Fang, you know what really fucked with our eco progress here?
When we found out that allllll the plastic that we had been carefully sorting out, washing, and putting in a separate waste stream; collecting and crushing; then shipping it halfway around the world to a recycling center in China… (where they make all kinds of plastic goods; so they’d obviously have a need for recycled plastic)
was just being !&*# dumped in the !*(&!@# ocean.
Why? “Cha bu duo”. “Can’t be assed to do what we said we’d do when we were paid to do a job”.
Asian people just throw shit out their window or down on the ground or whatever; they just throw it off their boats, they treat the ocean like their personal trash can; and that’s what the problem actually is. It’s just misplaced American Exceptionalism to presume that if there’s a world problem, we’re at the front of being the cause. In reality most of the plastic in the oceans from America was recycling that got waylayed because it’s cheaper to throw it in the river than grind it up and use it to make our next round of plastic products.
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