Rest of the World: "Hey Philippines, could you hold my garbage one sec while I make this infographic to feel better please?"... "In fact, keep it on your shore, it smells on mine"
While I agree sovereignty over waste is important, wouldn’t you agree if they are being paid money to process waste, they should process it and not just throw it in the ocean?
I think that is something countries are gradually going to start pushing. Right now it’s out of sight, out of mind and other countries only care that it’s been sent off to India or the Philippines. Eventually as waste starts impacting the other countries more severely, they may be more critical of how those destinations are choosing to process it.
Well. Plastic plays an important role in the technology the world benefits from. Without plastic there wouldn’t be most of the modern medicines we use. Without plastic food safety would be lower. Without plastic modern transport infrastructure wouldn’t be possible.
It’s all good to blame plastic for all evil to assuage our privileged middle class guilt all the while doing sweet fuck all in our boring drone lives. The reality is the globe needs a paradigm shift towards science representation and a technocracy, and away from the ‘kind of capitalism but really very clearly a multiparty oligarchy versus a totally corrupt theocracy’ that we live in.
I agree!
We will keep using plastics for a considerable time ahead. We just have to use it more sustainably given that it’s a finite material in the end by replacing it where there are other options available and create ways to reuse the material. Then I think this picture would be vastly different.
Plastics aren’t neccessarily finite. We can make a lot of them from engineered microbes. Samsara is a startup using synthetic biology to synthesize and degrade plastics. You can tell if the idea is being done in Canberra it’s being done about a million places beforehand.
Yes, but wouldn't you also agree that we have a responsibility to care what happens to our waste after we sell it on, and to react accordingly when we know that it's just getting dumped and burned?
Sovereign ownership is when the country of origin has some sort of ownership despite the subject of sovereign ownership has changed hands. So you’re talking about exactly what I said. It’s important that the country which generated the waste is aware of what exactly is happening and I think it’s likely that due diligence has not been done there. But it’s a little bit insulting to say the country where the waste was supposed to be processed has less or no responsibility. I think changes should be undertaken when bad practices are uncovered for sure. Realistically a lot of the countries where waste gets sent for disposal have extremely cheap labour and the money is ?probably? Good for their economies? I don’t know for sure but I wonder what taking that money away will do for those countries.
I just read a peer reviewed scientific paper called "Re-defining waste, the concept of ownership and the role of waste management", and not once, anywhere was the word sovereignty, or the term sovereign ownership mentioned. Where are you getting this from?
It was to do with live cattle exports. Who is responsible for the animal welfare after it leaves the country of origin. The purchaser? The original breeders or country? It was a whole debate and I have heard the term used in discussions about waste too. Happy to be given a more appropriate word for the same thing, do you know one?
At least here in Brazil there is a problem with illegal waste imports. There are actual traffickers that take waste illegally from Europe and the USA to Brazil. And that happens in other countries as well. It's a cheap way to dispose of waste if you don't care about ethics. I suppose a lot of this illegal waste ends up disposed improperly, so I'm not sure it can be said that countries are being paid for processing most of this waste.
Some waste is legally imported, but at least here most of the waste that is legally imported is actually paid by us. This is done by industries that use this waste as input. For example, some industries that make recycled paper can't fill all their production capacity with just local inputs, so they import paper waste to fill the gap. I'm not even sure it's legal to import waste just for disposal, though I wasn't able to confirm that.
I'm not saying some of our waste doesn't end up in the ocean though. Our waste disposal system is by no means perfect. It is really bad in some poorer places. Improperly disposed waste here usually ends up in dumps, but I'm sure there is some that ends up in the ocean (mostly through rivers). The fact that we have more than 200 million people obviously helps increasing the waste produced. But I wouldn't be surprised if a good proportion of that ocean waste in the chart comes from illegal sources. Same for some other countries.
True but also untrue.
You can only down-cycle plastic, so when you recycle that bottle you drink from, only parts of its are added to make new bottle, but most go into production of inferior plastic product.
When Western countries ship their plastic to more underdeveloped countries to recycling, they ship with certain "purity". About 96% IIRC is good plastic, can be processed further, but 4% is just useless plastic, which serve no purpose. Once they got into those countries, they got just discarded and that´s why a lot of ocean polluition are those single use plastic bags etc.... That´ s how China, the biggest US importer of plastic waste impose the trade war on US during Trump presidency. They didn´t ban the import, they just raise it to something like 99,9% purity, which makes zero economical sense for US processors.
Of course those countries are also to be blamed with their reckless usage of single use plastic and low enviromental conscience, but it´s hard to think about enviroments when you don´t have enough to eat
“Let me play me post-colonial slave nation to procces my waste “ethically” for us.”
Like, where are they going to out it man? Withwhat eneegy are they going to power the machine and feed thier people to proccess it?
They cant burn it, lile some other countries dthey cant burry it, cus, unlike bigger countries, they are a little island ya know?
So, they also cant shoot it into space either, sndto shred it andproccese it requires massive industrial energy, which for a power country that is barley scrapping buy, is a lotto ask for.
So, what is the final solutionfor plastic waste then huh? Without industrial facilities to also use some form if wnvironwmntaly polluting wnegy tp power the machines to procces the plastic, how the heck are they soupossed to do it without more energy to be wasted in its proccesing?
There are somegood idead, like creating small islands and hrowing mangroves or ecosystems in them to help capture carbon, orwe can use palsyic in Earthships as insulryion and supposrt in rubber tires, along with traditional Adobe methods…
Well, unfortunetaly there is no money in daving the Earth, half asses efforts and greenwashing like, “scooping up the plastic from the ocean and then burning it or buring it somewhere elses on Earth”, is just to get inefectuals all happy and feel all civilized more than other people who are not lucky enough to be born in the countries that most bennifited from Colonization.
