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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

People keep saying this, but is there any evidence for it? I'm curious where this comes from.

At first estimate we could just Google images of polluted rivers in Asia and Africa and look at the logos on the garbage.

From my priors, I'd estimate that the plastics would almost all be from locally-consumed products, simply thrown into the river as is common and accepted in such places.

My sense is that a lot of educated, wealthy Westerners don't realize:

1. How many people are in Asia and Africa.

2. How little effort they put into keeping their local environment clean. People just don't get how callous same cultures are about the environment; it cannot be believed until it's been experienced since it's so far outside of the wealthy Westerner's experience. (Plus, to believe such would also create cognitive dissonance with social justice creeds which are victim classes as inherently morally pure.)

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China tightened up regulations on importing recycling waste last year and Western recycling was hit extremely hard: https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos...

> It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.

> In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.

> Globally, more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. In England, more than half a million more tons of plastics and other household garbage were burned last year. Australia’s recycling industry is facing a crisis as the country struggles to handle the 1.3 million-ton stockpile of recyclable waste it had previously shipped to China.

None of this tries to demonstrate that the plastic flowing out of Chinese rivers was originally from the West.

I wonder what makes glass more suitable

To hazard a guess, I would assume that the type of stuff stored in glass containers in the West tends to be stuff less “soiling” of the recyclable material, and the fact that people are probably more conditioned to rinse glass than plastic.

> People just don't get how callous same cultures are about the environment; it cannot be believed until it's been experienced since it's so far outside of the wealthy Westerner's experience

If Mad Men[0] is to be believed, there was plenty of littering in the US in the 1960s.[1] It took many public awareness campaigns by government and private industry, in a country far richer with nearly universal literacy, over multiple decades to make littering socially unacceptable. And I still see plenty of litter in the US today. Change takes time.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roREnVhd_og

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/4oie71/how_accurate...

There was littering, yes. But in 1959 America you generally wouldn't see:

-Mothers supervising their kids as they defecate on a city sidewalk, or in the garbage bin in a busy train station.

-Dead mules left rotting and bloated in the sun for days right beside busy streets, with drinking water flowing nearby.

-Restaurant owners throwing garbage out the front door of their establishment onto the street right in front of the restaurant.

You're relating what I said to your own experience, which is Mad Men-style "littering". Only once you actually go outside your bubble can you understand that humans can do so much worse - and billions do.

I think to find a Western example you'd have to go back to horse and buggy days at least, and possibly to before widespread plumbing (e.g. late 1800's London cholera epidemics, the Thames literally full of shit).

> Only once you actually go outside your bubble can you understand that humans can do so much worse

I'm well aware of that. I grew up in India. I'm just asking you to place this behavior in the context of the prosperity and levels of education in the places where it happens. America, for all its advantages in material and human development, did not develop an anti-littering culture until very recently.

I just asked this question elsewhere in the thread. It seems that a lot of people just blindly believe it because it sounds good. But as you say between Asia and Africa we have over half the world's population. They're pretty far back in industrialization and they're bound to pollute way worse per person (divided by wealth on some way I'm sure).

Frankly I'm sick of people using environmentalism as their soap box like this. It doesn't make anything better to ignore reality because they want to condescend to the US and Canada and Europe. It's actively making it worse.

Humans live of mimetism almost entirely (very little true innovation out of our lives). Historically, the trend-setters have been western countries. If western countries don't clean their own shit, others won't follow (note that I can't for sure argue the opposite implication unfortunately).

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