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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

Philippines is the world's largest source of ocean trash. Even more than China.

The UN should start censuring countries which just throw their shit into the oceans.

Is this not because 1. the Philippines is a bunch of islands, mostly tiny ones; where 2. the smaller islands have mostly-agrarian populations who live mostly below the poverty line, and therefore can't maintain reliable working electrical infrastructure, let alone municipal waste + recycling collection infrastructure; and so, in combination, 3. the trash just piles up near homes in these areas, and then gets easily washed out to sea every time it rains, because effectively everywhere on a tiny island is directly upslope of the ocean?

I'm not sure what "censure" would do to address that problem. It seems endemic to the conditions that a large number of Filipinos live in — in a similar way to how India's highly-polluting use of wood and dung for home cooking fires seems endemic to the conditions a large number of Indians live in.

This is the reason. By far, most people in the Philippines live in poverty and anything affordable to poor people comein plastic sachets.

Instant coffee, shampoo, detergent, soap, almost everything is most affordable in a plastic sachet, and usually in very small amounts.

The detergent is enough for two small loads of laundry, the shampoo for two or three showers, etc.

This is combined with virtually no garbage handling, and often where there is garbage collection, it usually goes to landfills which are close to the sea and "leaks" plastic to the sea every time it rains or the wind blows.

Some places have started banning plastic shopping bags, but until there is an alternative or regulation to plastic sachet packaging, this problem won't go away.

And what exactly will censuring them do? My expectation would be nothing because the UN is an inept and corrupt organization that has not done anything useful ever.

Maybe the solution is rather to end NIMByism in advanced economies and stop exporting dirty jobs to countries that have way worse environmental protection regulations in the name of saving the environment.

The US reduced oil production in recent years, just to import more oil, and unless they only imported more oil from Norway (they didn't), every imported gallon of oil is worse for the environment than US produced oil.

Same with most other production, NIMByism needs to end and production should move back to advanced economies. If you are not comfortable producing things in your country, stop using those things.

> Philippines is the world's largest source of ocean trash [...]

Here's a nice (well, actually horrifying) visual of the problem:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

> The Philippines—an archipelago of over 7,000 islands, with a 36,289 kilometer coastline and 4,820 plastic emitting rivers—is estimated to emit 35% of the ocean’s plastic.

So how can we even start tackling this problem? they need about 4820 garbage collection services, it's going to be expensive...

We need an exclusion for our actual shit and for animal shit though, as we haven’t really tried solving that and don’t want fines.

How much of that originates from rich / developed countries?

Comparatively, very little [1].

And with developing nations quickly moving up the economic ladder, there's perhaps hope this comes to an end within a few short generations.

[1] https://www.plasticethics.com/home/2019/3/17/the-countries-p...

That article's misleading, probably out of ignorance of the author since it looks like an indie page. Up until 2018 China was importing about 45% of the world's trash plastic for recycling. [1] The world's waste is not well tracked, with a lot of opaque shifting about going on, but the paper makes some effort to estimate exports/imports.

The top trash plastics exporters (excluding Hong Kong, which imports and then exports a massive amount back to mainland China) over the time period studied (1988-2016) are: USA 26.7 million tons, Japan 22.2, Germany 17.6, Mexico 10.5, UK 9.26, Netherlands 7.71, France 7.55, Belgium 6.41, Canada 3.89. China imported a total of 106 million tons. It's estimated that the Chinese ban will see some 111 million tons of displaced plastics by 2030.

It's definitely just another example of developed countries exporting their problems to developing countries, and then looking the other way.

[1] - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aat0131

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