China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam dump more plastics into the ocean than all other countries combined. That's because these countries have large numbers of people in poverty or under economic or political stress, who typically are far more concerned with the immediate needs of survival than with hypothetical environmental concerns.
What makes it worse is that the garbage doesn't all come from those countries... a good part of it comes from industrialized western nations because those nations find it cheap to make their trash someone else's problem.
The reason this isn't discussed is that fixing the issue would require the wealthy western nations to intervene economically in those places to change the situation, something which would be resisted by the governments who find advantage in having a population that's not educated and remains under stress.
On top of that, climate change is happening.. those countries and people are going to be under more stress soon, not less... what will happen if, one day, those people have a choice between surviving another year by dumping toxins into the environment that will sterilize the oceans or dying?
That's because these countries have large numbers...
Its probably going to be a surprise to you then to learn that Kigali, Rwanda is absolutely spotless. Somehow they manage to come together every month to clean the city and have banned plastic
I know it makes 'sense' that poor people don't care about the environment, but you really should include all the data in your hypothesis.
> Its probably going to be a surprise to you then to learn that Kigali, Rwanda is absolutely spotless.
GP enumerated the countries they were talking about, they didn’t imply all countries with poverty are to blame. It’s well documented that those countries are the source of a large portion of ocean plastic and that US and other western countries ship their recycling and garbage to those countries.
1. refuse it (China did)
2. process it (pyrolysis → diesel ?)
3. clean it and resell it (clothing, furniture)
4. do nothing, let it wash into their environment. Shame.
As I showed, the desperately poor folk of Rwanda managed to get their government to make a plan. Their is no reason why hundreds of millions of these less-poor folk can't do it.
I suggest we stop handing out free-passes for poor behaviour.
Rwanda doesn't have the same problem with poverty and garbage as the countries I listed, and it's tiny compared to them. Specifically, the issue contributing to pollution here is that the countries in question have:
* Lots of people in poverty, and an upper class that are not
* Industries offshored from richer nations
* Significant amounts of trash being produced locally or taken in from other countries (usually via barge or sea traffic)
* Lax environmental enforcement that either doesn't restrict or is overwhelmed by the number of people polluting who are just trying to survive
It's not about having a plan... it's more about being able live another day. The problem isn't that they want to be poor, it's that their governments keep them that way and don't care about the environment or their welfare as long as their power is maintained.
The best option for a lot of the poor is picking through garbage from richer people, either from other countries or their own. There are so many people in the Philippines who literally eat food made from the remains of other people's meals they find in the garbage and re-use that it has a name - Pagpag. If you're poor enough to eat that way, disposing of other people's garbage in an environmentally sound way is pretty far down the priority list.
The best solution apart from common sense measures and laws controlling what waste can be exported and what has to happen to it is probably to buy plastic bottles from those poor people... they get money and live better, we get plastic sorted into types for recycling processes.
Per capita, people in developed countries are polluting far more. Comparing the total waste of Canada or US to India is similiar to saying CEO deserves more money because he works much harder than hundreds of people under them.
India has 1.34 billion people while US has almost 4x less and Canada 36x less.
An average American produce enough plastic for 10 Indians. Poor countries than india have even less per capita wastage.
Apples and oranges!
It’s a heck of a lot easier to clean up plastic waste when you aren’t having literally millions of tons[0] of it shipped to you from the United States alone.
The issue isn’t a few folks aren’t picking up trash along the river/beach, it’s many orders of magnitude difference in scale.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/21/ch...
Poverty means immediacy, and given global markets also struggle heavily with longer-term thinking no one sane would fault those in precarious positions for not giving a shit.
A place riddled with plastic garbage certainly looks worse than one that gathers and burns theirs, but since even power plant incineration with scrubbers etc is inefficient and hardly good for the environment... an actual landfill would be a lot better.
But it does make me wonder why so much Asian plastic ends up in the ocean. Why don't they burn it?
A quick google search says oil consumption in 2015 was 9.3x10^7 barrels and a barrel weighs 3x10^2 pounds so if we used 100% of our 2015 oil consumption to make plastic which comes out about three orders of magnitude short. Less than 5% of oil production is used for plastic, more than making up for any increase in tonnage from other ingredients (mostly nitrogen and/or oxygen) in the plastic.
So yeah, there's something in that statistic that got lost in translation.
That piece of the graph showing that 22 billion tons is discarded into the environment almost seems unbelievably high. There must be some caveat to that figure right?