Did you know that developed countries export thousands of tonnes of plastic waste to developing countries?
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2019/3/6/1570...
> The U.S. Census Bureau recently published complete 2018 export data for shipments of plastic waste (officially called “waste, paring and scrap”) generated in the U.S. and sent to other countries. As shown in Figure 1, 78% (0.83 million metric tonnes) of the 2018 U.S. plastic waste exports were sent to countries with waste “mismanagement rates” greater than 5%. That means about 157,000 large 20-ft (TEU) shipping containers (429 per day) of U.S. plastic waste were sent in 2018 to countries that are now known to be overwhelmed with plastic waste and major sources of plastic pollution to the ocean. The actual amount of U.S. plastic waste that ends in countries with poor waste management may be even higher than 78% since countries like Canada and South Korea may reexport U.S. plastic waste. The data also indicates that the U.S. continued to export about as much plastic waste to countries with poor waste management as we recycle domestically [1].
Whereas:
https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2018/08/01/epa-u-s-p...
> The EPA’s Facts and Figures Report states the U.S. in 2015 recycled 9.1 percent of the plastic generated, down from 9.5 percent during the previous year.
Then there's this:
The U.S. used to export waste to China. Until China decided to ban importing waste, leaving the U.S. waste disposal industries with a problem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK20t11He14
And finally I'll leave you with these:
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/uk-plastic-polluti...
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/06/14/china-plastics-b...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/18/uk-recyc...
https://www.plasticsforchange.org/blog/category/why-are-plas...
Anyway exporting, burning and landfills are not real solutions. The highly developed countries published some so called models for the purpose of blaming poor countries for those messes.
The pointing fingers kind of behaves like those are not good strategies to let everyone work together and fix things. But only to make someone feels better about himself and do nothing.
And spodek, to whom lv was replying, lives in the northeast USA, where plastic waste doesn't end up in rivers.
> Processing disposable plastic waste is a problem that can be avoided by... not using disposable plastics at all.
In the first world, it's a solved problem, so it's not a problem you need to avoid.