Observe wrote: ↑Mon, 19. Aug 19, 18:10
One of the downsides of recycling plastic, is a lot of it gets shipped overseas for processing by cheap labor. Until recently, China was one of those countries, but they now have a ban on foreign garbage. The same is true of garbage from The United States.
This practice is creating mountains of toxic materials in countries that have no or low regulations. Malaysia is now the worlds largest dumping ground for this stuff. It actually might be more environmental friendly, to just bypass our recycling bins and simply send everything to a local landfill. Someone could probably do the math.
The worse part is when the contractors try to bait and switch the content of the trash. Instead of shipping recyclable material per contract, these companies mix the content with the unrecylable trash and bundle it to these countries. Duterte (Philippine) earlier in the year throw a huge fit over it, questionable antic aside he did manage to get the original country to take back ~70 containers of trash. And who is this country? Canada, your supposed environmental friendly nation. I think Malaysia just did the same.
It's also noted that while Canada may sound like it's taking the lead on the "environmental friendly initiative" on the "news" front, its practical record isn't really that hot comparing to other developed country. This is why I bring up the issue of "paying money to simply shift the problem out of sight" and stat padding for bragging right. We might often think "it's thanks to our policy that our environment has improved", while that may help "a little", the real impact is the industry doesn't get cleaner, the polluted one just got moved to other places out of view. China's today looks about the same as the US decades away when we used to have polluting stream of smog screen so thick you can't even see the city coming down from the mountain (Colorado reference).
And it's the samething with China, as its own environment policy get stricter, it simply means it started exporting pollution elsewhere. A few years ago Vietnam had a big social unrest going on for awhile stemming from this issue. China paid some "grease" money to government official to give them the right to build polluted factories with almost no regulation for (and you gonna laugh) 100 years. China built these fabs and practically dumped untreated industrial waste into the stream and ocean front. Only took about 3 months for the pollution to completely wiped out several hundred-years-old fishing villages, which caused people to riot. Some poor fishermen dived naked into the polluted stream to take evidence of the pipes (because on the official paper these are all SOA factories that produce treated and safe waste only). Poor blokes died soon after to poisoning, sadly in vain.
That's why even though I know I may sound a bit callous\skeptic\cynical on these issues, but reality kinda make me annoy when people praise countries like China or Canada simply due to the PR effort. Environmental issue is a big umbrella that you can just hope to solve just by some point to point or pocket of problems. You simply shifting it around why giving the fail sense of belief that something was actually done. Give it a few decades, once the QoL is improved there (when people stop worry about what to eat, they gonna start wondering why the hell they're breathing fuel), these things gonna disappeared from E and SE Asia, and we would all be praise how far the region would have come in term of environmental issues. The polluters just simply be shifted to South Asia instead, and hey, Africa is still largely untouched, so I figure it'll get its turn.