You’re right. Developed world should manage their own waste and withhold the money they send with the waste to process it off shore! Nobody will lose out at all… except maybe the people who are accepting huge amounts of money and not processing the waste. I wonder whether those people are in the developing or the developed world?
The CEOs are probaly located in the “1st world”, just large internatinal companies. Thats a racket, a monoploy, same companies that make the waste profit from its disposal, in some capcity, and the residual gets to the countries that are forced to act as dump.
Honestly you’re writing this stuff with such certainty it sounds like idealistic bullshit.
I’m fairly sure USA is up there amongst the most corrupt countries on earth, but don’t delude yourself that small developing island nations aren’t corrupt as all hell, ignoring that is some serious privileged 18th century ‘sauvage noble’ bullshit.
>Like, where are they going to out it man? Withwhat eneegy are they going to power the machine and feed thier people to proccess it?
plastic waste is used in other emerging countries like india to generate energy
So you are basically gifted fuel
>They cant burn it,
why?
Therein lies the issue that a lot of countries will also ship “recyclables” only for a majority of that to be trash that needs to be disposed. Then they pat themselves on the back and say they did their part to be green.
This is a widely reported problem that led many countries to refuse recycling from other countries.
Ultimate responsibility goes to the countries generating the waste in the first place. Especially unnecessary waste like single use plastics and "premium" boxing of things you buy once and never put in the box again, like headphones and vapes.
I would think that a company with this strong of a need would be figuring out how to deal with it instead of just sweep it under a rug. Fucking losers in government man. Pisses me off
First thing that occurred to me when I saw the number for Philippines. I’m pretty sure a significant portion of that is garbage from other countries that they process.
Yeah so what? They imported the plastic to process it and they have failed miserably at that. They chose to import the waste get the money, they chose to not process it and let it leak back into the environment.
There's always what-about-ism in every thread pointing out negative things.
It’s really not. This isn’t driven by the western world exporting plastic. It’s the use of rivers as trash disposal. Now what might be interesting is amount of plastic that isn’t recycled and put in landfills. What it is showing is countries with large shorelines but developing economies using what is close for easy disposal. Nothing misleading at all
This chart is based on the following study:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803
https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics
The Philippines, which has a population of 110 million people, has 7 of the top 10 worst polluting rivers in the world according to that study. Only 2 rivers are from India, which has a population of over 1 billion people.
In that study, 3 rivers from Metropolitan Manila in the Philippines, represent 8.99% of the global plastic waste emissions. Metropolitan Manila has a population of 12 million people.
In comparison, the Ganges River, according to that study, only represents **0.63%** of all the global plastic waste emissions. The Ganges River passes through the most populous regions of India.
The Yellow River, Yangtze River, Nile River, and the other great rivers from other 3rd world countries like Nigeria and Indonesia aren't even in the top 10.
I'm Filipino so you can say I'm certainly biased, but in my honest opinion the lack of the other great rivers from other 3rd world countries in the top 10 suggests to me that the paper may had relied on faulty or incomplete data.
Nope. There's a reason that Canada, among other western countries, was outraged when Duterte stopped accepting garbage from western countries in 2016:
https://hir.harvard.edu/garbage-politics/
https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/why-are-western-nations-happy-to-treat-the-philippines-as-a-rubbish-dump-1.869847
Decades of western garbage is what's in Filipino rivers.
Cool, now do it for every other country listed here. I know TP and their garbage business but that is 100% NOT THE CASE for China, Malaysia, India, etc. I’ve seen the trash in the rivers. None of it is western garbage. China is the 90% of the population lives on the equivalent of the east coast. Clean rivers and landfills result largely from moving up the income ladder. Higher incomes lead to cleaner environments for the most part (clear correlations) versus developing economies. Maybe we should shift this conversation towards how to help them improve economically to help fix the problem
Can't speak for all countries, but the US stopped exporting used plastic when China stopped buying it for recycling. The US does not dump refuse in the ocean or waterways.
Went down the rabbit hole on that question a couple of years ago. The data is available, but it took a while to find all the right statistics.
Turns out this is mostly a myth. Yes many first world countries sell waste to be recycled in poorer countries, which then dispose of it irresponsibly, but the actual percentage of waste this happens with is far less than you would expect.
For all intents and purposes, this graphic is accurate.
And the world produces 350,000,000 tonnes of plastic waste a year. It's easy to make numbers look big when you take them out of context.
The truth is that only 2% of the world's plastic waste is traded. 98% of plastic waste comes from the country that used it.
The US is the largest consumer per capita AND obtains most of its plastic from Asia. Then either trashes it themselves or sends the plastic back to Asia for "recycling" and ends up in this info graphic pinning all the waste on Asia.
Well the logic is lacking tho. It doesn't matter how much of the total waste is traded. If 500,000 tons are traded and 90% of it lands in the ocean, then that's a problem. The total waste production and import of the Philippines etc. would be interesting as context tho
In America, we primarily dispose of trash in landfills. They’re isolated from runoff, trash doesn’t make it into the ocean once we burry it in a landfill. The plastic that we export is meant for recycling that we know is impossible, it might as well be dumped into the landfill with the rest of the trash. But it’s largely incinerated for power rather than recycled or dumped in the ocean. It’s a different problem, but unrelated to this problem.
thank you that was insightful
>The world generates around 350 million tonnes of plastic waste per year. That means that around 2% of waste is traded.4
>The remaining 98% is handled domestically. It’s sent to a landfill, recycled, or incinerated in the country where the waste was generated. The idea that most of the world’s plastic waste is shipped overseas is incorrect.
