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Comment by malwarebytess | Hacker News Reader

I've changed my mind on plastics. It's not really the plastics that are the problem. It's that nations without good garbage infrastructure are using them, and using them for single use objects. Most of the plastic pollution comes from Asia. The Philippines for example.

The best way to tackle plastic pollution is to properly dispose of it. Not even recycle, just collect it and stop dumping it into rivers.

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This is absolutely false. Rich nations do not know what to do with all the trash they produce. Australia had been shipping their trash to Indonesia, Malaysia and other SE Asian countries [1] for quite a long time, until just recently when Malaysia decided it was enough. Australia is not the only rich country guilty of this.

The diabolical thing is that Australians believed their waste was being handled correctly, e.g not being shipped to poor nations so their rivers and streets could flood with our trash.

The fact remains that plastic exasperates the “disposable” mindset and it produces mindbending amounts of waste every year. Its a logistical and environmental nightmare

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/why-australia-sends-its-wa...

> Rich nations do not know what to do with all the trash they produce.

I don't think this generalisation is correct. PG [0] digged up some numbers in a twitter thread:

"The US, Canada, and all of Europe combined account for .87% of plastic emissions. The Philippines accounts for 36%.

The reason the Philippines emits so much is not that it's emitting waste shipped from the US, Canada, and Europe. Even if every kilogram of plastic waste shipped by the US to the Philippines ended up in the sea, it would account for less than 1% of the Philippines' emissions."

[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1389150186283413505

Even in a European Capital trash is routinely found on the floor, on the streets. People throw it on purpose or by mistake, or the wind blows it away. Eventually it is forgotten, blown to forests to break down, or carried to waterways until it reaches rivers. Let's not pretend that plastic isn't everywhere in the west too. We need to stop single use plastics and unnecessary packaging yesterday.

We need to stop fooling ourselves that plastic is recyclable and is not single use. Dump it in garbage dumps.

Burn it for energy and electricity like they do in some countries. Better that than leaving it to never decompose in some landfill.

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