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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."
And put it all there.
There. I fixed it.
I heard India is having an economic crisis right now...
I'm doing my part to keep from burying innocent folks in China!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
In a capitalist society someone would take the initiative to find a use for this plastic, or at least weaponize the toxic waste. In a socialist society they just stack it up until it falls over and kills people. We should send them some copies of Wall-E so they can learn to stack garbage safely. Does anyone have a copy on DVD?
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"
Guys, lots of other countries use incinerators for non-recyclable stuff. You get rid of it, and get electricity and heat as a bonus. Modern incinerators are so clean, they rarely even emit visible steam.
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Time to throw money at these people... http://www.plastic2oil.com/site/home
Or use that process that burns it at very high temps. I think that's even net energy positive.
I'd also like to see those stupid clamshell packages banned. Fucking hate those so hard... You shouldn't need a bandsaw or special knife to open crap.
China manufactures all our stuff then packages it and ships it to us. We take our stuff out of the packages and ship the waste material back to China to be recycled into packaging for the next ship load of stuff.
"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.
"slashdot", I don't see any N, P, or R in that.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The problem with all those greenies. They are willing to be green about everything until it becomes their turn to sacrifice then they throw their hands up get in the private jets that burn more feul in onme day then a family of four does for 10 years and say "Oh well."
"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 in the first place.
After reading it over several times, it still isn't making sense in my head: "US States Banned From Exporting Trash To China Are Drowning In Plastic" "United States States Banned from Exporting Trash To China Are Drowning In Plastic" Huh?
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Much gets landfilled, other stuff is sorted poorly to where it is not easily recyclable. In my city we do not have single stream, but what we can put in the recycle bin is limited to type 1 &2 plastic, three colors of glass, and basic paper/carboard. The rest, I don't know where it goes, to thellandfill or single stream style sorting. Personally I sort it into a seperate bin and there is a local recycling center sponsored by the county that I take it to when it gits too big. Unfortunately, there is talk of shutting that free center down. Ergo, more crap in the landfill or for china.
The best thing to do is reduse what you can. I reuse nearly everything possible, but it still leaves alot.
Silence is a state of mime.
"it is no longer tenable to accept US waste exports."
It's no longer tenable to live the way Americans do.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
"slashdot", I don't see any N, P, or R in that.
Apart from the fact that, counting the subject, you mentioned 'P' twice: What?
Oregon and Washington are so green they won't accept recyclable plastic because it's actually too hard to recycle?
Long signatures suck.
That has helped build 'trash mountains' so high they sometimes bury people alive
Great, now I can't get the scene from Idiocracy out of my head that involves the garbage avalanche.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
Filabot craves plastic!
A video explaining plastic to oil conversion. I noticed in the video that all the plastics were perfectly clean. Recycle bins are a lot dirtier. How much water would have to be used in this process to clean the plastics? Can the poisonous gases generated be burned off safely? Interesting tech, anyway.
"California's farmers are grappling with what to do with the 50,000 to 75,000 tons of plastic they use each year."
This country has gone insane. They really can't think of an alternative solution? What were they doing before plastic? Did people just walk up to the farm and have farmers throw the food into their mouths? Jeez...
The story is about China refusing to accept US plastic, not about the US refusing to send the plastic.
"slashdot", I don't see any Nitrogen , Phosphorus, or Rhodium in that.
WTF are you rambling on about iii?! An Rhodium is Rh, you nimrod!
Time to face the music and deal with the garbage produced, instead of making it somebody else's problem.
Privacy is terrorism.
So, if you dig a really deep hole in China, do they say "You're going to dig all the way to the US."
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The problem is that they expect the other 95% to pony up the money for the same services they feel are worthwhile. It's easy to ask for a recycling fee of $50/mo to cover manual sorting, cleaning, and processing of the stream when you make 6 figures. The backlash comes from the non-green who have then money but don't give a shit and the every-day folks for whom $50/mo requires a significant change to their budget.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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
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
I don't have a clue what Europeans do, but I do know what they do in Afghanistan. I would love to see an Afghan be teleported through time and space to the local "transfer station" here in my neck of the woods, just for an hour to sit there and watch what we do with all our "junk." If he had no opinion about America before then, he would initially feel confusion...then disbelief...then incredulity...then anger...and finally he would return home with hatred in his heart for us and everything we stand for.
