UK 'Faces Build-up of Plastic Waste' (bbc.com)

The UK's recycling industry says it doesn't know how to cope with a Chinese ban on imports of plastic waste. From a report: Britain has been shipping up to 500,000 tonnes of plastic for recycling in China every year, but now the trade has been stopped. At the moment the UK cannot deal with much of that waste, says the UK Recycling Association. Its chief executive, Simon Ellin, told the BBC he had no idea how the problem would be solved in the short term. "It's a huge blow for us... a game-changer for our industry," he said. "We've relied on China so long for our waste... 55% of paper, 25% plus of plastics. "We simply don't have the markets in the UK. It's going to mean big changes in our industry." China has introduced the ban from this month on "foreign garbage" as part of a move to upgrade its industries.

Comments

Not surprising, really.

[Mal-2]

China now produces plenty of waste of their own, and they are struggling to handle their own volume of garbage. It's no surprise they would stop accepting anyone else's.

There's always Africa, right?

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Time for plastic roadways! There's already a pilot project in the UK.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[ShanghaiBill]

China now produces plenty of waste of their own, and they are struggling to handle their own volume of garbage.

The only labor intensive part is the separating. I spent 4 months in China last year (2017), and the garbage sorting requirements are strict, with fines for failure to comply. It seemed like everyone was sorting properly, at least where I was living (Shanghai/Pudong).

There's always Africa, right?

Cheap labor is only part of the problem. You also need the industrial infrastructure to process and use the recycled plastic. A big advantage in China, is that the production of plastic is very close to the demand for it.

It would have been nice if China had phased out their recycling more slowly, to give the rest of the world time to adapt.

The real solution is not recycling, but reduction in the use of so much plastic crap in the first place. Many things I buy have more packaging than product.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[CrimsonAvenger]

It would have been nice if China had phased out their recycling more slowly, to give the rest of the world time to adapt.

Why? This way they can expect some concessions in exchange for phasing it out. If they'd just announced that they were going to phase things out over two years, the UK would have had time to adapt, and no real need to make nice with China in trade talks or whatever....

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Slashdot Junky]

The western world has had plenty of time to adapt. The problem is our allowing money to dictate policy and price. We have been able ship our waste on to other people and their territories all along and keep consuming without paying the true price of said consumption. With virgin sources of plastic and other first-use resources being cheaper, we have not yet been forced by "free markets" to adapt. Landfills will be our only exploitable "natural resources" one day. Re-use, recycling, and reduction will be the only practical option for all but the wealthy in time if we're still here.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Opportunist]

You can either recycle it ... or put it somewhere. And Africa is big.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[hazardPPP]

The real solution is not recycling, but reduction in the use of so much plastic crap in the first place. Many things I buy have more packaging than product.

This. Exactly this.

People assume plastic is easily recyclable, because collecting e.g. plastic bottles for recycling is so ubiquitous. However, of the four "recyclables" we all think of when we think of our garbage (metal, paper, glass, plastic), plastic is the least recyclable. For example, the most common type of plastic bottles - PET bottles - hardly ever get recycled into new plastic bottles. They get turned into other, usually lower-grade products. So while we are reusing the PET material, we are not really "recycling" the PET bottles. We can truly recycle paper - make old paper into paper - as well as glass bottles - make new ones out of old ones - and aluminium cans - ditto. While we can make a glass bottle over and over again from the same pieces of glass, we cannot do this with plastic bottles - so most plastic bottles are made out of "virgin" plastic.

Furthermore, you can't just throw different types of plastics together, melt 'em, and get something usable (like you can with many metals), because such plastic mixtures are structurally weak (due to the phase separation of the different plastics). This means that proper sorting is key to recycling plastic. Furthermore, this means that some "exotic" plastic compounds made for a particular application (i.e. those not super-common like PET or PE) will end up in the landfill (or floating in the ocean) despite someone conscientiously throwing it initially in the recycling bin. Plastic has low value and plastics that are not produced in extremely high quantities are not lucrative for recycling.

We need to be aggressive about reducing the amount of plastic packaging used: we should go as far as banning it. A lot of plastic packaging is just simply unnecessary, a lot of other plastic packaging can be replaced with paper, metal, or glass packaging. In my book the worst offender is the transparent "product-shaped" type of packaging that allows you to see the product (but is actually totally useless, since you can't open it without destroying the package...so what's the point?). Most of those products can be placed inside a cardboard box. That can be opened and closed...the vendor can have one product on display (like is usually the case anyway), the rest can be in non-transparent cardboard boxes. This type of packaging needs to be banned everywhere, ASAP.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re-use, recycling, and reduction will be the only practical option for all but the wealthy in time if we're still here.

