Thread by @Coyoteblog

I will add one more thing to this -- US plastic recycling may be one of the largest contributors to plastic trash in the oceans -- here is why

sfchronicle.com/opinion/editor…

Plastic trash in the oceans is not from some poor schlub in Austin who had a plastic straw in his big Gulp. The vast vast majority of the plastic trash in the ocean is from 10 or so large Asian coastal/river port cities

Seasonal floods inundate the industries along these harbors and rivers, and washes the plastic trash out to sea. Where does the plastic trash come from? From places like CA, which until recently sent most of their collected "recycled" plastics to these Asian cities

The problem is that the majority of plastics do not pay -- at all -- to recycle, but recycling advocates in this country simply insist on denying this reality. Having to support their fantasy, and with no way to economically use them in the US, they were sold to places like China

But even in China, most of this material became trash (they took it originally hoping their low labor costs would allow it to profitably sort out the small amount of good stuff, but they always intended to trash a lot of it).

Question for Greens: If plastic is going to be trashed anyway, who do you trust to trash it more carefully, CA or China? A lot of our plastic is just heaped into trash piles just next door to the coastal ports where it was imported, ready to be washed to see in the next flood

And wham, instant ocean trash. While CA greens were making the rest of us make do with no straws or shopping bags, they were in fact themselves the source of way more ocean trash, via their plastic recycling program, than the rest of us ever were