The past two weeks I have been working down there doing "community service." All day long, every single day, people come through this facility with perfectly usable items, which they then throw right into the crusher. Brand new and perfectly usable lumber, appliances, camp stoves, clothes, books, electrical wire, chairs and other furniture, big mirrors, high dollar insulation, brand new mattresses, you name it, you will see it there being thrown out.
The first day I worked there I, full of naivete, thought I could help right these wrongs by loading up my own truck with any items I could use. The next day I got my ass ripped and told by the head bitch in charge that we are not allowed to take ANYTHING even if the person moans about the waste of throwing out perfectly good items and explicitly offers it to us. The lady told me a story about somebody who was there doing the same thing as me, except he was putting a little work into the items then turning around and selling them on Craigslist. So let me get this straight...the guy was rescuing perfectly good items from being destroyed, putting a little labor labor into them, then finding people who needed these useful items, thus making the world a better place for everyone involved? Oh the HORROR!
This place was built with $2 million of tax payer dollars. It's one of the most inefficiently run operations I've ever seen. Give me $2 million and I will build a place across the street from it that is 10x more efficient and much less wasteful. I suggested they set up a table where people could turn in good usable items rather than crush them. 80% of their customers would appreciate that, but making such a suggestion is a waste of time cause these folks don't fucking care. Here we are in the 2nd Great Depression and they are content to further their own destruction by destroying usable resources which are needed and wanted by the multitudes of poor people struggling just to get by.
Actions have consequences. Resources are not finite. The day is coming soon when this wicked system will come to an end. Each and every one of these cock suckers who work at this facility, who frown on me cause I tried to buck the system, these douchebags who drive their big ass souped up fancy diesel trucks (all financed of course) in an illusion of wealth, while gleefully crushing and destroying real wealth without a care in the world, will one day soon come to regret their stupidity and wastefulness. I hope each and every one of them starves to death in the gutter as they contemplate the mountains of good usable stuff they willfully destroyed in their lifetimes.
P.S. In this Bizarro world we live in, you can toss out somebody's perfectly good microwave or blender and they won't bat an eye, but just try grabbing that one bag of glass or plastic recycles and start to toss it, and see how loudly and quickly they scream about it!
It's just a bunch of polymeric hydrocarbons... bury it in the ground until you know what to do with it.
I used to be scared of plastics, but after looking at the chemistry the only thing I worry about is plastic in the wrong place(i.e. - around a seabird or in the gyres). Sure, the polymerizing catalysts can sometimes be scary, and some plasticizers like BPA can have minor effects, but generally plastic is OK in my book.
Hell, once I understood what plastic was it became really cool. It's like they found a way to turn crap into useful products. Hydrogen and carbon...
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
the answer seems so obvious. others have posted it. incinerate. put R&D into incineration techniques; how to make it cleaner, how to capture the gases that are released and RECYCLE them.
Power for the sake of power. And I do hope you noted what provides the fuel for that misuse of power...
Remember that the next time you vote.
... at least that what the story sounds like.
Read about it here on /. back in 2009. Newsworthy because a 16-year-old found it.
Here is the article.
"Don't put your trash in my backyard, my backyard, my backyard.
Don't put your trash in my backyard, my backyard's full!"
More to the point, if throwing stuff away starts getting expensive, maybe that will change the economics around so that people will do less of it and stop designing stuff to be thrown away. Or if we're talking about recycling systems, how about *gasp* building recycling plants here in the US?
I am officially gone from
The ideal to strive for is to not make any container that will survive much longer than the product in it.
Basically it's called Externality Pricing, a key component of Real Capitalism, as opposed to pollution-subsidizing Mercantilism.
Pollution has a cost.
We already make - and use on our giant campus - compostable biodegradeable organic clamshells and food containers. We do the same for "plastic" bags.
We even make bendable bioorganic photovoltaic cells that can wrap around buildings, cars, etc.
Adapt. The time for complaining is over.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
This should be mandatory reading to pass high school: http://perc.org/articles/eight-great-myths-recycling-no-28
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Seriously, USA was not just the start of recycling, but owned it. Now, because of the cheap labor of china, combined with cheap labor of illegals, we have allowed ourselves to lose out. It is time to restart home-grown recycling, but then add new demand for it. This is easier to do than it looks.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
1. Find poverty stricken country
2. Bribe officials
3. Send plastic and while you are at it any other kind of waste, including Pu
4. Profit
Didn't think the "????" was needed.