Isn't that the whole point? Why would anyone recycle if there was no value in it? It's been terrifically difficult for the eco-warriors to make it valuable for people to recycle. This is nothing but a step in the right direction.

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

So our great grandfathers had it right. Live off the land and recycle/upcycle items.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Slashdot Junky]

Why would anyone recycle if there was no value in it?

Selfish people don't get the value in reducing, reuse, and recycling, because this requires an long-term view. It requires consideration for others that are here today and that are to come. A side from this, those of us lucky enough to have real choice can choose to do something that is best for society even when it isn't best for us, especially in the moment. We can choose to do something that is good for the planet and the other creatures and plants with which we share it. Now, we can, instead, still be selfish assholes and live differently to do our part to make the planet a better place now and in the future for just those that we care about, our families and friends' families. We can be even more selfish by doing what we can now to protect the world we'll be living in as we age. It will just be better for society and the planet for us to do more by not being so selfish. I have little faith in mankind despite our potential to be better. Actually, I see little potential as I believe humans' selfishness is too deeply ingrained.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Applehu Akbar]

Time for plastic roadways! There's already a pilot project in the UK.

Here in Arizona we have rubber freeways. No more ugly, flammable piles of old tires.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Applehu Akbar]

Let's develop ways of digesting plastic back to simple hydrocarbons, so we can re-polymerize them into usable new plastics.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to be aggressive about reducing the amount of plastic packaging used: we should go as far as banning it. A lot of plastic packaging is just simply unnecessary, a lot of other plastic packaging can be replaced with paper, metal, or glass packaging.

Glass and paper are just as bad as plastic, just in different ways.

The processes used to recycle paper and glass generate millions of tons of toxic waste every year, which then gets dumped into landfills. The process used for recycling motor oil generates enormous amounts of toxic waste and in the US the official EPA-approved method for disposing of the waste is to burn it. Some of the biggest polluters, companies who have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars by the EPA, are recycling centers.

Except for metal recycling, all recycling generates so much toxic waste and air pollution that it's actually less harmful to just throw everything into landfills.

I'm not saying that just throwing everything into landfills is a good idea, but the inconvenient truth is that reducing production and consumption the only thing that's going to actually solve the problem and not create new, even worse problems.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Arizona we have rubber freeways. No more ugly, flammable piles of old tires.

Just roads on fire belching noxious black smoke.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[nwf]

It's much easier, cheaper and probably better for the environment to grind plastic and burn it. It can be done cleanly at scale. Plus, people who use plastic typically need electricity. Shipping it half-way around the world to pay people to manually sort icky garbage is not a long-term solution.

We burn plastic here in Eastern Pennsylvania because it's basically worthless, but I'm not sure why they don't just open it up to all types of plastic instead of just HDPE and PET.

There's no good way to recycle rechargeable batteries, small amount of copper and other metals, either.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plastic waste is a symptom of a more general problem.

At the moment if you are a manufacturer/retailer and you take time to make your products easier to dispose of than your competitors. Then they might get a little marketing nudge, but they are also likely to become more expensive/less functional/attractive because of material restrictions etc. You'll have these difficulties but you will probably end paying the same taxes as your non-green competitors. Similarly for your customers, there's no immediate upside beyond feeling a bit virtuous. Basically for most products there are currently few incentives to consider the end of a products, everyone pays for the mess.

I think the solution would be for manufacturers and retailers to pay up front for the cost of the dealing with their end of life products. Use a market to determine the price, whatever. The polluter should pay and If creating environmental disasters had a direct impact of their bottom lines of then the situation would change very quickly.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always assumed that not being able to open it without destroying the package was the point. It probably discourages returns.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[William Baric]

When I was born, there was 3.5 billion people on this planet. Now there is about 7.5 billion people. Because of technological progress, we could all live a great life. Unfortunately, "selfish" people decided to have children.

Because I decided to never have children, even if I'd drive a hummer and never cared about recycling, I would still be less "selfish" than people who chose to have children.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[CanadianMacFan]

China has stopped taking the West's "recycling" because it was too contaminated for them to use and it went to their garbage stream. It wasn't just one day China said that they weren't going to take the plastics. It's been a long time of them having to say that the stuff being sent over wasn't being prepared properly. If we in the West would separate it properly then China would gladly take it. But to make the programs work we have to tell people to throw it all into one box and then invent mechanical separators because there's a limit to the number of people you can have doing the job manually. (The cost has to be kept down so that's one limit but also not many people want to spend the picking through recycling.)