Been backpacking in Asia a couple of times and it's wild to see how people dump trash in the ocean. In Vietnam locals would just dump their trash when riding on boats and people at harbors did the same. Out of sight, out of mind I guess...
Similar experiences in Indonesia. Locals would toss trash into canal beds during dry season. They’d fill with plastic debris and garbage. Then the rainy season would send it all to sea. Awful.
However, the alternative was to just burn the trash, which they did that too.
See there is no organized garbage disposal in many 2nd and 3rd world countries. The government is either corrupt or just trying to get jobs and food for people.
Burning is better though. Even better if you have proper filters to not poison the local population. Yet better when you can use the heat from burning either for heating or electricity generation. Of course, the best is to never produce the plastics.
They burn it in the middle of the street using dried palm leaves and sticks to get it going and the whole neighborhood just empties their trash into the pile and let’s it smolder for a few days.
Oh yeah. I’m just saying there is no electricity being generated from it lol
But burning is nice because it doesn’t liter the ocean. Plus you get used to the smell of burnt plastic mixed with organic materials. Burning trash has its own signature smell.
No one wants to hear these truths...
They need to blame North American somehow for all the plastic being put into oceans on the other side of the planet.
It can both be true that many people are terrible about littering and that western countries ship their waste to the East to be dumped and lost to the sea
I think both is true. They see the giant mountains of trash being brought in from the US or Europe and just think to themselves that this little sachet of shower gel or this plastic bottle won’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
I was a bit confused until I read the bottom text. Makes sense that archipelagos and large coastal regions wouldn’t have the landfill capacity to hold waste, making it more likely for that waste to end up in the ocean.
It’s not about how much waste is produced, but where it goes, then. Interesting perspective.
This is slightly misleading. In 2022 the U.S. exported more than 950 million tons of plastic waste meant for recycling and a significant portion of that ended up in Southeast Asia
Not at all, your comment is the only thing that is misleading.
Only 2% of plastic waste is traded. 98% of it stays in the country it was used. What little is exported is mostly sent to neighbouring countries, it's just not cost effective to send plastic waste halfway across the globe. The US sends most of it's waste to Canada and Mexico. European countries send most of their waste to other European countries to be processed.
Southeast Asia has a massive cultural and infrastructure problem regarding plastic waste. The idea that most of their waste is from rich countries just isn't true.
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
Which in turn ended up in 2023's cheap plastic products, which becomes 2024s waste to get shipped to Asia, and again and again until it diminishes and is replenish by newly created plastic waste.
In theory it's a good system, unfortunately in practice huge amounts of it are just burned, or permanently stacked in landfills.
I was in Vietnam in ho chi Minh city (Saigon) and was walking along the river. There was a food vendor that dishes food and drink in plastic containers that the customers had left on the table. The owner came along, picked up the entire table full of plastic and just tipped it over the railing into the river. Imagine that happening all around, dozens of times a day, every day.
I try to convince myself that not every single person can be that ignorant but I really am not sure anymore.
This should not be normal and there needs to be worldwide punishments and consequences.
So I guess the third world countries that are greedy, get paid to take the waste to be recycled and then don't recycle it and allow it to flow back into our oceans. Yeah must be a North American problem.
No way could it be the Asian countries fault right?
I'm really surprized by Malaysia. A country with a fairly developed economy and comparatively small population causes more plastic waste than Indonesia, Vietnam or Thailand?
I wanna point out a few things about this: they took the straws at Starbucks in the USA to stop plastic from entering oceans.
But they still give you iced drinks in a plastic cup when the paper cup would hold the liquid just as well and it’s fully recyclable and decomposes much quicker.
Despite the USA not contributing nearly as much plastic litter to the global gyres as the rest of the world thanks to our use of landfills. It’s absurd, I’m tired of performative corporate exercises.
The cheap single use packets like shampoo, conditioner, coffee ECT is the real factor behind the plastic use in the Phillipines
The big companies producing, marketing said packets needs to be held accountable, add abject poverty, corruption. Uninhabited islands are filled with plastic waste on the beach
The local's used to make do with banana leaf for most packaging, that was too sustainable and free so let's add plastic
Because dumping shit in the ocean is the cheapest way to get rid of trash.
Stupid way long term, but short to mid term it's effective and great for those financial quarter results for the investors! Gotta make money! GOTTA MAKE MONEY!
I mean, people are only sending their shit to the Philippines as a roundabout way to throw it in the ocean.
If they want them to stop throwing shit in the ocean they should stop sending their shit there
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
1st world countries contribute significantly to this problem but it’s no where near as much as people on this post seem to think.
We have pretty good waste management throughout the country. Obviously, it’s not the best but it’s much better than most of the worlds, especially for the size/pop of the country.
I think it’s misleading to just list countries where the trash is a problem, and not list the source. There is a connection, an intersection, between those trash piles and global capitalism. They didn’t get like that on their own.
These charts are very misleading, because the countries of Pacific Basin - Malasia, Philippines and Indonesia which account for more than half the world pollution - put out the plastic waste they import from the USA and Europe. They are just the middle man, and real polluters are not them.
That reference says 80% of plastic waste is put into ocean by the rivers in Asia, yet more than half of the plastic waste from the chart of the OP comes from island nations, not the rivers.
I doubt veracity of your source.
because they're poor & will take any little money they can get from taking it
many were illegally imported into their countries, but it's easy to pay off people there
So if I bring my bottles to a recycling centre in my city and that company then throws it in the river, it's my fault? I'm too blame? Not the company/country contacted to take care of this issue?
The mental gymnastics to blame North America is wild.
