One should pick the tasks with the best cost/benefit ratio first. It seems intuitive enough to me that the same amount of $ will go much, much further around the Ganges than in an effort to ban plastic straws in developed countries, or whatever else I see political capital being burnt on.
One problem is that what I'm saying could easily be framed as "white people telling brown people what to do", and then everyone would drop it like a hot potato because it smells like colonialism. So it's politically safer to stay in my lane and buy a MacBook pouch made from recycled PET bottles instead.
(What I agree on is that the developed world should not export its trash or otherwise sabotage foreign countries.)
>>I don't know why you say that like it's easy
Are they saying that like it's easy? How should it be said? Your tone is so defensive...
By focusing resources on waste management and international cooperation we would be focusing on 90% of the ocean plastics problem instead of directing our resources at well managed waste streams that do little environmental damage by comparison.
Being pragmatic is very different than being indifferent. At the end of the day a plastic bag in a landfill is a way better outcome than a plastic bag in a waterway, and also arguably better than spending 43-250x more energy mostly from fossil fuels producing paper/glass/aluminum instead.
When there are no perfect solutions, you must choose the least harmful.
And all of the human advancements in sanitation, food safety, and transportation energy afforded by plastics? You'd significantly increase CO2 output of transportation if every plastic item was replaced by something heavier. Stopping all plastic production would be very harmful.
As for people bringing reusable containers to the store, this was stopped because it's a health hazard.
> all of the human advancements in sanitation, food safety, and transportation energy afforded by plastics
The pollution negates the health benefits of sanitation and food safety though, especially in the places where they are dumped, which are in rural communities in developing countries, whose people are somehow expected to make a living out of it for themselves and for their children.
Besides, there are so many uses of plastic in food packaging that aren't even necessary to begin with, and which shouldn't exist. How much of single-use plastics are just bags of unhealthy junk food and candy wrappers and carbonated soda? Is it even necessary to have such a large economy based on unhealthy food sources?
Better: eliminate consumerism
Yeah, about that, North America ships garbage to China and to poor countries in Southeast Asia to be burned there, or to be dumped in a forest/farmland next to low-income rural communities.
> we should be helping developing nations to better manage their plastic waste so that it doesn’t end up in waterways
I don't know why you say that like it's easy, but in the first place, maybe plastics just shouldn't be forced upon developing nations as conditions of trade if we already know that they don't have the infrastructure to manage it, in the first place?
> The Yangtze and Ganges are releasing plastic into the ocean at a rate far greater than all of North America combined, and our response is to expend huge amounts of energy produced by fossil fuels trying to recycle our plastic instead of burying it in a landfill where it is unlikely to pose a major ecological threat.
I never understood this line of reasoning, to be honest. So you have a ton of problems, some bigger than others. Why does the fact that you have bigger problems in your backlog negate working on the smaller, quicker wins first? Also you keep talking about "North America" as if it's a single, sovereign, unified country that has no conflicting interests.
> Like many environmental initiatives I worry that we’re more concerned about making ourselves feel better than actually solving the problem.
Didn't we already make ourselves feel better by arguing ourselves into what is effectively indifference about the problem of pollution?