Planet or Plastic | National Geographic Magazine: Sorted Plastic Waste

Colorful bottles caps create piles of drying plastic  along a riverbank. Families wash shredded plastic for profit organizing it by color for recycling in Bangladesh’s informal plastic waste industry. Their hand labor is more accurate than highly industrialized recycling in the USA and the labor costs $2-$4 a day.  Blue bottle caps are sorted from red bottle caps and they are sorted from the green bottle caps. A huge overburden of plastic is thrown away landing in the river and washing out into the Bay of Bengal.