Diatribe alert. If you just wanna know, here: 75% to 86% of plastic waste in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch came from fishing industry, article, study.

It’s not bad, and I didn’t claim it to be bad. It’s not relevant in the same way Dr Thunder and Pibb Xtra aren’t leading to a soft drink crisis in the USA—they’re a small part of a much bigger problem.

To carry on with this dumbass analogy, it would be misleading to argue for a ban on off-brand sodas while continuing to mass produce Sprite, Pepsi, and Diet Coke, and it lets big businesses off the hook for their destruction. Same with letting industries shovel untold plastic waste into the oceans behind our backs while making more visible efforts to ban much smaller amounts back on land.

Also, we’re not just worried about plastic because it ends up on beaches. That is, again, missing the bigger picture. It’s also missing why those items in particular end up on beaches, which is because of local littering. A cup on a beach is actually great for the environment compared to a piece of nylon disintegrating in the ocean. It just looks ugly. Our primary focus can’t be on ugly right now.

If you ban plastic straws from European beaches and say job well done, the planet will never notice. We need to start with the big issues, we don’t have time to pat them on the back and keep subsidizing the destruction of our planet. Agricultural fertilizer is next followed by plastic bags, iirc, or maybe bottles.

It's called environmental dumping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_dumping

First world countries ship waste to third world countries where dumping is not illegal (or at least not enforced).

You get stuff like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVnMBGXVVUI

Stuff falls out of garbage trucks, trash cans get tipped over, stuff gets blown out of the bed of a dumptruck at the landfill, landfills erode and take trash with them. Trashcans aren't just magic portals that take trash into the nightosphere

a lot of single-use items come from fast food places, which people will eat in their cars and then just throw out the window as they drive along.

it's a fucking sad practice but it's really hard to get people to stop doing it, so the next best option is just to make sure as much as possible of the things you get from fast food joints will dissolve in a rain shower.