The reason governments waste time on recycling, or fail to authorize landfills, or orchestrate the export of trash to other countries is because environmentalists exist and are very active. They're especially powerful in rich countries – in fact, environmentalism seems to be a function of affluence. Affluence looks like a necessary but not sufficient condition, loosely speaking.

Your information is incorrect. No countries are exporting junk, rather some countries buy recycling in order to profitably use it.

And those developed countries were willing to sell it.

And yes those developed countries do in fact have landfills and they use them. there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.

> there are no countries that export pure trash to be landfilled in a third world country.

Of course they do.

Even Toronto was exporting 100 truckloads of trash to Michigan for years until recently.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2018/02/19/c...

Michigan might be cold but it's not a 3rd world country.

Michigan, perhaps you might have noticed, borders Canada. No one is shipping trash long distance.

For a long time it was because China was buying it.

Here the landfill has recycling sorting on site and puts glass in the landfill because no one will pay what it costs to ship it.