So real talk, up until a little while ago, the global solution to recycling plastic was to dump it all into ISO containers and ship it off to China. At that point the plastics would be sorted into the types that it was profitable to melt down into pellets for new products, or it would just go in some landfill. The amount of pollution and costs to deal with that pollution got so bad in China, that the government put a ban on the importation of foreign plastics waste, leaving global North countries with the choice of pretending to recycle and landfilling everything, or finding some other developing country to offload their waste onto. Recycling their own plastic was not considered. Since recycling is dictated by the profit motive of which plastics it is profitable to recycle, there is a clear contradiction at play, since making new plastic is cheaper, so in any case there is no good solution.

Naturally, the increase in landfilling of waste in the west was blamed on China, since the west deems their responsibility in creating environmental disaster absolved under the contract of "we send you our filth and it's your job to take care of it because we paid you", especially if China would in turn landfill the waste.