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Banning things: When your ideas are so good you have to enforce them at the point of a gun.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[sydbarrett74]

Like this?

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to hollywood they are.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[sydbarrett74]

This is exactly what Paul Hawken advocates in his book, The Ecology of Commerce . The EU has been busy establishing a framework for manufacturer responsibility for the life-cycle of products. The company Interface Carpet has gone from selling carpet to selling a carpeting service. What they realised is that most people (aside from collectors and aesthetes) don't care about the product itself, but the services it renders.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flamebait maybe, but he has a point :-) I think I read that. Just a single child produces massive amounts of pollution in a lifetime.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[TheRaven64]

Burn them and you'll get simple hydrocarbons, plus carbon dioxide and water (and maybe carbon monoxide if you don't burn them with enough oxygen). In some cases, that might be the best option. We're not short of carbon, hydrogen, or oxygen, we're short of energy to turn them into useful things.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[TheRaven64]

I think the solution would be for manufacturers and retailers to pay up front for the cost of the dealing with their end of life products

This is difficult to do well. Computers sold in the EU include a fee paid by the manufacturer to cover the cost of recycling, but it's a flat rate per product class so there's little incentive to produce one that's cheaper to recycle. For something that's expected to be recycled 3 or more years in the future (unlike a plastic bottle, which is expected to be recycled a few days after it's sold), working out a sensible cost can be quite tricky. You should also factor lifetime into the calculation. If two manufacturers make smartphones with identical components, I'd rather that the one that guarantees 5 years of security updates pays less than the one that guarantees 3, because the best way of reducing recycling costs is not to throw the thing away in the first place.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, just maybe its time to clean off the cobwebs, chuck a pint of oil in the sump and crank the old engine of local industry. Anyone still remember how to drive this thing?

Re:Not surprising, really.

[sa1lnr]

Indeed, I curse the selfish people that chose to have you.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[drinkypoo]

We burn plastic here in Eastern Pennsylvania because it's basically worthless, but I'm not sure why they don't just open it up to all types of plastic instead of just HDPE and PET.

Probably because those are easiest for the scrubbers to handle. PVC for example releases dioxin when burned. At high enough temperatures it's destroyed, but those temps are very high and they are difficult to guarantee throughout a combustion chamber at atmospheric pressure.

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then, become a true angel and apply for euthanasia.

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not murdering people would be a good idea. But forget it, imposing laws is for pussies!

Re:Not surprising, really.

[vlad30]

One of the problems is theft ever noticed how high value items like razor blades are in big packages to big to stuff in normal pockets, well until pockets got bigger

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Barsteward]

"There's no good way to recycle rechargeable batteries,small amount of copper and other metals, either. " are you sure about that, there are companies out there doing just that.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, so stupidly the "best" solution to this is to bury the sorted plastics in sorted landfill.
They won't degrade, and in 50 years time we can mine them for concentrated hydrocarbons when the rest of the world is having to dig up and process their general mixed waste at much higher cost!

Re: Not surprising, really.

[MachineShedFred]

There is no benefit to China being "nice" - in fact, there is strategic advantage to them not being nice and cutting people off, which is why they did it. When smaller nations that consume in excess of what they can domestically handle, China will be in a better negotiating position once the smaller nation is swimming in waste plastics.

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

...if you are a manufacturer/retailer and you take time to make your products easier to dispose of than your competitors...

Skepticism is another big issue.

I wouldnâ(TM)t mind paying more if I thought that the âoemoreâ went into actually doing what they say, and not just âoegreen washingâ by offloading the lie of doing the right thing to another organization.

I donâ(TM)t consider it proper recycling to toss my electronics into an enormous pile in a 3rd world country where desperate residents poison and injure themselves and their local environment trying to extract the few trace elements of value.

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't laugh, it covers the coal plant emissions, and makes the sunsets beautiful!

Re:Not surprising, really.

[hazardPPP]

Let's develop ways of digesting plastic back to simple hydrocarbons, so we can re-polymerize them into usable new plastics.

That would be really great, since there is certainly a lot of unrecycled plastic gunk (and will continue to be for the foreseeable future) to work with. However, long-term, this is curing the symptom rather than the disease. Also, it's been tried, sydbarrett74 below posted a link about thermal depolymerization (TDP). I don't know the current state of that technology.