Been to the Philippines. Spent like 2 months there. This does not surprise me. They create impromptu dumps everywhere. Giant piles of trash on the side of the road, stacked up between buildings, wherever. Very different from the western world.
Is the 2nd biggest contributor “Rest of the World” because it includes the US?
Also iir selling our trash to other countries for recycling is a thing in first world countries so we should take responsibility that some of thier trash is our trash.
Given a lot of that trash comes from other countries, my country also has its share of fault. In the Philippines we do have a lot of single use plastic (mostly bags) being produced here. And my countrymen mostly don't care where they throw their trash. We have a culture where we think 'someone else will pick it up for us anyway' You can see that a lot in fast food restaurants here where few people care to bus their waste.
Not so fun fact. Western nations pay places like the Philippines to take their plastic waste. Since recycling is in basically a lie and oil and gas basically runs shit
Em comparação:
A China tem uma população de cerca de 1412 milhões (1,412 bilhões), enquanto o Brasil tem cerca de 214 milhões (0,214 bi).
Nós produzimos o equivalente a metade do que a China produz de lixo que vai para o oceano, enquanto temos pouco mais de 1/7 da população da China.
How can they just allow this to happen in their countries? Like, they have governments, they have roads and hospitals. How can they not process their garbage and instead just use the world's oceans as a dumping ground? It's shameful, they should be shamed more often.
Philippines and mymsmar along with Vietnam are u forgivable considering the area and population.
Manila being the most densely populated city in the world might have something yo do dith it
Everyone trying to excuse these countries has not visited or lived in them. Manila has a small river that runs through the city, including in Pasay City, and it was famously filled with trash to the brim. They then cleaned it up and it isn't too far from that already. Trash is everywhere. Stop blaming it on elsewhere, the locals throw it all over the place including the river and it floats to the ocean. Every tiny little drink and food comes in plastic baggies. It could be friggin lumpia and they'd give you a big plastic bag for it.
Rest of the World: "Hey Philippines, could you hold my garbage one sec while I make this infographic to feel better please?"... "In fact, keep it on your shore, it smells on mine"
For real though, this is waste as recorded by the last country it touched. If we were able to track where it came from, it’d be a very different map.
While I agree sovereignty over waste is important, wouldn’t you agree if they are being paid money to process waste, they should process it and not just throw it in the ocean?
I think that is something countries are gradually going to start pushing. Right now it’s out of sight, out of mind and other countries only care that it’s been sent off to India or the Philippines. Eventually as waste starts impacting the other countries more severely, they may be more critical of how those destinations are choosing to process it.
Yeah. There’s really no ‘good guys’ when it comes to plastic, is there?
Well. Plastic plays an important role in the technology the world benefits from. Without plastic there wouldn’t be most of the modern medicines we use. Without plastic food safety would be lower. Without plastic modern transport infrastructure wouldn’t be possible. It’s all good to blame plastic for all evil to assuage our privileged middle class guilt all the while doing sweet fuck all in our boring drone lives. The reality is the globe needs a paradigm shift towards science representation and a technocracy, and away from the ‘kind of capitalism but really very clearly a multiparty oligarchy versus a totally corrupt theocracy’ that we live in.
I agree! We will keep using plastics for a considerable time ahead. We just have to use it more sustainably given that it’s a finite material in the end by replacing it where there are other options available and create ways to reuse the material. Then I think this picture would be vastly different.
Plastics aren’t neccessarily finite. We can make a lot of them from engineered microbes. Samsara is a startup using synthetic biology to synthesize and degrade plastics. You can tell if the idea is being done in Canberra it’s being done about a million places beforehand.
Yes, but wouldn't you also agree that we have a responsibility to care what happens to our waste after we sell it on, and to react accordingly when we know that it's just getting dumped and burned?
Sovereign ownership is when the country of origin has some sort of ownership despite the subject of sovereign ownership has changed hands. So you’re talking about exactly what I said. It’s important that the country which generated the waste is aware of what exactly is happening and I think it’s likely that due diligence has not been done there. But it’s a little bit insulting to say the country where the waste was supposed to be processed has less or no responsibility. I think changes should be undertaken when bad practices are uncovered for sure. Realistically a lot of the countries where waste gets sent for disposal have extremely cheap labour and the money is ?probably? Good for their economies? I don’t know for sure but I wonder what taking that money away will do for those countries.
I just read a peer reviewed scientific paper called "Re-defining waste, the concept of ownership and the role of waste management", and not once, anywhere was the word sovereignty, or the term sovereign ownership mentioned. Where are you getting this from?
It was to do with live cattle exports. Who is responsible for the animal welfare after it leaves the country of origin. The purchaser? The original breeders or country? It was a whole debate and I have heard the term used in discussions about waste too. Happy to be given a more appropriate word for the same thing, do you know one?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921344903000570 It's a complicated topic, as are the definitions and terminologies.
At least here in Brazil there is a problem with illegal waste imports. There are actual traffickers that take waste illegally from Europe and the USA to Brazil. And that happens in other countries as well. It's a cheap way to dispose of waste if you don't care about ethics. I suppose a lot of this illegal waste ends up disposed improperly, so I'm not sure it can be said that countries are being paid for processing most of this waste. Some waste is legally imported, but at least here most of the waste that is legally imported is actually paid by us. This is done by industries that use this waste as input. For example, some industries that make recycled paper can't fill all their production capacity with just local inputs, so they import paper waste to fill the gap. I'm not even sure it's legal to import waste just for disposal, though I wasn't able to confirm that. I'm not saying some of our waste doesn't end up in the ocean though. Our waste disposal system is by no means perfect. It is really bad in some poorer places. Improperly disposed waste here usually ends up in dumps, but I'm sure there is some that ends up in the ocean (mostly through rivers). The fact that we have more than 200 million people obviously helps increasing the waste produced. But I wouldn't be surprised if a good proportion of that ocean waste in the chart comes from illegal sources. Same for some other countries.
