Developing nations generally leapfrog by adopting the latest generation of developed world tech.

Imagine people saying they didn't want to adopt mobile phones because developing nations didn't have traditional telephones yet.

This applies to both green tech and to green regulations. They'll look to the EU and China for that as the US is going this one alone again. China recycles 30% of its plastic compared with 12% in the US. Presumably they look at it as an engineering problem to solve and not a fake culture war to protect the oil industry.

Slightly older data here but the trend and the major outlier of the US visible here:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-plastic-waste-recyc...