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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

Plastics aren't a problem if people actually put them in the bin, and they are buried / recycled / burned. The problem is littering and poor waste management.

You can solve plastic pollution in two ways. Either crackdown on inappropriate waste disposal, or eliminate the use of plastics. One is actually possible, the other isn't.

Edit: although to be fair there are a range of "harm reduction" type measures. But if you focus on those, you might solve 10% of the problem and just drain energy from actually solving waste management.

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You are not wrong. We tend to zoom in on on the wrong problems. Most of continental Europe produces a lot of waste. Almost none of that ends up in the oceans. The problem exists mostly in coastal areas with a lack of legislation and rules or just a generally a sloppy attitude to cleaning up. And shipping in international waters. Once you are in international waters, there are very little rules and essentially no enforcement. Most of the problems in our oceans come from very specific countries and shipping just dumping their waste directly in the oceans. The problem is not the oil industry but some countries not managing their waste effectively.

Of course the best thing is just not having one time use plastics to begin with. But we tend to over-emphasize the problem and focus on the wrong parts. People using e.g. straws in their drinks is maybe unnecessary but in tons of plastic it's a very minor part of the actual problem. Especially if most of it goes into the trash and ends up in a landfill or incinerator. E.g. People using plastic or paper straws in Berlin makes no measurable impact. It's all very symbolic. The Spree, the main river that runs through Berlin and the only way trash could physically make it to oceans, has been pretty clean since the DDR stopped dumping toxic waste into it a few decades ago. I don't think rule changes in recent years for one time use plastics made any measurable difference.

It's more of a problem on beaches and near coastal areas where some people can't be bothered to clean up after themselves. You see the same on public roads or train tracks where people just toss their crap out of the window. This is the root of the problem: too many people just do the wrong thing without even thinking about it.

IMHO littering fines and more effective enforcement would be very appropriate and should be fairly uncontroversial. If people are being jerks, just treat them as such. Shame them into doing the right thing. Inconvenience them. Etc. Littering is a choice. And it should have consequences. And when people know there might be consequences, they usually adapt. Other things that work are deposits on bottles and cans. Making people separate their trash.

And then go after the big polluters and force them via tariffs, trade restrictions, etc. to do better.

You are ignoring the other problems with plastics. Microplastics in the environment, greenhouse gas emissions, and health problems from plasticizer chemicals.

I doubt either of those is really possible. The worst offenders are countries with little resources for enforcement (at least unless it threatens tourism income). It’s still needed, but at the same time we have to work towards a big reduction in our addiction to expendable, single-use plastic products. Disposal of plastic by burning cannot be a long-term solution, either, as long as almost all of it is made of fossil hydrocarbons.

Developed countries generate an order of magnitude more waste per capita. It seems unfair to blame poorer countries.

We make more waste but we don't put it in rivers.

We instead ship it to poorer countries for them to put it in their rivers.

We send it to other countries, have them dump it for us, then point our fingers at them.

Sometimes we send it.

But not for them to "dump it for us". We don't want the river dumping. If we stop sending it or even stop trying to recycle entirely then it goes into a landfill. Going into rivers is an extremely avoidable fate.

We "sometimes send" millions of kilograms per year[0], and we do so while reading reports that over half of it might end up being improperly dumped[1]. I think it's beating around the bush to say we don't send it to be dumped. We export this stuff into what are essentially regulatory black holes knowing full well what could happen. For our own newspapers of course we have to make up a cover story but I don't believe we're so ignorant as to believe it are we?

0: https://www.ban.org/plastic-waste-project-hub/trade-data/ger...

1: https://blog.cleanhub.com/plastic-waste-exports

We're sending it to be gotten rid of. But that could and should be into a landfill after optional sorting and extraction, not a river.

When we outsource manufacturing, the carbon and a lot of the pollution is our fault, as an inevitable part of it. When we outsource plastic handling, tossing it in the river is not the same. It's really easy to not toss it in the river. We're turning a blind eye to it, but it's not because we actually want it. We want them to stop and they could stop.

We want them to stop, we know they're not stopping, but we're still giving them our waste and being open about "turning a blind eye." And we pay them for it even when it mostly goes wrong, creating incentives to keep doing it wrong.

A country like China might be able to play the game well enough to get enough power to say Enough is enough but many other nations in South Asia and Africa are still struggling due to the fall-out of...our colonial interference, pressures from the WTO to do things by our rules, wealth inequality that further pushes them into difficult situations... And we blame them.

All this while countries like the US set great examples for others and turn away from the Paris Climate Accords and release doctored research on climate change.

Let's stop messing about. We send it to them to get rid of it knowing what will happen. WE need to do better, we can't just point our fingers for ever. "We want them to stop and they could stop " so why is this the situation today?

You're looking at blame, which is fine. I have some arguments there but it's not my focus. I'm mainly objecting to the implication that the reason our rivers are fine is because we ship plastic away for someone else to deal with. If we stopped shipping plastic, our rivers would be fine, and their rivers would still be bad.

