Plastic disposal is a clear example of the failure of current economics.
It's clearly bad for the environment and has long term costs, but there basically isn't any way economics to calculate that or incent it to not be done.
So IMO, recycling is an exploratory exercise in seeing if we can socially engineer behavior that is "better". The cynic would say "it doesn't", but I could argue civilization is built on short term economic calculations and resulting social/behavioral engineering that makes that impossible.
If there was any way to know, I'd be fascinated to see if there are real measurements in the drop in altruism, either from the psychological conditioning of our society, or making altruistic people less able to procreate.
We need to prohibit Western companies from packaging food and FMCG for the developing world in plastic - until both the disposal infrastructure and societal attitudes around pollution and environmental management change. Or, charge those polluters to build that infrastructure or change those attitudes.
I would suggest that a targeted protest and political lobbying campaign against the headquarters of those companies would be more effective than any individual effort to clean up plastic pollution.
My recycling is sorted on site at the county dump, with rejected stuff disposed of in the dump. No way are the bundles of material they sell being shipped to Asia for disposal, it doesn't make any sense at all.
That article is about the countries raising their standards for the sorted material they accept, not about the typical journey that Australian waste takes. Just think about what a non existent amount of material 100 tonnes is for a country of 25 million people. Millions of tons of waste a year just in NSW: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/what-sydney-is-really-th...
Bulk shipping to asia in particular is very cheap due to the volume of empty containers going in that direction. Not sure about other places.
Countries that recycle plastic have people pick out the good bits cheaply in hellish facilities, profit off selling the high grade recycling, the rest is "waste waste" to be gotten rid of somehow. Dumping it in the ocean is quite cheap.
The sorted plastic used to be a thing that you could mix with virgin plastic to get a cheaper product.
Since China's waste import bans, I believe it's actually more expensive than virgin plastic, partly because it costs more to produce now and partly because demand is driven by manufacturers who want to have a certain % recycled plastic in their product for marketing reasons.
The higher price incentivises other countries to import and process mixed plastic waste instead. They of course will also have to find a way to get rid of the not-useful portions of mixed plastic waste.
In the US, dumping stuff in the nearest landfill is pretty likely to be cheaper than dumping it in the ocean. Especially if the landfill is operating the recycling sort (the case here and many other smaller counties).
(This addresses your second paragraph; if they are selling the high grade and putting the rest in the landfill...)
The first reason it's hard to just landfill it is optics. Local government asked people to sort their trash, made a big deal about it. And it's a scandal when people find out of course it's just being buried with the rest of the stuff. Recyclers were able to do two things; a) play a shell game which diverts the waste in an opaque, hopefully deniable way and b) deal with the waste more cheaply than landfilling it. They did this by exporting it, and all the externalities.
I mean, your argument is good but I feel it's contradicted by reality in a sense; megatons of waste plastic were being sent to China before the import ban.
You have to pay to put stuff in landfill, whereas the recyclers were paying _you_ to take the waste.
I think you might also be surprised by the cost of landfill. Sure, there's plenty of space, but there's not as much government approved, environmentally audited space as you might want - that won't leach into the water table, has good geography, neighbours who won't NIMBY it, no rare frogs that live there etc. Obviously it all needs ISO 27000 management, union labour and regular safety and environmental audits.
Caring about none of the above is how Chinese waste entrepreneurs could take mixed plastic from 1/2 way around the world and make a profit out of it, instead of losing money putting it into the ground. Their margins are slim and they have to pay for landfill too (much less of course), so dumping it in the ocean or similar saves money unless they get caught.
(For what it's worth I do agree that putting it in the ground might be the best thing to do, i.e, cheapest considering all externalities, and local government should just be transparent about what actually happens to your recycling).
I lived in Nashville in the early aughts. They had recycling centers where there were bins with labels for every sort of plastic. Of course, the only people using these centers, people like myself and my wife, were people who were scrupulously rule-abiding and wanted to do their part for the environment. Everyone shlepped their recyclables across town to these centers and then carefully sorted everything, take great pains and time to do it. If you were there when the trucks came to pick up the stuff, they emptied all the bins into the same truck. I saw this happen. The recycling company charged the city to mix the recycling. Then they charged it to separate everything again at the recycling plant. This was not a secret. Still, the people such as myself who took the trouble to recycling as much as they could of their waste could not be convinced to throw everything into whichever (carefully labeled) bin and go home.
My point is that it is entirely plausible that people are paying extra to "recycle" their waste when this has no positive environmental consequence. I was one of the people separating my trash, knowing the trucks would come and mix and all and charge me for this "service". It wasn't "virtue signaling". It was desperation to feel that one wasn't doing so much harm plus a desire not to be seen as the one breaking the rules of the recycling center. I was trying to do the best I could in my circumstances and feel a little better about my actions. I no longer live in Nashville.
I've literally been in the local facility that sorts recycling, they do a good job of sorting clean stuff by type and throw everything else away, into the landfill where it is located. Should I not believe my lying eyes?
So someone pays to haul stuff away on trucks and I'm supposed to believe that they are dumping that stuff in the ocean for some reason. Or shipping it to China and then dumping it in the ocean.
Waste management is handled at the local government level, they tend to "do their own thing". If your local government is doing the right thing, good for them! It could be burnt, landfilled, exported, sorted and sent to a local processor or sorted and then exported.
Sorting is not a binary process either. You can sort to different contamination levels depending on what processors are willing to take.
Not all waste is the same; different kinds of waste are handled differently in different places.
Local conditions make a difference; how much do voters care about the environment really? How much unused space is nearby? Are you way inland or near a port? etc.
But we can zoom out a bit and look at the macro trends.
I think the best use would be not microparticle-shedding plastics made from fast growing plants, deposited in the ground as carbon sinks. Something degradable, but not in anaerobic conditions.
There definitely is a way to deal with this in economics: taxes. If you tax the companies making the plastics, the price will go up, and they have an incentive to do things differently.
Taxes are a crucial pillar of even a purely capitalist society, it’s just that they are not easy to implement politically.
LOL @ the downvotes. Not sure why, what orev said is true - taxing externalities is generally considered (at least by economists) the best way to manage the externality. Set the tax at a level that makes it cost prohibitive to use plastics and the market will find an alternative.
I read u/AtlasBarfed's point being that we don't have a proper way to put a price on the externalities.
To your point, onerously high taxes could largely remove plastics from the waste stream, mooting the need to determine the cost.
I'd like to go even further. Incentives and prizes and grants and whatever-it-takes to find alternatives. eg Bulk pills in plant-based baggies, instead of monthly oversized labeled bottles and caps.
Nudge the culture and expectations. Every little bit would help. Because better is better.
Pigovian taxes are my favourite response to environmental damage.
In theory, everyone should be on board. The fiscal conservatives should want it, since negative externalities are a violation of the non-aggression principle, and taxes are the least intrusive way to encourage change, it's basically delegating the specifics of the change to the market. It is consistent with their principles to want it. It seems like the easiest way to potentially get the most people on board.
I also genuinely believe it's the best solution most of the time. The market is ingenious as long as prices accurately reflect costs and benefits.
It's clearly bad for the environment and has long term costs, but there basically isn't any way economics to calculate that or incent it to not be done.
So IMO, recycling is an exploratory exercise in seeing if we can socially engineer behavior that is "better". The cynic would say "it doesn't", but I could argue civilization is built on short term economic calculations and resulting social/behavioral engineering that makes that impossible.
If there was any way to know, I'd be fascinated to see if there are real measurements in the drop in altruism, either from the psychological conditioning of our society, or making altruistic people less able to procreate.