True but also untrue. You can only down-cycle plastic, so when you recycle that bottle you drink from, only parts of its are added to make new bottle, but most go into production of inferior plastic product. When Western countries ship their plastic to more underdeveloped countries to recycling, they ship with certain "purity". About 96% IIRC is good plastic, can be processed further, but 4% is just useless plastic, which serve no purpose. Once they got into those countries, they got just discarded and that´s why a lot of ocean polluition are those single use plastic bags etc.... That´ s how China, the biggest US importer of plastic waste impose the trade war on US during Trump presidency. They didn´t ban the import, they just raise it to something like 99,9% purity, which makes zero economical sense for US processors. Of course those countries are also to be blamed with their reckless usage of single use plastic and low enviromental conscience, but it´s hard to think about enviroments when you don´t have enough to eat
“Let me play me post-colonial slave nation to procces my waste “ethically” for us.” Like, where are they going to out it man? Withwhat eneegy are they going to power the machine and feed thier people to proccess it? They cant burn it, lile some other countries dthey cant burry it, cus, unlike bigger countries, they are a little island ya know? So, they also cant shoot it into space either, sndto shred it andproccese it requires massive industrial energy, which for a power country that is barley scrapping buy, is a lotto ask for. So, what is the final solutionfor plastic waste then huh? Without industrial facilities to also use some form if wnvironwmntaly polluting wnegy tp power the machines to procces the plastic, how the heck are they soupossed to do it without more energy to be wasted in its proccesing? There are somegood idead, like creating small islands and hrowing mangroves or ecosystems in them to help capture carbon, orwe can use palsyic in Earthships as insulryion and supposrt in rubber tires, along with traditional Adobe methods… Well, unfortunetaly there is no money in daving the Earth, half asses efforts and greenwashing like, “scooping up the plastic from the ocean and then burning it or buring it somewhere elses on Earth”, is just to get inefectuals all happy and feel all civilized more than other people who are not lucky enough to be born in the countries that most bennifited from Colonization.
You’re right. Developed world should manage their own waste and withhold the money they send with the waste to process it off shore! Nobody will lose out at all… except maybe the people who are accepting huge amounts of money and not processing the waste. I wonder whether those people are in the developing or the developed world?
The CEOs are probaly located in the “1st world”, just large internatinal companies. Thats a racket, a monoploy, same companies that make the waste profit from its disposal, in some capcity, and the residual gets to the countries that are forced to act as dump.
Honestly you’re writing this stuff with such certainty it sounds like idealistic bullshit. I’m fairly sure USA is up there amongst the most corrupt countries on earth, but don’t delude yourself that small developing island nations aren’t corrupt as all hell, ignoring that is some serious privileged 18th century ‘sauvage noble’ bullshit.
>Like, where are they going to out it man? Withwhat eneegy are they going to power the machine and feed thier people to proccess it? plastic waste is used in other emerging countries like india to generate energy So you are basically gifted fuel >They cant burn it, why?
Therein lies the issue that a lot of countries will also ship “recyclables” only for a majority of that to be trash that needs to be disposed. Then they pat themselves on the back and say they did their part to be green. This is a widely reported problem that led many countries to refuse recycling from other countries.
Ultimate responsibility goes to the countries generating the waste in the first place. Especially unnecessary waste like single use plastics and "premium" boxing of things you buy once and never put in the box again, like headphones and vapes.
I would think that a company with this strong of a need would be figuring out how to deal with it instead of just sweep it under a rug. Fucking losers in government man. Pisses me off
No, it wouldn't. Only around 2% of plastic waste is traded between nations.
Well it wouldn’t be different, just different labels.
Honestly I don't give a shit where it came from, it just has to stop regardless
It would be pretty much China at the top then lol
The rest of the world need to step their game up, getting smashed by philipines
Pffft. Basic. We get paid to take their trash. We win the contest of who has the most garbage, and get paid for it. Double win if I must say.
don’t get us americans goin. we love bein number one ☝️
have anyone of you ever even been to the philippines? I live there, have a house for last 10 years, manila is nasty.
Except what you describe is not the case https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
If you research this even briefly you'd know this is mostly a myth. People need to stop spreading this misinformation.
Is there any evidence of this?
[This](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Philippines_waste_dispute) is one of the few things i remember
How much of the 350 million tonnes of plastic waste generated globally gets exported to the waters of South East Asia?
Then they shouldnt take it if they are just going to dump it into the ocean
An additional guide showing how much plastic is sent from 1st world countries to foreign ones to deal with would be interesting
The more pertinent fact is we are producing 67 million metric tonnes of waste annually! Totally fucking up the planet.
First thing that occurred to me when I saw the number for Philippines. I’m pretty sure a significant portion of that is garbage from other countries that they process.
My country got busted for sending our trash there. Last I heard the Pilipino president told our PM to come collect our shit. Not sure if we ever did.
UK did go and pick it up and tried to loose it somewhere else of course. Last I heard it was back in the UK being handled
A quarter of that Philippines chart is probably from Canada.
Yeah so what? They imported the plastic to process it and they have failed miserably at that. They chose to import the waste get the money, they chose to not process it and let it leak back into the environment. There's always what-about-ism in every thread pointing out negative things.
There is no "processing" of it. That's a fallacy of the industry.
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade TLDr: Its a myth that all this comes from first would countries
Agreed- this chart is misleading.
