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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.
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.
Nope. This is all plastic. If it were iron, we could recycle it much more easily.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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?
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.