[badpun]

It's western governments fault that they allow exporting trash to foreign countries to be "processed" by companies which are more than likely to just dump eveything into ground or a river. And it is much worse with toxic industrial waste, where it's not just discarded plastic forks and stuff, but actual million of gallons of chemicals that can poison entire water basins.

If recycling or protection of environment in general was the actual goal, we'd never do it. But, in reality, it is mostly just greenwashing and/or protecting just the local environment (who cares if rivers in Poland or China will become toxic, as long as US or Germany or Italy are clean), so "out of sight, out of mind" policy works well.

[mpweiher]

Huh?

"Most of the world’s waste is handled domestically and most of the waste that enters the oceans stems from these countries."

"... around 2% of waste is traded."

[badpun]

It would be great if it was weighted by toxicity though. Regular municipal waste is nowhere as dangerous or expensive to dispose of. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, there are hundreds of sites discovered by authorities, where extremely toxic industrial waste from Western Europe plants is abandoned by various sham companies. Safely cleaning up each of those sites can cost dozens of millions of dollars (per site) and that's assuming the containers didn't break and the poison didn't leak into ground already.

[mpweiher]

The article and all the figures are about plastic, not toxic industrial waste.