Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

If you care so much about plastic waste polluting the environment then why aren't you advocating for higher economic growth in poor nations so they have the money to build the waste-management systems required to prevent plastic from escaping into the environment?

THREAD

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1301359973536989185

Plastic waste in the oceans comes from

- poor nations that lack waste collection

- rich nations that dump plastics on poor ones by deceiving themselves that their plastics will be recycled when they often are not

It's great that people are raising the alarm, again, about rich nations dumping plastics on poor nations, but people should remember that this is because:

- poor nations lack waste-management systems rich nations take for granted

- we irrationally think plastic must be recycled

As for the claim that plastic bags "pollute the environment for millennia," there's precisely zero science for it.

In reality, the best-available science finds 99.9% of plastic waste biodegrades, sinks, and is otherwise removed from the ocean's surface.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P….

If you want to deny poor nations the PVC pipes that handle our sewage, the plastic masks that prevent the transmission of covid, & the plastics that we are all using on this web site, then do so openly and honestly, don't wrap your anti-growth Malthusianism in plastic.

/END

Sources:

Graphs/charts:

environmentalprogress.org/plastics

Book:

amazon.com/Apocalypse-Nev…

Short overview:

forbes.com/sites/michaels…