Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't work because humans litter despite efforts to mitigate, and all of this plastic ends up uncollected. Paper bags break down eventually. We need less plastics in our daily lives, full stop.

View on HN

Two third of the plastic waste in the ocean come from Indonesia. Stop trying to make good people the culprits.

Ignoring your implication that other countries are "bad people" and your country of choice is "good people", western nations ship garbage to other countries

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48444874

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/31/waste-co...

So? Suppose I pay Indonesia to take my garbage and Indonesia dumps it in the ocean. I'm the bad guy? Or Indonesia? Rhetorical question.

offloading ethical/moral violations to poorer countries by paying them does not free you of responsibility, no.

It's like how child labor ends up in supply chains - at the very least once you know it's happening you bear responsibility for making sure it no longer does, or if you can't do that, you stop doing business with the wrongdoer

That litter comes from failed recycling for the most part: the US ships its "recycling" to other countries which just tosses in a heap.

There is nuance. Recycling exports have declined from the US [1], and a significant amount of the recycling stream of little value (non metals) is landfilled instead now [2] [3] (a quick google search will confirm, although some of my info comes from a family friend in a mid level management position at Waste Management). With that said, waste management (the practice) is atrocious or non existent outside of the developed world [4]. And even in the developed world, people still litter [5]. So! We can't use plastic, because we are collectively irresponsible. Maybe we hope it'll end of landfilled after its useful service life, but hope is not a strategy.

[1] https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2023/02/21/u-s-fibe...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20210120215100/https://napcor.co...

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466021/

[5] https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+people+litter

(fun fact: The origin of "Don't Mess With Texas" is from their anti littering campaign)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com