This is a good point. I’m reminded of a thread from yesterday: [1]. There are tons of places where nobody gives a single crap about waste disposal. The sides of the roads are literal trash heaps. “The West” is not going to solve this global problem by making everyone sort their trash into 10 different bins. It needs to stop at the source: the companies producing all this waste (mostly discarded packaging).
This. Visit Mumbai and tell one of the hundreds of million people that live on 50 cents a day to use their last ounce of energy to walk a piece of plastic to the trash can. I recycle gladly in California, but am realistic that problems at this scale MUST and WILL be solved by technology. Instead of finger wagging, readers of Hacker News may be the most qualified for building a machine that crawls dumpsites searching for plastic.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17403526
EDIT: updated for the sensitive