https://www.statista.com/statistics/1270819/ocean-plastic-po...
The U.S. isn't even in the top 10 producers of plastic waste in oceans (it's something like >30th on the list).
It's effectively 80+% from Asian countries.
Who is supposedly paying to come pick it up, put it on a boat, and so on, instead of just putting it into the landfill?
Like is there a federal program handing out money to the companies buying the recycling? Was there a secret government program sending money to Chinese recyclers?
And for instance, metal, cardboard and paper recycling actually work well. How come the may-may about plastic recycling being fake rolled those in?
> Some recyclables — notably, aluminum cans — continue to have a relatively high market value. But they are mixed with other materials that have little value and therefore require expensive sorting.
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/recycling-cost-benefit-a...
So, cities pay for recycling to be collected, and then after that pay some company to take it off their hands. They used to not pay much for the latter, sometimes even zero, if enough aluminum could be recovered. But now, they pay for it to be taken too.
These companies that take the recycling, try to make some profit from the money they are paid, and the materials. They also have to look like they are actually recycling. So they used to just spend some of the money (which they are paid by the city, and some from the pure aluminum they can separate) to ship the worthless stuff to China for "recycling" ... and what's left over is profit.
EDIT: better specific data:
> Boston then pays a private firm, Casella Waste Systems, to sort and sell the materials when there is a buyer, or otherwise dispose of them.
> The price that the city must pay Casella to accept these recyclables has been rising, partly because some 25% of the materials are contaminated. A five-year “residential recycling processing contract” that expired in 2019 called on the city to pay $70 per ton for that service;[18] a new contract signed in 2019 increased that fee to a minimum of $125 per ton and a maximum of $160 per ton—depending on market conditions.
But worth noting its firms in the poor countries buying the stuff as scrap to recycle, and tossing or burning the stuff they couldn't recycle.
They do still accept "clean" plastic, like from industrial manufacturing. Think custom molded part containers or similar.
And before you start cleaning your recycling before binning it, that automatically uses enough water and energy to defeat the point of recycling.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi are consistently the biggest offenders in plastic waste.
The United States should be the shining global role model we are so often told it is, and legislate to force better corporate behaviour around these issues.
At this point the consumer-blaming logic regarding single use plastic bottles is like "Well, we just make cigarettes, we can't help it if people smoke them and get sick."
Not good enough.
1. A 30c-$1 increase in the price of Coke relative to its current baseline will not break the bank.
2. Tens/hundreds of millions of slowly degrading plastic bottles in the ocean certainly do have an environmental impact.
More likely, a company setup by the family member of several U.S. politicians will receive funds from the U.S. government to aid in "transitioning" these economies to a post-plastics world. None of which will be effective and largely be like the Clinton Foundation in Haiti.
The reality is that reducing crude oil to gasoline production will remove the ability to produce plastics. As plastics become more expensive, different materials will be utilized.
Does it make it ok for them to throw plastic in oceans?
Given we have limited time and resources I believe he is implying that it's easier to reduce Indian waste by 1% than reduce American waste by 50%. So we should probably focus on former.