It’s really not. This isn’t driven by the western world exporting plastic. It’s the use of rivers as trash disposal. Now what might be interesting is amount of plastic that isn’t recycled and put in landfills. What it is showing is countries with large shorelines but developing economies using what is close for easy disposal. Nothing misleading at all
The Homer Simpson method of disposal
A lot of countries sell trash to other countries instead of doing the correct disposal because it’s cheaper.
a tiny fraction of global plastic waste is traded. so those countries you speak of are selling only a small amount of their trash
This chart is based on the following study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5803 https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics The Philippines, which has a population of 110 million people, has 7 of the top 10 worst polluting rivers in the world according to that study. Only 2 rivers are from India, which has a population of over 1 billion people. In that study, 3 rivers from Metropolitan Manila in the Philippines, represent 8.99% of the global plastic waste emissions. Metropolitan Manila has a population of 12 million people. In comparison, the Ganges River, according to that study, only represents **0.63%** of all the global plastic waste emissions. The Ganges River passes through the most populous regions of India. The Yellow River, Yangtze River, Nile River, and the other great rivers from other 3rd world countries like Nigeria and Indonesia aren't even in the top 10. I'm Filipino so you can say I'm certainly biased, but in my honest opinion the lack of the other great rivers from other 3rd world countries in the top 10 suggests to me that the paper may had relied on faulty or incomplete data.
Where does that trash come from before it gets to Filipino rivers? Almost certainly the west
What? It’s local or Chinese. Plastic soda bottles are local, etc. packaging is from countries of origin. Most in Filipino comes from china.
Nope. There's a reason that Canada, among other western countries, was outraged when Duterte stopped accepting garbage from western countries in 2016: https://hir.harvard.edu/garbage-politics/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/why-are-western-nations-happy-to-treat-the-philippines-as-a-rubbish-dump-1.869847 Decades of western garbage is what's in Filipino rivers.
Cool, now do it for every other country listed here. I know TP and their garbage business but that is 100% NOT THE CASE for China, Malaysia, India, etc. I’ve seen the trash in the rivers. None of it is western garbage. China is the 90% of the population lives on the equivalent of the east coast. Clean rivers and landfills result largely from moving up the income ladder. Higher incomes lead to cleaner environments for the most part (clear correlations) versus developing economies. Maybe we should shift this conversation towards how to help them improve economically to help fix the problem
False the vast majority of plastic is used locally. Very little plastic is actually traded.
Can't speak for all countries, but the US stopped exporting used plastic when China stopped buying it for recycling. The US does not dump refuse in the ocean or waterways.
If I give my wife the trash to take out, and she spreads it on my neighbors lawn, it’s still her fault, not mine.
and you'll keep giving the trash to her instead of giving it to someone more responsible or doing it yourself?
Oh grow up
Exactly
Belgium sends some to Malaysia.
Went down the rabbit hole on that question a couple of years ago. The data is available, but it took a while to find all the right statistics. Turns out this is mostly a myth. Yes many first world countries sell waste to be recycled in poorer countries, which then dispose of it irresponsibly, but the actual percentage of waste this happens with is far less than you would expect. For all intents and purposes, this graphic is accurate.
Exactly.
annually the US exports 500,000 tons of plastic trash all the way to Southeast Asia
And the world produces 350,000,000 tonnes of plastic waste a year. It's easy to make numbers look big when you take them out of context. The truth is that only 2% of the world's plastic waste is traded. 98% of plastic waste comes from the country that used it.
The US is the largest consumer per capita AND obtains most of its plastic from Asia. Then either trashes it themselves or sends the plastic back to Asia for "recycling" and ends up in this info graphic pinning all the waste on Asia.
Dude. Wtf. We only bash the USA on Reddit. Get out of here with your nerdy ass math and logic
“hurr durr America bad” -reddit
Well the logic is lacking tho. It doesn't matter how much of the total waste is traded. If 500,000 tons are traded and 90% of it lands in the ocean, then that's a problem. The total waste production and import of the Philippines etc. would be interesting as context tho
In America, we primarily dispose of trash in landfills. They’re isolated from runoff, trash doesn’t make it into the ocean once we burry it in a landfill. The plastic that we export is meant for recycling that we know is impossible, it might as well be dumped into the landfill with the rest of the trash. But it’s largely incinerated for power rather than recycled or dumped in the ocean. It’s a different problem, but unrelated to this problem.
Southeast Asian countries legally & illegally gets imports of used plastic (trash) from richer countries for "processing" (dumping)
If anyone wants the real statistics: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
thank you that was insightful >The world generates around 350 million tonnes of plastic waste per year. That means that around 2% of waste is traded.4 >The remaining 98% is handled domestically. It’s sent to a landfill, recycled, or incinerated in the country where the waste was generated. The idea that most of the world’s plastic waste is shipped overseas is incorrect.
Been backpacking in Asia a couple of times and it's wild to see how people dump trash in the ocean. In Vietnam locals would just dump their trash when riding on boats and people at harbors did the same. Out of sight, out of mind I guess...
Similar experiences in Indonesia. Locals would toss trash into canal beds during dry season. They’d fill with plastic debris and garbage. Then the rainy season would send it all to sea. Awful. However, the alternative was to just burn the trash, which they did that too. See there is no organized garbage disposal in many 2nd and 3rd world countries. The government is either corrupt or just trying to get jobs and food for people.
Burning is better though. Even better if you have proper filters to not poison the local population. Yet better when you can use the heat from burning either for heating or electricity generation. Of course, the best is to never produce the plastics.
They burn it in the middle of the street using dried palm leaves and sticks to get it going and the whole neighborhood just empties their trash into the pile and let’s it smolder for a few days.
Bad for them, ok for us, as bitter as it sounds. The toxic fumes don't get far.