I always thought that the disease will be cured by itself due to peak oil & gas, that it will just become uneconomical to dig up oil to make plastics out of it. Now that it looks like renewables might displace oil before peak oil actually hits, I'm not so sure. There might end up being a glut of oil that's cheap since it's not used for energy as much, and using it as a raw material might still make sense 50 years in the future, say. Which means more plastic crap.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Applehu Akbar]

And for, if nothing else, carbon fiber as a construction material.

Re: Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm thoroughly shamed to share a race with pathetic cunts like yourself. But hey ho, pick ourselves up and get on with it.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Mashiki]

We can truly recycle paper - make old paper into paper

Fuck no. It takes twice as much energy to recycle paper then it does to have sustainable forestry. Recycled paper has to go back through the entire cellulose-separation and dying/bleaching and re-drying phase. There's a lot of waste out of all of that. Use that old paper waste for anything else, heating, insulation, compost, mix with landfills to produce biogas whatever. There's a million better things to do with it.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason for those wholly sealed plastic packagings is, allegedly, tamper / theft prevention. But I agree that we should deal with these problems in another way, instead of packaging shit in nature-and-consumer-hostile containers that are impossible to open without a tool, and even then often end up cutting you.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[nwf]

Yes, but they don't pick up. Driving 50 cents worth of copper across town is hardly a net benefit for the environment.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Strider-]

What you actually do is burn them in two stages, same thing with burning wood. It's much more efficient. You burn it at high temperature, in an oxygen reduced atmosphere. This causes the plastic to decompose and off-gas hydrogen, light hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and so forth. These gasses are also extremely hot. You direct them through the second part of your boiler, and inject air which burns the gasses, releasing more heat. Lastly, you recirculate part of your flue gasses back into the first stage combustion chamber, reducing the oxygen levels, and providing the heat to decompose the materials.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Strider-]

While we can make a glass bottle over and over again from the same pieces of glass, we cannot do this with plastic bottles - so most plastic bottles are made out of "virgin" plastic.

Glass bottles are also refillable. In British Columbia, most breweries use the Brewery Standard bottle (think your typical long-neck dark brown beer bottle). They can stick on whatever paper label they want, but the bottles themselves are all identical. They also have a $0.10 deposit on them.

The beer bottles get returned, cleaned, and sent back to the breweries. On average, each bottle makes it through the system about 10 to 12 times before it breaks, or doesn't pass inspection.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to move those factories from China back to UK...

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Anonymous Coward]

He did not said, he was adopted...

And wishing ill to others... if that is your pinnacle of your life - maybe it would be better if your parents were less selfish and not go through abort failure...

Re:Not surprising, really.

[swb]

Why did it get to the end of the comments to see something about thermal depolymerization?

I agree that less plastic and more glass and aluminum, which are more easily reusable and/or recyclable is the best way forward, but thermal depolymerization is a reasonable backup plan for plastics if straight burning isn't enough.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[Mal-2]

Break out the Marvel Mystery Oil and pour some in the spark plug holes a day before you try to turn the engine over.

Even then, you still want to keep your fingers crossed that nothing flies apart or explodes. Unmaintained boilers are particularly problematic.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[drinkypoo]

All packaging should have to be easily recyclable, or compostable. So much of that transparent packaging could be recycled if only they had stamped a number on it with a triangle around it.

Re:Not surprising, really.

[djinn6]

Glass and paper are just as bad as plastic, just in different ways... The processes used to recycle paper and glass generate millions of tons of toxic waste every year, which then gets dumped into landfills.

Classic FUD. Neither of those processes produce "millions of tons" of waste. Recycling glass doesn't produce any waste. Glass is washed, sorted, and then melted. Recycling paper is the same, pulp, sort, bleach and then remade into paper.

I know how to fix this

[DontBeAMoran]

How about building recycling plants in your own country? Or is that too much to ask?

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Except that it will be expensive whereas China was cheap.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting this is the UK we're talking about.
We've forgotten how to do things for ourselves here, we're now just a nation of outsourcing and reselling other peoples crap. Oh and red tape, lots and lots of red tape.
  In fact, so much red tape that even if we wanted a new plastics recycling facility to replace outsourcing it to China, it would take several years for the bureaucrats just to come an agreement on a name for it.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Monster_user]

I agree with the AC, the cost of recycling in a first world country is almost prohibitively expensive.

China's wages have been among the lowest, and as a result were very cost effective. I believe they were also the least regulated.

