Perhaps it would be more appropriate to talk about cause and effect, not blame / morals

> They could easily tell people to cut down their plastic/trash usage...Profit/corruption

I don't think thks would work.

I come from another region with the same problem. I know people who manage local factories that produce food and drink wrapped in single-use practic. They buy machines from Italy, they import bottles, caps, everything. Local suppliers look to what west does and they copy.

Imagine that tomorrow, overnight, US and EU governments clamp down on their companies domestically and stop producing single use plastic. It will be gone from developing world withing a few years.

I think the problem of plastic is problem of industry. It cannot be solved through invividual action. It has to be solved in the factories that produce this crap by the billions.

> Imagine that tomorrow, overnight, US and EU governments clamp down on their companies domestically and stop producing single use plastic. It will be gone from developing world withing a few years.

100% it won't change in Vietnam unless the government there does some strict mandates and education. It doesn't matter what the US/EU does. You really have to spend time in the country to get an understanding of how it is literally ingrained in their culture to just dump trash wherever they want and use plastic endlessly. They really don't see the problem with that. Once it gets into the culture, it'll take many generations to extract it.

>> Once it gets into the culture, it'll take many generations to extract it.

I recall a few years ago it took a couple weeks in USA for people to shut themselves into their homes, fear being close to their neighbors, and wear face masks at grocery stores and while driving in their own cars. Sufficient fear will cause mass obeying and hating those who don't obey. It can be done again.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/31/health/covid-...

I can’t speak to where you have been. But that’s not true that I saw in Vietnam when I was there this year.

For example. Go buy a bunh mi and they wrap it in a bag, and place it in a grocery bag (to hang on your scooter). Want a pressed sugar cane drink? Plastic cup, plastic lid, straw and plastic bag.

To your point since there is no trash pickup (it’s usually an old lady that comes at 4am in each district with a cart) there is discards everywhere. Especially in rivers and the like. These are all local things. The culture there is much of a porch culture that you hang out and talk. Each house often has a shop of some type that the tenant lives above and has a “hustle” to make money. So it’s not one where folks go get weekly groceries or whatnot. You want dinner you go get whatever you want, bunh mi, pho, or broken rice and pork? etc from said shop. You want rambutans, you go get some. Cooking and the like is often for special occasions.

The trash problem is huge there. And when I asked they often blamed it on being ocean trash from the west. Even when asking about the trash issues on the Mekong at the northern end of the delta.

While they also burn their fields around the same times annually for crops, they constantly burn trash in much of the country and the smog issue is real in many parts, except maybe Da Nang which is a special case and in fact that provincial leader (was quite popular and successful) was promoted to the capital and then mysteriously died.

Fun fact. Vietnamese don’t have a word for smog. They call it fog. I actually got sick when in Hanoi and i am 50/50 on whether it was from the smog to be honest (the only folks in my party that didn’t get sick there were the folks that lived in Vietnam).

Why does it matter where plastic originated from? Doesn’t make a difference if it originated locally, it’s more of an excuse to blame where it came from. Like gasoline for example

You can’t fix an issue if you are in complete denial of the source of the issue.

It wasn’t western trash on the banks of their rivers or in the city corners.

No doubt there may be some trash that does cross the oceans and hit their coast. But it’s by no means the bulk of the source.

Frankly that trip somewhat made me aware that there isn’t much European and US can do for pollution at a global scale. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, but that the indias and chinas and Vietnam’s dgaf and are working on the day to day and don’t have a huge concern for the big picture since there really isn’t time in the day. So we are pissing in the wind of sorts, though we should focus on keeping our nations and beaches and rivers cleaner.

> Frankly that trip somewhat made me aware that there isn’t much European and US can do for pollution at a global scale.

That's exactly it. That said, I'm living in southern californai now, we have a recycling bin that people just throw trash into. Nobody here cares either.

Heck, this is one of the compost bins! https://imgur.com/cdPEo0i

> For example. Go buy a bunh mi and they wrap it in a bag, and place it in a grocery bag (to hang on your scooter). Want a pressed sugar cane drink? Plastic cup, plastic lid, straw and plastic bag.

During my time on the motorbike with my gf, we made a huge effort to not use plastic. It was a struggle. We brought our own cups, reusable bags, etc... we'd give them a cup for that delicious sugar cane, then they'd pour it in a plastic cup because that is what they were so trained on, remember we gave them a cup, pour it in our cup and then immediately toss the plastic cup. I can't tell you how many times that happened.

