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US States Banned From Exporting Trash To China Are Drowning In Plastic
hackingbear writes "Not only we depend on Chinese labor for the imports but we also depend on them to clean up our mess. Being green is getting a lot harder for eco-friendly states in the U.S., thanks to the country's dependency on overrun Chinese recycling facilities since the start of China's Green Fence policy this year. Recycling centers in Oregon and Washington recently stopped accepting clear plastic "clamshell" containers used for berries, plastic hospital gowns and plastic bags, while California's farmers are grappling with what to do with the 50,000 to 75,000 tons of plastic they use each year. The Green Fence initiative bans bales of plastic that haven't been cleaned or thoroughly sorted. That type of recyclable material, which costs more to recycle, often it ends up in China's landfills, which have become a source of recent unrest in the country's south. For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic. That has helped build 'trash mountains' so high they sometimes bury people alive. For a country facing environmental crisis after environmental crisis, it is no longer tenable to accept US waste exports."
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
NIMBY.
No sig today...
"For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic."
That's okay, the toxic stuff was all stuff they made and sold to us anyways.
No one forced the Chinese to buy the trash in the first place.
Yes, that's what was happening - the Chinese were willfully BUYING it, trying to make money by recycling it.
So get over your childish "America is teh EVUL" and grow the fuck up.
> They'll have to dead head back to China with empty ships!
Exports?
I know, crazy idea.
Modern incinerators are so clean, they rarely even emit visible steam.
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
Dioxin and other ''invisible" nasties, perhaps? Those stable substances have to go somewhere. And putting them in the atmosphere, although a time honored tradition, isn't really a good idea.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We have activist groups who are so insistent on a perfect solution, that they will fight and poo-poo any less then optimal solution to the problem.
There was a way to make biodegradable plastic from corn. However they fought against it because it mean Bio-engineered corn. We have Nuclear Energy which has a better safety record then Fossil fuels, but they are bitching and moaning because of the radioactive waste problem. We could burn our garbage but we create carbon to add to global warming.
We can't go back to living in a preindustrial way, we can make decisions because they focus so much on the trade offs, for every decision.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's what they want us to do, but *after* we've done some of the leg work to actually sort the stuff. Given that so many Americans put garbage in recycling bins with utter abandon, it's really no surprise the Chinese got fed up with us.
This is /. , why isn't there some hipster maker with a kickstartr to build a arduinio-driven robot recycling bin that can sort our plastics for us?!!! It should use a dirigible to go door-to-door soliciting refuse and dispensing bitcoins, which, at the customer's option can be donated to the EFF.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
That sounds just like a levy on processes based on their carbon production - the exact kind of regulation that supports public good while enabling capitalism to work with it. In other words, exactly the kind of thing that everyone seems to hate.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
My question is: In a time where everyone is screaming, "Green!!!", why is every little object packaged in a large plastic case 10 times the size of the little object?
Not only is it an obvious waste, it is incredibly irritating to have to break out tools to extract a purchase.
Funny experience was watching a person at an airport wrestle with a sealed package with a bluetooth headset inside. (Of course no one has anything sharp because the only good human is a helpless one) They ended up cutting their hand on the packaging before they got it open.
!!! Wait!!! Doesn't that mean that plastic packaging should be banned from airports as it can obviously cut someone?
Chemo is correct.
What most people fail to understand is we recycle even food waste in Seattle, which you put in with the yard waste.
When I moved here in the late 80s, used to be the largest bin you put out was Garbage, the next largest was bottles, and once in a while you put out paper.
Nowadays the largest bin we put out is recycling, the next largest is compostable yard waste - which includes food waste like seafood shells, chicken bones, food soiled paper napkins/plates. A lot of forks and knives and spoons and cups you buy here are Compostable - we throw them in the yard waste.
Most of us barely fill a very small plastic shopping bag with garbage - about the size of the thing your newspaper comes in.
Adapt. Pollution has a cost.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If people have to pay variable amounts for trash disposal, they will cheat. I.e. the poor will toss their trash over someone's fence to save money. Try living in a city where even 1% do that.
Instead, add fees/taxes when new materials are used for products/containers. That way, the money exists when the materials become trash.
Nope. This is all plastic. If it were iron, we could recycle it much more easily.
Hidden in your humor is root of the real problem.
Look at anything supposedly made out of recycled plastics and you see just totally ridiculous prices.
Compared to wood or steel, similar sized playground equipment, picnic tables, lawn furniture, always is at least a third more expensive, (even when purchased from the same company), just by virtue of being made out of recycled material.
Its not clear if this is predatory pricing or the actual cost of re-refinement exceeds the price of new materials. If recycled material really does cost that much more, then maybe we ought to be looking for ways to cleanly burning this material for electrical power generation, rather than make new things out of a more expensive resource.
In the mean time, modern land fills (or mountains) of bailed plastic may as good a way of stockpiling it until the recycle technology catches up. Grinding it and dumping it in the ocean is clearly the wrong way.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.