crimeo t1_j8y51xq wrote on February 17, 2023 at 7:59 PM

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

Pick a random country off the list. There's at least a 50% chance, eyeballing it, that their total plastic produced there is < 6% of the United States' plastic. And that's pretending they are themselves dumping all of theirs too, so actually way more than that, probably like 80+% chance the US is dumping more, when you account for a lot of these other countries also using landfills.

Lurkalope t1_j8yp7ql wrote on February 17, 2023 at 10:13 PM

The US certainly generates far more than its fair share of plastic waste, but you're calling it dumping as though we are forcing other countries to take it. I don't think it's ethical to send plastic waste to these countries when its known that it will be mismanaged, but these countries are also responsible for managing the waste they choose to import.

What this data primarily communicates is where waste management infrastructure and policy is probably lacking, rather than who is ultimately the most responsible for plastic waste in the oceans. The US is terrible when it comes to creating waste, but we also have more effective systems of disposal. My point being that the US isn't lower on the list when it comes to plastic mismanagement per capita because we ship it elsewhere. If that 6% didn't go to other countries it would go into landfills.

crimeo t1_j8yr5mf wrote on February 17, 2023 at 10:26 PM

I don't disagree both countries sending and receiving are to blame, but the original comment was about how plastic laws in the US are "idiotic" because of a perception of low US waste being dumped.

Yet the US waste that ends up being dumped is on the very high end, because even if a minority gets dumped, it produces so much overall than a minority still dwarfs other countries. So those laws are not, in fact, "idiotic".