>Its people who intentionally "dispose" trash in the environment.
In the US and Europe we tend to have well developed municipal waste systems and only a small portion of our plastic waste ends up in the ocean.
The problem is the rest of the places that do not. There are many places in the world that will gladly sell you a plastic soda bottle, but after that point it's your job to burn it or bury it.
In addition, you had plenty of 'recycled' plastic waste end up in the ocean by proxy. Before 2017 or so, if you were 'recycling' plastic, it was getting shipped overseas on a container where it had a very high chance of just being dumped.
>In the US and Europe we tend to have well developed municipal waste systems and only a small portion of our plastic waste ends up in the ocean.
Thats exactly what I said
>The problem is the rest of the places that do not. There are many places in the world that will gladly sell you a plastic soda bottle, but after that point it's your job to burn it or bury it.
And to solve this problem the people in this thread what to replace plastic bottles on the other side of the world (in the west) with glass/aluminum bottles.
See how that does not work?
>In addition, you had plenty of 'recycled' plastic waste end up in the ocean by proxy. Before 2017 or so, if you were 'recycling' plastic, it was getting shipped overseas on a container where it had a very high chance of just being dumped.
This is a side effect of the whole "recycling at any cost" nonsense strategies.
Plastic was carefully and labor intensively separated form trash to be sold. But only very specific plastics have accentual market value. The rest does not have value or maybe it sometimes has but supply and demand fluctuates so there could be many month where no one wants to buy it.
Consequentially the US companies would need to pay for it to have it burned or land-filled. But that would destroy their "recycling goals" so what they instead do is they sell it with the valuable stuff by offering it only together.
Whoever buys it then dumps the worthless stuff somewhere.
The whole recycling-mania created the incentive for this. There is no way moving the plastic trash so far away is cheaper than the local landfill. They are simply not allowed to landfill it due to recycling goals which if they reach it probably gives them taxpayer money to do do more useless recycling.
In the US and Europe we tend to have well developed municipal waste systems and only a small portion of our plastic waste ends up in the ocean.
The problem is the rest of the places that do not. There are many places in the world that will gladly sell you a plastic soda bottle, but after that point it's your job to burn it or bury it.
In addition, you had plenty of 'recycled' plastic waste end up in the ocean by proxy. Before 2017 or so, if you were 'recycling' plastic, it was getting shipped overseas on a container where it had a very high chance of just being dumped.