> I actually got sick when in Hanoi and i am 50/50 on whether it was from the smog to be honest (the only folks in my party that didn’t get sick there were the folks that lived in Vietnam).

100% is was from the pollution there. Summers are brutal in Hanoi.

> we'd give them a cup for that delicious sugar cane, then they'd pour it in a plastic cup

Perhaps it's for ensuring consistency (of product volume, ratio of ingredients, etc) for all their products.

That's some hardcore vinalogic.

It comes from a machine that squeezes the sugar cane directly into a cup.

I follow you but I still am not sure I buy that India/Vietnam are too poor to afford general, organized trash service.

Are you maybe saying it a cultural thing? As in, it would be too difficult to convince people to pay somewhat higher taxes and then adhere to littering/dumping/burning laws?

In the cities, there is trash collection. Anywhere outside of the cities, it is dumped just outside of the commune (most of them have a road in and a road out, so there is two heaps). Usually smoldering. If you go to remote areas, you find trash heaps in the middle of nowhere.

It really has nothing to do with money since it is a communist country. The government could decide to allocate resources (ie: people) towards dealing with the mess. That's effectively what they do in the cities.

In Saigon, I lived on Truong Sa in a 5th floor apartment, so I had a great view of a large stretch. This street is along a river running through the middle of the city. Every day, there was several boats that would go up and down collecting the trash that people would dump into the river. All day long, I could watch people just stop their bike, get off, walk over to the river and dump their trash into it. The lazy ones would just dump their trash on the street or in the gutters, which tend to back up during rains and cause more flooding.

> All day long, I could watch people just stop their bike, get off, walk over to the river and dump their trash into it

oh dear, thats so gross

In their mind, they know someone else will come along and pick it out. Despite there being plenty of trash cans all along the walkway. Saigon is full of waterways and they are all full of insane amounts of trash. https://imgur.com/ZSwfRPt and https://imgur.com/nhpfqQe

Picture of some random beach somewhere... whole entire coastline is trash and Vietnam is shaped like and the size of California... https://imgur.com/fp6D7Ca

When I went to the world heritage site, Ha Long Bay, I went out in a kayak and picked up a whole bag of trash. I didn't even need to take a bag with me because I just found plenty floating around to use.

This is also a country that still eats dogs (and cats) and really anything that moves. You won't ever get them to stop making waste. https://imgur.com/ItvSF6T

> have the massive taxpayer funded garbage collection that is present in the west.

Is it? I pay for both recycling and waste collection, per bin. It's not via my taxes

Up until recently, waste collection in San Diego was essentially paid for via taxes.

https://voiceofsandiego.org/2022/11/18/san-diego-dumps-centu...

There's a guy in India who invented bitumen with plastic, for making roads. He made his patent royality free.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4e484f24-4885...

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Sure, developing countries don't have the infrastructure to recycle. The point of criticism here is reduce.

Datapoint: I'm vietnamese and think the use of plastic is unnecessary. It doesn't take much education to understand that plastic is bad, especially when the government has no hesititation to govern people's thought.

With groups like Otosaigon [1], you'd think that would be enough education to stop doing stupid shit [2], but I think the problem runs deeper than that.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/otosaigon.news

[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/otosaigon.news/posts/1965346...

Lazada and Shopee probably contribute a chunk of the plastic waste.

So does Amazon, on a more epic scale. Your point?

The real contribution to plastic waste in Vietnam, is just 99% of Vietnamese.

Anyone can set up a shop anywhere in Vietnam and they all hand out insane amounts of plastic.

Even the charity work I did there to help feed people amounted to filling up plastic bags to hand out.

My own observations are that people don’t don’t care about dumping trash in Vietnam.

If an undeveloped lot isn’t checked on, it will quickly become a dumping ground for neighborhood trash. And at least they put it somewhere other than just on the ground.

And there is nothing stopping the country from having a public trash collection service. Labor is cheap. It’s just lack of political will: corruption why it’s not done. Plus lack of enforcement to punish people who litter.

Singapore is clean not because people don’t litter (they do to a surprising extent). But the law is vigorously enforced (with warnings then fines, then mandated trash pick up duty as punishment), but also widespread and frequent cleaning. Most busy areas get trash collection twice a day.

No reason why Vietnam couldn’t do it.

> No reason why Vietnam couldn’t do it.

Plenty of reasons, it is just that none of them are any good. =)