But not for them to "dump it for us". We don't want the river dumping. If we stop sending it or even stop trying to recycle entirely then it goes into a landfill. Going into rivers is an extremely avoidable fate.
We "sometimes send" millions of kilograms per year[0], and we do so while reading reports that over half of it might end up being improperly dumped[1]. I think it's beating around the bush to say we don't send it to be dumped. We export this stuff into what are essentially regulatory black holes knowing full well what could happen. For our own newspapers of course we have to make up a cover story but I don't believe we're so ignorant as to believe it are we?
We're sending it to be gotten rid of. But that could and should be into a landfill after optional sorting and extraction, not a river.
When we outsource manufacturing, the carbon and a lot of the pollution is our fault, as an inevitable part of it. When we outsource plastic handling, tossing it in the river is not the same. It's really easy to not toss it in the river. We're turning a blind eye to it, but it's not because we actually want it. We want them to stop and they could stop.
We want them to stop, we know they're not stopping, but we're still giving them our waste and being open about "turning a blind eye." And we pay them for it even when it mostly goes wrong, creating incentives to keep doing it wrong.
A country like China might be able to play the game well enough to get enough power to say Enough is enough but many other nations in South Asia and Africa are still struggling due to the fall-out of...our colonial interference, pressures from the WTO to do things by our rules, wealth inequality that further pushes them into difficult situations... And we blame them.
All this while countries like the US set great examples for others and turn away from the Paris Climate Accords and release doctored research on climate change.
Let's stop messing about. We send it to them to get rid of it knowing what will happen. WE need to do better, we can't just point our fingers for ever. "We want them to stop and they could stop " so why is this the situation today?
You're looking at blame, which is fine. I have some arguments there but it's not my focus. I'm mainly objecting to the implication that the reason our rivers are fine is because we ship plastic away for someone else to deal with. If we stopped shipping plastic, our rivers would be fine, and their rivers would still be bad.
The problem is not based on who generates the most plastic. Or in other words, our portion of the blame is not because we generate lots of plastic rather than minimal plastic.
I didn't suggest our rivers were clean because we export it, but we should definitely consider the waste we export to still be our own regardless of where it ends up.
The rivers in less privileged states would be dirty in any case, yes, for the reasons I've listed above.
I didn't use the word "blame" except to say that we shouldn't be blaming others for issues we created (the wealth disparaties, the petro-chemical industry, global consumer culture etc). Blame is neither here nor there, it's a matter of responsibility.
> I didn't suggest our rivers were clean because we export it
The combination of "Developed countries generate an order of magnitude more waste per capita. It seems unfair to blame poorer countries." and "We send it to other countries, have them dump it for us" sounds like it to me. Plus the sibling comment of "We instead ship it to poorer countries for them to put it in their rivers."
And yes I know you only made one of those. So with you not intending that meaning, then I guess you can ignore my comments, they weren't at you.
But I still want to counter the other users' implications and statements. The blame and responsibility we have in uncontained plastic is generally unrelated to the quantity we produce.
> Blame is neither here nor there, it's a matter of responsibility.
In this conversation they're the same to me, you can pretend I said the word responsibility instead.
