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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

In theory yes. In practical terms, it's cheaper to ship it to India so you don't have to store it in the expensive landfill with all the regulations and staff that have maternity leave and dental care, where the plastic can be piled into artificial mountains with basically no landfill design principles applied.

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This is not what happens though? At one point china accepted recycling waste, but not anymore, and trash has always been to landfills. The US has well run and regulated landfills with few problems.

Landfills are the third biggest source of methane in the US.

This is mostly food waste decomposing, which should ideally be diverted.

https://www.epa.gov/land-research/quantifying-methane-emissi...

Yes, it is what happens. The PRC refusing to buy trash did completely overhaul the market but Vietnam and India pick up the slack https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-pla... (that article is from before the PRC stopped buying garbage but it mentions those industries)

It's also important to remember that trash isn't just from your hands to the India landfill, there's also industrial waste from the factories that make all our products that gets dumped somewhere cheap near the factory. Even if we shipped no trash to India, our consumption results in garbage dumped there because our products are made there, or near there.

Trash goes to local landfills.

Recycling is what does this.

Hence why you should consider if its better to trash plastic, its probably thermodynamically efficient anyway

In even more practical terms, garbage is not shipped to other countries. That's not something that happens.

Some recycling is bought by other countries, but they buy it to use it, not to stack it into artificial mountains.

There have been several cases in which countries were paid to take plastic trash for "recycling" - and recycling became "let's just dump it somewhere":

https://www.unodc.org/unodc/frontpage/2024/March/explainer_-...

> Some recycling is bought by other countries, but they buy it to use it, not to stack it into artificial mountains.

Any source for this?

A lot of plastic waste exports destination are in South-East Asia [0]. In the EU, with all its modern infrastructure and capacities, only 41% of the plastic packaging waste is being recycled [1]. So which portion of the imported plastic waste can we assume will be recycled in Malaysia?

Documentaries [2] and [3] support the opposite thesis as yours, stating that imported plastic waste is imply dumped.

The OECD report on Monitoring trade in plastic waste and scrap [3] indicates that even the ban on hazardous waste (Basel Ban) exports is not having any effect.

  [0]: Share of global plastic waste imports, 2021 - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-imports?time=2021
  [1]:  41% of plastic packaging waste recycled in 2022  - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20241024-3
  [2]: Your plastic waste might be traded by criminals - https://youtu.be/tID-AChSg7o?t=246
  [3]: UK plastic for “recycling” dumped and burned in Turkey - BBC News - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw6KR2vj_bc
  [4]: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/support-materials/2024/04/monitoring-trade-in-plastic-waste-and-scrap_0c401097/Monitoring%20trade%20in%20plastic%20waste%20and%20scrap%20PH.pdf

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