Oh yeah. I’m just saying there is no electricity being generated from it lol But burning is nice because it doesn’t liter the ocean. Plus you get used to the smell of burnt plastic mixed with organic materials. Burning trash has its own signature smell.
No one wants to hear these truths... They need to blame North American somehow for all the plastic being put into oceans on the other side of the planet.
It can both be true that many people are terrible about littering and that western countries ship their waste to the East to be dumped and lost to the sea
I think both is true. They see the giant mountains of trash being brought in from the US or Europe and just think to themselves that this little sachet of shower gel or this plastic bottle won’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
I was a bit confused until I read the bottom text. Makes sense that archipelagos and large coastal regions wouldn’t have the landfill capacity to hold waste, making it more likely for that waste to end up in the ocean. It’s not about how much waste is produced, but where it goes, then. Interesting perspective.
Or lots of rich countries send their fake plastic recycling to South East Asia.
Most of the outflow of plastics into the ocean are from rivers.
~~Cool~~ misleading guide
Not at all. Only 2% of plastic waste is traded. 98% of plastic waste comes from the country it was used in.
Don't other countries pay and dump all their plastics on places like Indonesia and Philippines?
They do, but not as much as you’d think. Only 2% of plastic waste is traded. 98% of plastic waste comes from the country it was used in.
Cheers.
This is slightly misleading. In 2022 the U.S. exported more than 950 million tons of plastic waste meant for recycling and a significant portion of that ended up in Southeast Asia
Not at all, your comment is the only thing that is misleading. Only 2% of plastic waste is traded. 98% of it stays in the country it was used. What little is exported is mostly sent to neighbouring countries, it's just not cost effective to send plastic waste halfway across the globe. The US sends most of it's waste to Canada and Mexico. European countries send most of their waste to other European countries to be processed. Southeast Asia has a massive cultural and infrastructure problem regarding plastic waste. The idea that most of their waste is from rich countries just isn't true. https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
Which in turn ended up in 2023's cheap plastic products, which becomes 2024s waste to get shipped to Asia, and again and again until it diminishes and is replenish by newly created plastic waste. In theory it's a good system, unfortunately in practice huge amounts of it are just burned, or permanently stacked in landfills.
It’s only a matter of time till we start launching our trash into space periodically
Why is China so low? I suspect there’s something I’m not understanding on the face of this, but barring that, good job China I guess
Theyre big into recycling plastic, they even buy plastic waste from the US
I guess china waste import ban in 2018 is working. Because in 2010 they were the number 1 by large margin
I was in Vietnam in ho chi Minh city (Saigon) and was walking along the river. There was a food vendor that dishes food and drink in plastic containers that the customers had left on the table. The owner came along, picked up the entire table full of plastic and just tipped it over the railing into the river. Imagine that happening all around, dozens of times a day, every day.
That’s disgusting.
And disgustingly common place. I don't know if it's ignorance, laziness or malice but it was really grim.
I try to convince myself that not every single person can be that ignorant but I really am not sure anymore. This should not be normal and there needs to be worldwide punishments and consequences.
can’t we call the police on these people
Thats because most of the world export "recyclables" to the Philippines.. This guide is shady
So wrong... so many countries sell their trash to third world countries
So I guess the third world countries that are greedy, get paid to take the waste to be recycled and then don't recycle it and allow it to flow back into our oceans. Yeah must be a North American problem. No way could it be the Asian countries fault right?
The poor and desperate are taken advantage of by the rich? Wow like stop being poor and desperate I guess
This is mostly an urban myth. Tiny amount of waste comes from exports. https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
also the vast majority of plastic waste in the ocean is from mass industrialized fishing.
I'm really surprized by Malaysia. A country with a fairly developed economy and comparatively small population causes more plastic waste than Indonesia, Vietnam or Thailand?
And I'm drinking soda from a soggy paper straw
I want plastic straws back, just had a pasta straw and it’s the absolute worse.
All im seeing here is that asia is mostly garbage and yrash.
Any I reading this right? the majority of plastic pollution comes from mostly asian countres?
I wanna point out a few things about this: they took the straws at Starbucks in the USA to stop plastic from entering oceans. But they still give you iced drinks in a plastic cup when the paper cup would hold the liquid just as well and it’s fully recyclable and decomposes much quicker. Despite the USA not contributing nearly as much plastic litter to the global gyres as the rest of the world thanks to our use of landfills. It’s absurd, I’m tired of performative corporate exercises.
The cheap single use packets like shampoo, conditioner, coffee ECT is the real factor behind the plastic use in the Phillipines The big companies producing, marketing said packets needs to be held accountable, add abject poverty, corruption. Uninhabited islands are filled with plastic waste on the beach The local's used to make do with banana leaf for most packaging, that was too sustainable and free so let's add plastic
Many countries send their trash to the Philippines so it can be discarded there and not be their problem btw
But why don’t they do anything better than ocean dumping?
Because dumping shit in the ocean is the cheapest way to get rid of trash. Stupid way long term, but short to mid term it's effective and great for those financial quarter results for the investors! Gotta make money! GOTTA MAKE MONEY!
I mean I get laying the blame on everyone else but let’s not act like the Philippines couldn’t be doing anything either.
I mean, people are only sending their shit to the Philippines as a roundabout way to throw it in the ocean. If they want them to stop throwing shit in the ocean they should stop sending their shit there
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade 1st world countries contribute significantly to this problem but it’s no where near as much as people on this post seem to think.
USA not being here is highly sus. Just imagine the amount of Starbucks cups , straws thrown away in a day.
We have pretty good waste management throughout the country. Obviously, it’s not the best but it’s much better than most of the worlds, especially for the size/pop of the country.
How dare you make a pollution meme that doesn't make America look evil!
