>> a plastic pellet is just going to pass straight through my digestive system
Through the mechanical grinding action of weather and tides (the same mechanisms that make sand out of rock and coral), these chunks can become much much smaller, small enough to cross the intestine into the bloodstream and small enough to cross the blood brain barrier or pass up your nose, lodging in your brain.
It's a pity the parent commenter led with that point. Their second point, that the overwhelming majority of ocean plastic pollution comes from those two sources, remains valid (albeit I'm not sure if it's actually true but it certainly seems feasible).
To their second point, blaming the Philippines for dumping our ‘recycling’ in the ocean is a little bit like blaming African countries for burning our e-waste. We can’t pretend you can generate pounds of single-use plastic waste per person and have the problem disappear when you put it in a blue bin. Recycling is a lie invented by the packaging industry, and the reality is that we export the problem in bulk to the developing world, who inconveniently happen to share a planet, physics, and economy with us. We’re the ones buying the plastic to begin with, and it’s only right it washes onshore back here so we can’t pretend it doesn’t exist when it hits the bin.
The Philippines accounts for 0.16% of the world's waste plastic imports. Switzerland imports 10x more plastic waste and the Netherlands imports 100x more. Your explanation is very wrong.
I don't see how that contradicts the above poster's point that if there wasn't demand there would be no supply, and then to deal with it we ship it back to said third world countries so it can be "somebody else's problem", essentially exporting our waste and the ensuing health issues to other countries.