The U.K has a limited amount of land for building these projects, and it is likely that citizens or allied nations will be downwind and/or downstream of the facility, requiring expensive procedures to minimize the spread of toxic chemicals. Additionally, labor to work at these facilities will be significantly higher, possibly more than the national average if the risk of exposure is high enough. This means lower production levels at a higher cost.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Rei]

Labour costs are too high for manual sorting like is widely used in China. As always, it'll need to be tech to the rescue. For example, modern plants can use processes like cryofreezing to make even foams brittle, crushing/grinding waste it into granules, separating by density, and optical sorting (spectral analysis) to assess colour, transparency, composition and quality.

Re:I know how to fix this

[ColdWetDog]

What? Crazy talk.

Makes way more sense to ship garbage half way around the world.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Hognoxious]

At least we won't have to ask permission from the barmy Brussels bureaucrats, thanks to that nice Mr. Farage.

He's always so well turned-out, isn't he?

Re:I know how to fix this

[Hognoxious]

As others have already pointed out, ships are going back empty anyway.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Kohath]

Easiest, cheapest answer: landfills.

Re:I know how to fix this

[arth1]

That's utopia. More realistic: Ship it to Wales.

Re:I know how to fix this

[PPH]

We were planning on paying a bunch of people UBI anyway. So they can just report to a sorting center for their work assignments.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually does make sense unless you're completely uneducated on the issue.

Hi.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Nutria]

How much of the problem is wages, and how much is regulation (environmental impact studies, multitude of lawsuit by NIMBY "greens", how to store it, wash it, what to do with waste water, etc, etc)?

Re: I know how to fix this

[93 Escort Wagon]

I agree with the AC, the cost of recycling in a first world country is almost prohibitively expensive.

The real problem is likely that the way we live our first-world lives is unsustainable, given we haven't been solving the waste problem so much as displacing it off to some third-world foreigners.

That doesn't necessarily mean our quality of life has to drop... but at a minimum we probably need to rethink how product packaging is handled, instead of "okay, now how do we get rid of all this excess plastic and paper"?

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

"How about building recycling plants in your own country? Or is that too much to ask?"

Sure, but to run those, they'd need lots of workers from Poland or Bulgaria and they can't have that.

Re:I know how to fix this

[nospam007]

"Oh and red tape, lots and lots of red tape.
    In fact, so much red tape that even if we wanted a new plastics recycling facility to replace outsourcing it to China, it would take several years for the bureaucrats just to come an agreement on a name for it."

Not to mention that the red tape would end up as plastic waste as well.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

How about thermal depolymerization? Anything organic, you just "boil" the plastics, be it polystyrenes or any organic material, which gives you short chain mineral oil out, easily used as diesel fuel, or reused for making more stuff? Yes, this requires water and energy, but it completely reuses the waste.

Re: I know how to fix this

[DontBeAMoran]

That's the first of the three R's: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't the first time that China has pulled a "bait and switch". First they underbid all competition, which is easy with an abundant cheap workforce and lenient environmental protection. You can't run a recycling plant without customers. Eventually the last recyclers in the west shut down, because all the recyclable trash and a lot that isn't recyclable goes to China. When the world relies on China, they crash the system by changing the rules. Remember the rare earths fiasco? Same thing. Rare earths don't exist just in China, but when China underbids all other mines (cheap workforce, lax environmental protection), eventually they become the only supplier of rare earths. Then they limit exports. Sudden changes like this disrupt a globalized economy. It's like suddenly shutting a valve on a massive pipe: You get water hammer.

Re:I know how to fix this

[nukenerd]

You're forgetting this is the UK we're talking about.... .... red tape, lots and lots of red tape.

It's not red tape anymore. It's green tape.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Nutria]

Like the YumEarth organic, vegan, dye free, non-GMO, kosher pareve, gluten free candy and nut free sweets that are individually wrapped in so much plastic it even shocks a Republican!!

Re:I know how to fix this

[vtcodger]

Or they could burn it to generate electricity instead of cutting down forests in North America and carting the wood across the Atlantic Yes, they really do that. Honest.

Of course, it wouldn't count as "renewable".

Maybe they could redefine "renewable"

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they should start dumping it all in a domestic landfill and see if that helps with the red (and green) tape.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

You also need demand for plastics which is what made China so efficient at recycling plastic. Their ban is terrible for the environment.

Re:I know how to fix this

[hazardPPP]

How about building recycling plants in your own country? Or is that too much to ask?

Sure they could build recycling plants...but from whom?

