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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."
As someone living in one of those states, they just need to be more thoroughly sorted, which you can barely make out of the poorly written and slanted article.
Keep making garbage until you drown in your own shit.
When the shit gets too high, export it to someone else and make it their problem.
When that fails, wring hands about how the problem is un-fixable, blame the government.
The US exporting their shit to the rest of the world is a pretty standard MO -- and if other countries stop accepting it, whine and complain about how unfair the world is, and then try to sue them under the WTO for 'unfairly restricting trade'.
The world isn't the dumping ground for America's garbage, and if you hadn't been exporting it for decades you'd be up to your eyeballs in it.
They'll have to dead head back to China with empty ships!
This story reminds me of the documentary "ShipBreakers" showing the plight of the Indian workers breaking down ships and dealing with the toxic and unsafe conditions. At one point a ship arrives that had been on a toxic list for a long time, had had it's name changed multiple times and was finally going to get scrapped in India because no other place on Earth would take it.
CBS 60 minutes did a story on it too but it was in Bangladesh and three years later than the documentary..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The problem is that the more complicated you get, the less it gets done. We have a central recycling area for our small town. Giant bins with clear descriptions of the material in large, friendly type.
While most people get it right (except the plastics which do get confusing), there is a significant number of idiots that don't understand the difference between plastic and glass, between steel and aluminum. Even when you have big ex-hard drive magnets for people to test the cans on.
And then there are the plastics. At least six types, many of which look similar. Most retail products do have the number stamped on the package. Somewhere. In a font that is all of 0.5 mm tall and blurry because it's actually stamped in the plastic. I doubt anyone over 50 can actually see the stupid things without some form of magnification.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When I was a small child in the early 70s, we still sent glass bottles back to the store to be re-used. Yes, they actually steam-cleaned soda bottles and re-used them. Crazy, eh?
I'm not sure what's more energy intensive though. A proper cleaning of the bottles to me implies raising them to some standard temperature long enough to kill pathogens. You also have to inspect them for damage and things that are stuck in the bottle even after the cleaning process. Huh? Well, we actually found a mass of what looked like shredded cardboard jammed into a bottle one time. People didn't try for litigation lotto as much back then; not without real honest damage anyway. We just sent it back for a refund.
Bottle deposits actually meant something. We always got the deposit back at the store, unlike now where you have to go to some sketchy recycling center and they weezle out of paying bottle-for-bottle, trying to make you pay by the pound. One caveat though--this was a PX--a military store on a base, so it might not have been like this in many civilian stores.
Wow, they are doing it wrong!
The incineration plant was 50 miles from the city that produces the garbage. The idea is to have the plant so close to the city that you can use the heat to heat houses in the winter. Also, the stuff they take in contains all kinds of stuff that doesn't really burn, the article mentions refrigrerators. Around here we recycle all kinds of stuff (and definately refridgerators) so that what is left in the dumpster burns very well.
And finally, saying that solar is cheaper may be true in the summer, but how will you heat houses in the winter with solar? Only run the plant during nights and winter or whatever are the peak hours. Obviously this will probably make the individual kwh:s even more expensive, but peak hour power is much more valuable when other sources are not enough.
I read a proposal where all garbage collection would be financed by a levy on goods based upon their disposal cost. While there are some real challenges in properly estimating disposal costs, it would make for an interesting incentive to create goods that are easier to recycle, and which come with less packaging.
I can see how it would also reduce incentives to innovate on the disposal end, so that would have to be taken into account. Perhaps a 50-50 split on the disposal cost.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Since we have mandated that everyone recycle and most people do not pay for their trash pickup, we have externalized the cost of disposing of trash. If people had to pay for the disposal of their trash AND there was a financial incentive to reward them for separating out the stuff that it is economically feasible to recycle, this would work much better. I remember as a child, my older brothers would collect various recyclables and take them to the recycling center for spending money. I did it for a little bit, but before I really got a system like my brothers had going the government mandated recycling and the recycling center stopped offering money for recyclables.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Here in Finland we actually have a very functional PET and glass bottle recycling system. When you buy a drink, your bottle contains a "PalPa" symbol (palautuspantti - english "return pawn" as in pawn shop) with price of the bottle. You pay this price on top of the drink when you make the purchase. Then you can return the bottle into machine at the shop that will read the bar code, recognize the worth of the bottle and print you a voucher for total value of all bottles, cans etc you return. You can use the voucher in the shop for your next purchase.
The old system which was mainly used for glass bottles was fairly complex. They had things like smell detectors used to detect if bottle was still not clean after washing cycle since you couldn't actually break the bottles - you reused the same ones. Many glass coca cola bottles sold here back then had distinct marks of wear on the outer sides where machine probably grabbed them for washing and refilling. They were apparently reused about 33 times on average before they were crushed and glass mass was reused. But the process was somewhat costly because of the smell detectors and other extra hardware needed to ensure safety of the returned bottles.
Nowadays PET bottles just get crumpled up by the machine itself and then sent to factory for melting and being recycled. According to wikipedia http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpa they get shredded and then reused as anything from new bottles to things like raincoats, bags and even ties.
Same thing is done for aluminum drink cans (apparently we have about 96% recycle rate on cans because of it).
The general idea is that you basically you pay a bit of extra for the container when you buy the product, and you get that money back by returning it into the machine at the shop. I.e. the container is pawned to your, and you get your money back when you return it for recycling. This creates strong incentives to recycle the product rather then just put it in the trash.
According to the article the 50 miles drive is one reason the plant is not competitive against cheap landfills. The garbage trucks need to drive 100 miles with each load.
Here (Finland, Europe) we have pipes that circulate almost boiling water in city and town centers. The plants can be a mile or two away and the losses are not too bad - the pipes are underground and they have a lot of polyurethane around them for insulation. The plants do produce both elecricity and heat.
It may be true that is Michigan it's not cold enough to make something like that worthwhile. Here we can easily have a month of -20C cold and in December days are 8 hours long, so solar just isn't not an option. During that time my house uses about 200kWh of heat a day - and it is well insulated. I am looking at ways to get as much as possible of that 200kWh from something other then electricity.
Semi-humorously, since WA state banned plastic bags, the stores have used that as an excuse to start charging for paper bags. Which are completely recyle-able. As though they decided to punish the voters for doing the right thing.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson