Plastic in the ocean Credit Shutterstock

There are millions of tons of plastic floating around in the world’s oceans — between 10 and 30 billion pounds of it, to be imprecise — and more than half of it comes from just five countries.

Those countries are China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, (emphasis added)according to a report from the Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment. Here’s why these countries are on the hook for up to 60 percent of the world’s ocean plastic, from GlobalPost:

As Asian economies rise, people have more cash to blow on Marlboros and Sprites at 7-Eleven. But the junk these habits produce often doesn’t end up in legit landfills.

In the five Asian countries listed above, only about 40 percent of garbage is properly collected. Across Asia, trash is often piled up in communal dumps where stray bits are swept up by the wind and cast into the ocean.

Even sanctioned garbage dump sites are sometimes intentionally set up near rivers that flow […]