Asia does not just mean « China ». Canada has been sending its plastic to the Philippines, where it is constantly mismanaged and ends up in the ocean (edit: not helped by the fact that Canada’s plastic was full of household garbage making it impossible to recycle properly anyway, see [1]) . Is it Philippines fault for mismanaging ? Sure, but it has been public for a long time and Canada kept sending plastic over there knowing full well what would happen with it. But it doesn’t matter because no one will blame plastic coming from Asia’s river on Canada.

Same story applies to India’s ship dismantling industry, where tons of damaging materials ends up in the ocean. Do we stop sending our ships there ? Of course not, because it doesn’t matter no one will blame Carnival for that.

We are not paying for recycling we are paying for environment damage laundering, so that at home we can display impressive lies such as « 98% of Canadian plastic is recycled » or whatever.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dis...