[gridlockd]

"Discarded single-use plastics have become an international environmental flashpoint, as they have turned up in the bellies of birds and fish, flooded pristine beaches in remote countries with litter and even been detected in microscopic quantities in rainwater."

Ironically, this is almost certainly due to recycling being so uneconomical that trash gets shipped to foreign countries, where less diligent actors will simply dump in the ocean.

Landfills are the best solution, let the trash robots of the future figure it all out.

[ars]

> due to recycling being so uneconomical that trash gets shipped to foreign countries

This isn't true. No one is shipping trash to other countries, it's way too expensive to do that.

Other countries pay to buy recycling, and recently they haven't been as interested.

[205guy]

This isn't true either. The US was shipping badly sorted recycling (aka half-trash) to other countries because return shipping to Asia is dirt-cheap (aka trade imbalance). Other countries were sorting the recyclables with miserable labor and dumping our trash byproduct due to lax environmental laws in said countries. Recently, they haven't been as interested in this deal.

[redis_mlc]

1) The US press followed this for decades.

The Chinese govt. allowed trash shipments for a long time, but nobody in business wanted to really do the trash shipments because they slowed down the return trip.

Finally the Chinese government realized banning the shipments was an easy way to improve air quality in China, since often trash mountains are burned to isolate metals.

2) There's an erroneous belief that we do recycling in the US. Aside from vehicle recycling, about 99% effective, most trash is landfilled since there's no way for private companies to make money on the trash stream.

If you read local newspapers, there's often an article on the municipal council being asked for $1 million payments from recyclers, so dumping is chosen instead.

[pedalpete]

Australian recyclers have been been caught shipping to Malaysia, where the receiver is not a recylcer and illegally received the trash and just dumped it there.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-29/malaysia-to-send-tonn...

Yes, it has happened and is happening.

[ars]

You clearly didn't read your own article. It confirms what I said.

Illegal recyclers in Malaysia bought recycling from the UK. But the government wasn't happy about it and forced it to go back.

It's exactly like I said: It's not the UK paying to ship garbage, it's people in Malaysia buying low quality recycling.