Much of the waste was sent to Turkey, followed by Malaysia, with Indonesia also a regular destination. Investigations have repeatedly linked the plastic recycling industry in these countries to environmental damage, illegal dumping and burning, and labour abuses.
point being, obviously, that most countries send a lot more per capita.
According to the source that doesnt seem to be the case though. Unfortunately it doesnt list all countries but the US is in 7th place with 62kt exports to non-OECD countries so at least we know that all other countries are below that in total exports. ‘Most countries’ would already have a lower per-capita at that amount.
this source ranks the us fairly low. i’d even say suspiciously low, but the numbers for germany seem correct.
So Germany is among the highest export per capita. Thanks for providing a source. The numbers seem off though, 10t per person would be insane in a single year^^ maybe the scale is supposed to be kg not tonnes?
well that graph is total plastic exports, not waste specifically. i should probably have checked that before linking it. this one is probably more relevant; it shows generated plastic waste, but not exports. however if we take the 810kt from the op article at face value and put that against the 0.48kg/person/day number given to germany in this graph (× 80.83M people × 365 days ≈ 14.2 million tons), we get 810 / 14 200 ≈ 6% of their generated plastic waste being exported. i’d honestly say that’s a pretty impressive number, even though it also seems to point to the average german generating more like a ton of plastic waste a year. as someone partially responsible for a multi-tenant building’s maintenance it’s not an unbelievable figure by any means, but it is a lot.
Obviously that doesn’t make a difference to the country receiving 810k tonnes of trash.
that country is most likely receiving multiple orders of magnitude more than that.
“so what’s a little bit more?”. Yeah, great point.
i feel like you’re not arguing in good faith. my other replies makes it abundantly clear what my point is, but i’ll reiterate anyway: germany’s plastic export per capita is lower than many other european countries, so singling them out by presenting the number without context is unproductive. in cases like this you want to be going for the low-hanging; if italy exports 15kg of plastic per year, then it’s cheaper and faster to get italy down to 9kg rather than inventing new technology to get germany down to 7. repeat for every country. naming and shaming doesn’t work when they’re in the lead.
sweden missed their paris accord climate goals because of thinking like yours: the accords called for improvement in greenhouse gas emissions from industry every year by a certain number of tons, and we couldn’t get there because we were already using the latest tech. poland, meanwhile, started slowing down their transition because the better they did one year the harder the next one would be.
Alright, I’ll level with you. What annoyed me was your use of “obviously” and “abundantly clear”. Please consider where you are right now and what medium you’re using:
So things aren’t as “obvious” as you make them out to be.
Now that that is out of the way, you are still downplaying the role Germany plays in plastic pollution. 810 thousand tonnes is far from a negligible amount to export per year. No matter how you spin it, Western countries still consume and waste obscenely more than non-Western countries. They do terribly in carbon consumption too.
I can appreciate the “at least we aren’t doing as bad those other guys” ( imagine the brag “hey we gassed only 600k Jews, they gassed 2M, we’re so much better!”) , but it’s still 810 thousand tonnes exported to countries that cannot deal with even their domestic plastic waste. If the headline were “Germany dumped 810 kilo tonnes of plastic waste into the ocean”, that would sound no better than the “UK dumped 675 kilo tonnes of plastic waste into the ocean”. Of course, if we just say “exported” it seems cute and maybe even economy boosting. “We gave Malaysia a few megatonnes of plastic and they just dumped it into the ocean! Bad Malaysia, bad!”
Being able to export the waste to a country that a) doesn’t produce even half as much and b) cannot deal with it, doesn’t make up for however much you recycle (or claim to recycle) in your own country. It’s a cop out.