It's been done with Africa already.
There are now lots of machines that convert waste plastic into pellets/strings for use in fabricators. We just have to start expanding their use and the use of the fabricators.
We are being held back from acceptable solutions to this problem by big business (yet again). Cargill (among others) has a major interest in pushing corn-based plastics (PLA). The problem is that PLA does more harm to the environment than fossil-based plastics. These large, corn-biased corporations have lots of funding to influence government regulations, as well as to market their own initiatives like the BPI (biodegradable plastics institute). Not only is PLA bad for the environment, it's a poor replacement for plastic, that doesn't fit many of the uses we have for plastic.
There are bio-based additives that you can put in plastic that make them biodegradable in the presence of microbes (landfills, water, etc). Plastics made with these additives are essentially the same as the originating plastic (PE, PP, PET, etc), and are perfect to use as a replacement for regular plastic in almost every application. As soon as there's a ground swell of support for actually fixing this problem, we'll realize that there already is a solution. It's a shame it hasn't happened already.
Joe and the volcano seemed like a good idea, what is stopping them from trying this...run up the side of the volcano, dump the stuff in, and run back down for the next load, & repeat!, Eventually, you will be able to close off the volcano completely, no?
John Galt may be imaginary, but I believe John Frum will return!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
I need to recycle the lens-less eye glasses as well.
The cost of recycling is directly related to the energy required to break down various complex substances and construct other substances from them. So, anything can be recycled easily if we have enough cheap energy to throw at the problem. I will offer the modest suggestion that the areas of the USA where we can generate lots of solar and wind power, places that lack the infrastructure for distributing their energy production to other places, should be places where we build recycling facilities, where we would send lots of trash to be converted into raw materials. Think of the phrase "Industrial Ecology", defined as "a system in which the waste products of every industrial process become the feed-stocks of other industrial processes". In this case the first "industrial process" is the huge-scale trash-generation of society's consumers. And the "other industrial processes" in this case would be the recycling plants.
Maybe we could burn the plastic we cannot recycle in coal-fired power plants. We produce 32 million tons of plastic waste a year, but burn one billion tons of coal. If the coal feed had 3% plastic added to it the entire waste stream would be consumed while producing some electricity, and slightly reducing the CO2-to-energy output ratio.
http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/plastics.htm http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/coal.cfm
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Shred it up into pellets, melt it down and use it to make more plastic stuff, like spools of 3d printer material?
I don't recall having ever seen any sort of video or tv presentation or read an article or seen anything that clearly explains why its important to CLEAN your plastic recyclables. Now of course you can't leave food in it; thats common sense. But suppose I get done eating a rotisserie chicken in a plastic bag that has leftover chicken-juice clinging to the inside of the bag, I wanna know why I gotta go to the trouble of cleaning all that stuff out of there because its a bother and common sense tells me that its just gonna be burned off and vaporized in a melting process somewhere alone the line. And I can't think that the leftover remains of burnt chicken juice is going to make the entire recycling plant fall apart. So please explain WHY you're rejecting my somewhat-dirty plastic please.
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
Good god, stop recycling because currently we suck at it. Just bury the stuff in a hole and let robots unpack it and sort it in 100 or 200 years.
You fools are like people in 1800 worrying about what to do with all the horse shit.
Seriously. No, seriously.
No, seriouysly. I even spelled it wrong for you.
