The World's Recycling Is in Chaos. Here's What Has to Happen

[riversedge]

Single use plastics are the worse!!



“Reducing the amount of waste we generate in the first place is the most important thing we can do,”





Author: Cheryl KatzCheryl Katz
science
03.13.19
08:00 am

The World's Recycling Is in Chaos. Here's What Has to Happen



https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos-heres-what-has-to-happen/
Recycled materials being stacked at a facility in Costa Rica last June.
Ezequiel Becerra/Getty Images

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.

In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.

Globally, more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. In England, more than half a million more tons of plastics and other household garbage were burned last year. Australia’s recycling industry is facing a crisis as the country struggles to handle the 1.3 million-ton stockpile of recyclable waste it had previously shipped to China.

Across the United States, local governments and recycling processors are scrambling to find new markets. Communities from Douglas County, Oregon, to Hancock, Maine, have curtailed collections or halted their recycling programs entirely, which means that many residents are simply tossing plastic and paper into the trash. Some places, like Minneapolis, have stopped accepting black plastics and rigid No. 6 plastics like disposable cups. Others, like Philadelphia, are now burning the bulk of their recyclables at a waste-to-energy plant, raising concerns about air pollution.

https://media.wired.com/photos/5c886470c72573163b816f06/master/w_1132,c_limit/recycling-1070623890.jpg

Scrap metal at a dock in Liverpool, England, waiting to be exported.
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images


https://media.wired.com/photos/5c8866b192cce301f3dfae41/master/w_1132,c_limit/recycling-967157238.jpg

[democratisphere]

1. Part of the problem with contaminated recyclable plastics

is that Americans are too damn lazy to thoroughly wash and clean the recyclable plastic items. Plastics containing food and other residues are now thrown into landfills where the benefits of recycling are lost. We continue to be our own worst enemy.

[patricia92243]

2. Should we get back to glass and returns, etc for a refund.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. And just eliminate all the unnecessary packaging. I despise going

into a grocery where you can't buy a small amount of green beans, grapes, or potatoes because they're prepackaged.
Dump the plastic. It's unneeded in 90% of its usage.

[JayhawkSD]

4. I would agree with you.

But many government health departments would not. Customers repeatedly handling the food before one of them finally buys it means contamination. Ten, or a hundred, people pick up those green beans with their dirty hands and sort through them before you get there. They leave all sorts of contamination. Maybe you get all the contamination washed off before you use them, maybe you don't.

I'm willing to take responsibility for thoroughly cleaning the food I eat. Government is not willing to trust us to do so. Their position is that if we get sick we can hold the grocery store "responsible for dirty groceries." The consumer is never responsible for his own safety.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Funny how grocery stores were able to sell food without packaging for decades.

I grew up in the 40s and 50s. Back then even meat wasn't prepackaged.

[Igel]

9. "The consumer is never responsible for his own safety. "

And back then we were even aware that the plants we ate grew in fields. Bugs crawled on them. Birds shat on them.

You never knew who picked them--did they wear hair nets and wash their hands after scratching their butts? And those containers ... you can see the rotten crap on the inside, they didn't wash them out!

Meh. You take the plants home, you wash them well if you'll be eating them raw and perhaps not so well if you'll be cooking them.

I know people who will throw away a dozen eggs if they get them home from the store and forget to refrigerate them until the next day. This, after they've been washed and kept sanitary at every step of the way since being collected and washed. Those people go into shock when I say I got a bunch of eggs, didn't have room in the fridge, and didn't refrigerate them for two weeks. "But they're all rotten by now!" "No, they were fine. How's do you like the quiche I brought to the potluck?" And they realize one use I had for the eggs.

But seriously, you go to some places and the meat sits out at room temperature most of the day before you pick it up, take it home, and cook it. People aren't dying right and left. Then again, the animal was likely butchered the previous day or that morning, not last summer and stored someplace.

[JayhawkSD]

10. That's because people took responsibility for themselves back then.

As I was raised to do back when I grew up in the 40s and 50s. I was taught that my safety was my own responsibility, and that if I wanted to make sure my food was safe to eat then I needed to take step on my own to make sure that my food was safe to eat, such as washing it carefully.

We quit teaching kids things like that a couple of generations ago. Now it is the job of government to keep us safe from dirty food, not our own responsibility. The idea that we should be responsible for the cleanliness of the food we eat is nonsense - that's what we have a government for. Pitiful.

[ROB-ROX]

5. RECYCLING JUNK

I wonder why this great country does not convert one of the closed auto plants into a MAGA recycling plant? If China can do it, why don't WE do it here?? We have the rail and shipping to get the junk to the old auto plants!! We have the BRAINS to build a better recycling plant and then ship the materials all over the world. BAD RE-THUGS preventing a better world......

[JayhawkSD]

11. Because the jobs in those plants are hard, dirty work.

We don't have the brains to build a machine that will reliably separate types of materials. No one does. No such machinery has ever been invented. It has to be done mostly by hand, and the work is really nasty. Definitely "jobs that Americans don't want to do." You'd have to hire illegal immigrants to do it, but that's, um, illegal.

And the wages we pay are too high. At the wages we pay, recycled materials would cost more than original materials.

[Nitram]

6. Of course ""Reducing the amount of waste we generate in the first place is the most important

thing we can do.” But accepting the truth of that is not enough. We need to provide incentives for the development of alternative, bio-degradable or truly re-cyclable materials, and for industry and commerce to replace their use of plastic with them. Mapping that out is the real answer to "Here's What Has to Happen." We can do it, but it will be expensive and reduce profits in the short term.

[JayhawkSD]

12. Yes. We need to reduce consumption.

We don't need cars that get better mileage. We don't need electric cars. We need fewer cars by an order of magnitude. We need to reinvent our society to be one that does not revolve around cars. We need the car to be a very rare luxury - something that a person only experiences once or twice in a lifetime.

[Nitram]

14. I live in rural Virginia. There is no practical alternative to cars for rural areas. Bus lines

would have too few passengers to survive. You might consider that living on two acres of forested land, and recycling wastewater right on my own property, provides services to the environment that help make up for my carbon footprint. Btw, the topic here was re-cycling solid waste.

[JayhawkSD]

15. That's because you are not considering re-engineering.

The present social environment needs cars. I did not and do not dispute that. I am suggesting we need to re-engineer the social environment to one that does not need cars.

The comment to which I responded was yours which said that "reducing waste is the most important thing we can do." I was both agreeing and disagreeing with you. I was saying that we need to redefine "waste." Using cars the way we do is incredibly wasteful.

If you don't want me to actually think about things and enhance the conversation, if all you want is comments that, in effect, say "Yes I agree with you," then I will make a note and offer you nothing but mindless agreement.

[Nitram]

16. I didn't mean to offend you, Jay. The comment "reducing waste is the most important thing we can do"

was not mine, and I was responding to the fact that the OP did not offer solutions towards that end. Having worked in conservation for many years, specifically watershed management, I would never suggest that there is a "most important thing to do." I try not to reduce complex issues to simplistic slogans.

I can't understand why you think I "don't want [you] to actually think about things and enhance the conversation." I find it quite offensive that you think I would want "nothing but mindless agreement.' I'm going to assume you just got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.

[dalton99a]

8. Kick

[Blue_Tires]

13. Jesus...