Interesting Article worth a read..
I will relate this story. Back in 1992, I transferred to Bitburg Air Base, and the initial week of processing included this 30-minute piece by the new German recycling chief of the base. He hyped up the standard rules, explained how the system worked, and questions were allowed.
Someone asked a direct question...just how much could the German economy around that area, or nationally...recycle paper and plastic. Long pause, and his answer....roughly 40-percent. The rest was being dumped in the local dump and this was frustrating the environmental folks greatly.
What they did over the next decade was look for various ways to encourage (financially) recycling operations to work. You could sit and see how this was developing.
Some folks would come up and present this idea of shipping plastic out of the country to countries that they claimed....had a recycling program, but there was a need for money to ship the stuff out and there had to be some profit margin. This all got cooked up...some middle-guy was paid cash to pick up tons and tons of waste plastic....transport it to Hamburg, where it got dumped on medium-sized third-world freighters and it ‘disappeared’. The middle-guy got his cash....the boat owner got his cash...and it’s very likely that more than half of what got shipped out...was dumped in the Pacific.
They built an entire system that simply couldn’t handle the amount of plastic being used by society, and they couldn’t handle the idea of just burying it or burning it. It was all fake environmentalism.