And I know how things work in The Philippines, I've lived there for some years, I've driven past the the shanty villages built on landfills and the storm drains filled with garbage. I know about the corruption. And I'm not saying there's no single piece of plastic pollute the ocean from Asia that came from western waste exports, so that kind of angle would be a strawman.

I'm questioning the extraordinary apologetics for the worst polluters when it comes to this issue. The evidence doesn't seem to stack up that the majority or even a significant part of the problem is the western waste export trade.

As it stands, if countries in Asia act the way we do, they would offload garbage to those even less fortunate. Then we will be pointing fingers at Somalia and wondering how come there is plastic in the ocean still. How come tribal warlords are not dealing with it?

We, the west, have created this problem, and we refuse to address it. Companies that produce 80% of the worlds plastic are headquartered here, listed on our stock exhanges, and financed here. We could resolve this with a stroke of a pen, if we had the balls to take action instead of playing politics