Melmortu

Melmortu t1_j8rlw4l wrote

Doesn't work like that, these are plastics that are badly classified and dirty. Classifying and recycling them in developed countries is not economically viable, but with cheap labor from poor countries it is, so they buy them for nearly nothing, and they process them.

Thing is, most of it is not useful, so all of that unusable, unrecyclable plastic ends un in a poor country without the means to get rid of it. China used to do this until they banned the import of those plastics because the impact on people's health was more expensive to treat than the economic margin, and now it's done in SE Asia.

So, the blame is on developed countries for producing an incredible amount of unrecyclable plastics and shipping it there, not on poor people trying to make a living out of recycling it.

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