Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

hellcat_uk t1_j8rgxr9 wrote

Reply to comment by Soupmother in [OC] Plastic waste emitted to the ocean per country by sometiara1

Presumably they are paid for this recycling they're meant to be doing? Where's that money going? Not into the rivers with the water clearly.

11

Melmortu t1_j8rlw4l wrote

Doesn't work like that, these are plastics that are badly classified and dirty. Classifying and recycling them in developed countries is not economically viable, but with cheap labor from poor countries it is, so they buy them for nearly nothing, and they process them.

Thing is, most of it is not useful, so all of that unusable, unrecyclable plastic ends un in a poor country without the means to get rid of it. China used to do this until they banned the import of those plastics because the impact on people's health was more expensive to treat than the economic margin, and now it's done in SE Asia.

So, the blame is on developed countries for producing an incredible amount of unrecyclable plastics and shipping it there, not on poor people trying to make a living out of recycling it.

6

Breaker-of-circles t1_j8ruqgl wrote

Canada's more advanced tech can't recycle their own shit, then they pay peanuts to poor countries to take their trash so they can appear good in charts like this.

What a joke.

4

Tropink t1_j8u5jaw wrote

Less than 2% of waste is traded internationally, the blame is still on undeveloped countries that just use the ocean as a dump

2

Breaker-of-circles t1_j8ujbf5 wrote

Percentage vs raw numbers. Interesting argumentative decision given that the raw numbers and their visual representation in this graph is bare for all to see.

Edit: I assume this is your source for that 2%

https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

While the article is indeed well researched, it doesn't address where the plastics in the ocean were produced. It only talked about total plastic pollution, which is not what the discussion is about.

I mean if you look at one of the graphs there, Europe, Japan, and North America still ship more than 4M tonnes of plastic to Asian countries.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2022/10/Plastic-waste-trade-sankey-1536x1175.png

The 970k tonnes fits very well inside that 4M tonnes.

1

Tropink t1_j8u5iuc wrote

Less than 2% of waste is traded internationally, the blame is still on undeveloped countries that just use the ocean as a dump

0