The problem is not based on who generates the most plastic. Or in other words, our portion of the blame is not because we generate lots of plastic rather than minimal plastic.

I didn't suggest our rivers were clean because we export it, but we should definitely consider the waste we export to still be our own regardless of where it ends up.

The rivers in less privileged states would be dirty in any case, yes, for the reasons I've listed above.

I didn't use the word "blame" except to say that we shouldn't be blaming others for issues we created (the wealth disparaties, the petro-chemical industry, global consumer culture etc). Blame is neither here nor there, it's a matter of responsibility.

> I didn't suggest our rivers were clean because we export it

The combination of "Developed countries generate an order of magnitude more waste per capita. It seems unfair to blame poorer countries." and "We send it to other countries, have them dump it for us" sounds like it to me. Plus the sibling comment of "We instead ship it to poorer countries for them to put it in their rivers."

And yes I know you only made one of those. So with you not intending that meaning, then I guess you can ignore my comments, they weren't at you.

But I still want to counter the other users' implications and statements. The blame and responsibility we have in uncontained plastic is generally unrelated to the quantity we produce.

> Blame is neither here nor there, it's a matter of responsibility.

In this conversation they're the same to me, you can pretend I said the word responsibility instead.

In fairness, most developed countries used to, when they were at their level of industrial development.

> Plastics aren't a problem if people actually put them in the bin, and they are buried / recycled / burned.

Only 9% of all plastics ever produced has been recycled. 100% is impossible due to the various composite materials that exist.

Landfills don't work in many places in the world due to lack of space and are expensive, hard to manage and come with methane emissions. Burning is obviously the same as burning fossil fuels and cannot happen if we want to keep our planet habitable. It also happens almost always in poor communities that suffer health consequences because of it.

Even if the disposal was somehow magically solved, we still have the problem with production. Plastics are a lifeline to the fossil fuel industry and are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand to 2030. Cracker plants for plastics production are also usually placed near communities of colour or in developing countries and create toxic conditions for life around them.

Plastics are a problem. Regardless of the disposal.

that is a misleading number. In my country it is almost 100%.

Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants. The real problem is the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).

> In my country it is almost 100%.

> Most gets recycled, the rest used as fuel in energyplants.

Do want to share how much work your "almost" is doing here?

> the 10 countries in the world that are responsible for 90% of dumping stuff in the rivers (all in south asia and africa).

How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?

> How much of it is their own waste? How much was produced for Western consumers and then off-loaded onto them?

From following ocean cleanup project, for plastic ending up in the ocean it's usually own waste. The issue is countries that don't have working waste collection systems, any rainpour will often wash out the trash into river/oceans.

(littering is also an issue in countries with waste management though, but to a smaller degree, I kinda hate when people don't realize that stuff they throw in the street will often end up in rain collectors and directly flow into rivers)

Thanks for the reply! I was able to find the source you mentioned. Is there room in the conversation to talk about how much of their "own use" plastic is sold to them by Western companies who control the local markets?

> In my country it is almost 100%.

Do you have a link? I think OP meant actual recycling, not waste collection.

I don't think 100% plastic recycling is close to achievable at the moment (even if recycled, it's often downcycled).

Recycling here implies reworking existing plastics into new ones, not just collecting them.

Plastic can't be recycled at all, that is a complete myth. The only thing one can practically do is down cycle it, and even that costs more than virgin plastic so is uneconomical.

Of course theoretically perfectly clean and pure singly type plastic can be recycled, but that is something very different from post-consumer waste

"PET bottles on the Dutch market averaging 44% recycled PET content in 2023". Also, many other products: Fleece jackets are made out of bottles. That's up-cycling, afaik. And lots of packaging materials (bags, shampoo bottles, etc). If it is economical depends on many factors, and can be different in each country. Landfill may be cheap in the US, but extremely expensive in European countries, because there's no un-used land.

but yes, what can't be recycled is epoxy (also a plastic).

But nearly all plastic recycling companies in the Netherlands have gone bankrupt recently. Unfortunately it is usually best to just burn the plastic for energy.

For the case of PET bottles, recycling is possible if:

- products are made from a single sort of plastic with the intent of recycling - can be collected as a dedicated waste stream - are not contaminated in a way that is not easily cleaned - there are rules and regulations to offset the added costs

As all these conditions have to be met, one might as well use reusable bottles instead of recycling altogether, like we do with glass beer bottles. But then why were plastics used in the first place, as there is then hardly any advantage?

Can’t it be compressed back into a fuel?

Burning is a lot better than dumping it in a river, as happens in many places in Asia. It reliably gets rid of the plastic, produces energy (ideally offsetting fossil fuels that would otherwise have been burned), and regulations for exhaust filtration keep the toxins at bay.

Not producing plastic would be preferable, and sequestering it in a landfill is the second best option, but burning it is a great alternative where the first two don't work

Misleading. It depends on your jurisdiction, many are doing a great job recovering material.

It is a problem even with 100% recycling if we are talking about food.

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