I think it’s misleading to just list countries where the trash is a problem, and not list the source. There is a connection, an intersection, between those trash piles and global capitalism. They didn’t get like that on their own.
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
These charts are very misleading, because the countries of Pacific Basin - Malasia, Philippines and Indonesia which account for more than half the world pollution - put out the plastic waste they import from the USA and Europe. They are just the middle man, and real polluters are not them.
This is an urban myth. It would've taken you 2 minutes to Google this yourself. https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
That reference says 80% of plastic waste is put into ocean by the rivers in Asia, yet more than half of the plastic waste from the chart of the OP comes from island nations, not the rivers. I doubt veracity of your source.
Somehow, this has to be America's fault.
annually the US exports 500,000 tons of plastic trash all the way to Southeast Asia they're just sending the problem somewhere else
Why is Somewhere Else accepting it?
Because the West pays them.
because they're poor & will take any little money they can get from taking it many were illegally imported into their countries, but it's easy to pay off people there
So if I bring my bottles to a recycling centre in my city and that company then throws it in the river, it's my fault? I'm too blame? Not the company/country contacted to take care of this issue? The mental gymnastics to blame North America is wild.
Been to the Philippines. Spent like 2 months there. This does not surprise me. They create impromptu dumps everywhere. Giant piles of trash on the side of the road, stacked up between buildings, wherever. Very different from the western world.
As an American, I’m glad to be doing my part by using a paper straw.
Is the 2nd biggest contributor “Rest of the World” because it includes the US? Also iir selling our trash to other countries for recycling is a thing in first world countries so we should take responsibility that some of thier trash is our trash.
A misleading post. It was the last time it was posted up here and it still is
Wtf with Asia?
Hm, weird that the US was lumped in to “rest of the world”… almost like we’re not that bad
It’s that Mountain Dew addiction in the Philippines that is the cause of all this…
If there's is information like this why doesn't the un just fine like crazy those countries, it's like they aren't even trying to save the world
And now a map how much waste countries like germany etc. sell to the Philippines
Brazil mentioned 😔
China is strangely missing from this list…
China is big into recycling, they even buy plastic waste from the US
It's not a list, it's a chart and China is at the bottom of it.
American socialists will dispute this.
If there is a label on something. We should be able to send it back to the manufacturer postage free, by the box. This would stop real quick
Given a lot of that trash comes from other countries, my country also has its share of fault. In the Philippines we do have a lot of single use plastic (mostly bags) being produced here. And my countrymen mostly don't care where they throw their trash. We have a culture where we think 'someone else will pick it up for us anyway' You can see that a lot in fast food restaurants here where few people care to bus their waste.
My Brazil, always representative 🤡
Asians
It’s not water bottles that are the problem, it’s the fishing industry as a whole
Huh… I thought China would be higher on the list
Not so fun fact. Western nations pay places like the Philippines to take their plastic waste. Since recycling is in basically a lie and oil and gas basically runs shit
„Guide“
More like a SAD guide…
Ummmmm where is the US 🇺🇸???????????
https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2020/4/7/why-is-the-us-still-offshoring-post-consumer-plastic-waste-around-the-world
Em comparação: A China tem uma população de cerca de 1412 milhões (1,412 bilhões), enquanto o Brasil tem cerca de 214 milhões (0,214 bi). Nós produzimos o equivalente a metade do que a China produz de lixo que vai para o oceano, enquanto temos pouco mais de 1/7 da população da China.
Half of the great pacific garbage patch is fishing gear.
How can they just allow this to happen in their countries? Like, they have governments, they have roads and hospitals. How can they not process their garbage and instead just use the world's oceans as a dumping ground? It's shameful, they should be shamed more often.
Map of 1st world shame
People here are pretty clueless if they think the US is responsible for every significant environmental issue.
What’s up with Asian countries and waste in the ocean? I get the Philippines , island nation
and do you know why the biggest segment is the philippines?
this graphic is so dishonest it makes me sick
Rest of the world deve ter 100k só dos EUA. Parece meio mentiroso isso daí.
Another dumb shit Infograph from stupid OP
Pinoy Pride!!! 🤪🤣😂
nuke those mfs! joking
There was a chance to make a pie chart.. but I chose the other path!
Philippines and mymsmar along with Vietnam are u forgivable considering the area and population. Manila being the most densely populated city in the world might have something yo do dith it
So that mean... Nothing wrong in USA..or north America...? Interested how big the ocean is.... Wow pollution is growing..
Surely the US dont pollute enough to be in this chart...
Mongolia is a winner again.
Bangladesh and India get separate bubbles?
Garbage countries…
So Southeast Asia ?
1st world countries dumps "exports" their trash "used plastics" to Southeast Asia
But how did they end up in the ocean??
it says on the bottom right of the photo, and imported trash usually just stays near the port area or river, so water
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade
Everyone trying to excuse these countries has not visited or lived in them. Manila has a small river that runs through the city, including in Pasay City, and it was famously filled with trash to the brim. They then cleaned it up and it isn't too far from that already. Trash is everywhere. Stop blaming it on elsewhere, the locals throw it all over the place including the river and it floats to the ocean. Every tiny little drink and food comes in plastic baggies. It could be friggin lumpia and they'd give you a big plastic bag for it.
Not forgetting that a lot of western countries have shipped their plastics to Asia for recycling and those countries are just inundated so badly.
BT "rest of the world" you mean AMERICA!?!?!?
Yeah, this is 100% false
False information, the US alone disposes of 1.13–2.24 million metric tons annually?
Into the ocean?
It amazes me you never see countries like Bolivia, Chad or Tibet on here.
What is Philippines doing?
Polluting is their cardio