Still there fuming? Good. Read this: No, seriously.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
certain products if they are not in certain packages, based on some combination of physical size/shape AND value AND likelihood to be shoplifted. If you have purchased a small electronic gadget in one of those big clear plastic sharp-edged ultrasonically-welded clamshells, don't get mad at the manufacturer... the retailer probably demanded it (that happened to some products I designed). The line used was, essentially, "put it in a welded clamshell like this or we won't stock it because we'll be unable to control the shoplifting"
The technology has existed for years. Pilot plants have been shut down due to astroturf campains by dump operators and oil companies.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thermal depolymerization (TDP) is a depolymerization process using hydrous pyrolysis for the reduction of complex organic materials (usually waste products of various sorts, often biomass and plastic) into light crude oil. It mimics the natural geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels. Under pressure and heat, long chain polymers of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon decompose into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons with a maximum length of around 18 carbons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
In the "Out-Of-Sight-Out-Of-Mind-And-Poof!-We're-Green!" states of the United States (where trash, body-fat and war-materials are just about all that's home manufactured anymore), like Oregon, there are homeless people, who have lost everything in the wake of losing jobs that were exported to Southeast Asia for cheapness of labor and disregard for manufacturing produced environmental damage over there, who are out and about every day, in all weathers, most often for long hours, picking through trash looking for recyclables that have deposit-values. The deposits, paid by consumers and tossed with the deposit-valued container, are those homeless' sole sources of income. So let's put deposit premiums on all formed plastic likely to become waste, to make it become attractive to intelligent purchasers to recycle, and of value to the homeless when the can' t-be-bothered throw away. The homeless will pick up and return anything that can pay something for being returned, and so for the mere cost to you of deposit values will pick it up for you.
If Americans want to be a "clean" and "green" nation, let the dumpm drop and pitch population put money where their mouhs are. Let the homeless become flung-trash bounty hunters.
Why not? We got the technology
Didn't the plastic originate from China in the first place, oh the irony! I think the US govt. should tell the Chinese govt. if they don't accept our recycled trash, we won't accept their plastic products.
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It'd make the world of difference:
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/recycling/blogs/sweden-runs-out-of-garbage-forced-to-import-from-norway
Spend the extra 10 cents and use materials for packaging that don’t cause this problem (like biodegradable materials). The manufacturer needs to step up to the plate and only offer these matrials just as the consumer must step up to the plate and only buy the same.
The "poorer" country isn't anymore due to the other country committing economic suicide, and they are both firmly capitalist, just one believes in savings and the other was hoping for infinite credit.
It's about time that the lazy Americans start an honoust job again and clean up their own mess instead of dumping it on the rest of the world.
Iam writing from South Korea
The garbage disposal system here is very organized. At my appartment every individual has to seggregate garbage based on plastic bottles, plastic covers, glass bottles, cola cans, paper, cardboards and food waste.
While all other items are free to dispose, food waste is charged. We have a RFID card which we use to swipe the food waste machine, the door opens and you throw the food waste in, not the plastic cover you got the contents :)
The food garbage machine weighs the contents you put in, and closes the door. Finally at the end of month you are charged based on how much food waste you threw out.
As an individual it feels a little cumbersome to me, but on a larger scale it makes much more sense :)
Makes sense. If everyone now asks for a paper bag, then their paper bag expenses must have gone up by a huge amount. So they charge.
An alternative to dumping plastic waste is to convert is back to usable oil:
http://www.flixxy.com/convert-plastic-to-oil.htm
I wonder what percentage of that plastic trash originated in China in the first place, and is merely returning "home"?
changes the "poor China" story a bit when it's their chickens coming home to roost.
Regulate non renewable resources so that they are only used for important products like food safety, sanitation, medicine, scientific research, engineering, etc. No more junky toys, holiday crap, trendy fashion and excessive packaging.
http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle.html
"Less than 10% of plastic trash is recycled -- compared to almost 90% of metals -- because of the massively complicated problem of finding and sorting the different kinds. Frustrated by this waste, Mike Biddle has developed a cheap and incredibly energy efficient plant that can, and does, recycle any kind of plastic"
This is an engineering problem, But Greens love to pass laws and use state power to control people, don't they?
Austin, TX had an offer for FREE recycling; the company would have make a profit on the material. Disposal cost $0.00 ! But of course, being a green city, we rejected the offer and went with a company that costs us ~$900,000 per year to ship it to a MRF (Material Recycling Facility) on the other side of Texas based on a contract that assumes the worst gasoline prices ever seen in this decade. Other cities in Texas actually get money out of this company for their waste, but not us!
Let them drown in their own refuse - then maybe they will hesitate before producing even more of it
gosgog:
A few months back I read in I think BBC News, online, that a young Pakistani Engr, living , if I remember rightly,in the U.S. he & a Buddy had developed a system that would consume all plastics and the end product could then be used to develop energy. So, it seems to me that somewhere in the U.S. a capital resource outfit should jump on this....then, all old used plastics could be converted into full use...Energy! & the U.S. Environment would improve and plastic garbage would not need to be shipped elsewhere.