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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...
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
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! --
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.