China and Japan are among the “ many, many countries ” flooding U.S. beaches with plastic waste. At least, that’s what President Trump said in late 2018 as he signed the first Save Our Seas Act. “All the time we’re being inundated by debris from other countries,” he stated, calling those other countries “abusers” and promising to crack down on them. “I will continue to do everything I can to stop other nations from making our oceans into their landfills.” Trump’s remarks — and much of the ongoing discussion about the United States’ responsibility to address the plastic pollution crisis — seem to be rooted in a landmark 2015 research paper that, for the first time, attempted to estimate how much ocean-bound plastic pollution was coming from which countries. That study used 2005 World Bank data on per capita waste generation and how much of that waste was plastic […]