If you import a bunch of plastic crap from China (like the UK and almost any Western country does), that means you're not making the plastic crap yourself. That means that once that plastic crap becomes garbage, you have no one who will buy that garbage once it is recycled into a raw material. Hence you ship it to China, which can use it to make more plastic crap. To send back to you.

Re:I know how to fix this

[SeaFox]

Labour costs are too high for manual sorting like is widely used in China.

Sounds like something the market will sort out once plastics are piling up at people's doorsteps.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Rick Schumann]

A large part of the problem is much plastic waste isn't recyclable. Another large part of the problem is the plastic that is recyclable, isn't practical to recycle, costing more to do so than you get out of sale of the recycled material. It'd be nice if we'd produce fewer throw-away things, or things that aren't durable, but that's also less profitable therefore it won't get off the ground in a capitalist world. The focus is always on sell, sell, sell and getting consumers to consume, consume, consume so there's little interest in getting people to buy fewer things that last longer.

Re:I know how to fix this

[JosKarith]

And even then it'd end up being called "Plasticky McPlasticface"...

Re: I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Most waste processing facilities in the UK are owned by Chinese investment firms too..

Re: I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

When this is over, they'll own the rest too.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

That is sort of the Elephant on the ocean, isn't t? If it came to waste, and the Countries responsible for originally generating it are now responsible for dealing with it, even more ships jammed with garbage would be heading to China. If China didn't produce so much rubbish for export, it wouldn't be dealing with this issue, badly, now.
Of course, in terms of dealing with garbage packaging, Amazon is more than just a river in Brazil.

Re:I know how to fix this

[kenh]

...Or they could start manufacturing plastic crap at home, in the UK.

Re:I know how to fix this

[kenh]

Or they could burn it to generate electricity instead of cutting down forests in North America and carting the wood across the Atlantic Yes, they really do that. Honest.

No, they really don't - they don't generate electricity in the UK by burning wood.

If you insist they do, please provide the locations and capacity of these wood-fired electricity generating plants.

Re:I know how to fix this

[kenh]

They could teach a few hard-working, incredibly smart middle eastern refugees to run the recycling plant - they happen to have a few hundred thousand sitting around doing nothing.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Applehu Akbar]

Drax, Yorkshire. It used to be a coal-buring hellmouth, and Greens were mighty proud when they converted the massive plant to wood pellets. Unfortunately, all the trees in Yorkshire were burned for firewoood centuries ago, so the fuel comes from pulpwood trees in the American South, brought in by a fleet of diesel-belching bulk cargo ships. Yessiree, the Greens are totally proud of this accomplishment.

Re:I know how to fix this

[K. S. Kyosuke]

More like Sweden, perhaps?

Re: I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Drax Power Station,
Selby,
North Yorkshire,
YO8 8PH

3,960 megawatts (MW)

Half fired by biomass, with the majority being imported from the US and Canada - 7.5 million tonnes per year.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_power_station

Re: I know how to fix this

[nwf]

I think NIMBY is a big part of it, no one wants to live near a huge recycling center. But no one wants to work at one, either.

Maybe some enzyme can turn the plastic into some liquid that can be cleanly burned for electricity, heat or even in vehicles.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Drax Power Station? Actually, that was the UK's Labor and/or Conservative Party.

Sorry! But the UK Greens both governing parties measures in regards the UK's power supply.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cruel and inhumane. I suppose you'd like to be another wage slave.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Nutria]

If only it were "just" plastic, and there was only one kind of plastic.

Re: I know how to fix this

[llZENll]

I have noticed this more and more. It's absolutely disgusting. Everything we buy is covered in plastic, wrapping, cardboard. Disposable plates, cups, forks, all used once then thrown away.

Any eating establishment should be banned from using disposable dishes for dining in. To go should have a tax that goes to recycling or cleanup. All plasticware should have a federal deposit value, all cans, bottles, etc. It would go a long way to recycling and give the homeless a possible income and clean up the garbage.

Styrofoam should be banned completely unless for very specific cases. We have a long way to go politically...

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

When the fake tanning jars from the Southend accumulate enough to curve the political space into a cymru, Wales will fall through an orange hole outside of Great Britain into an incomprehensible universe of overtly long compound words.

Re: I know how to fix this

[93 Escort Wagon]

I have noticed this more and more. It's absolutely disgusting. Everything we buy is covered in plastic, wrapping, cardboard.

Given how difficult it is to open a lot of packages nowadays, I suspect the main goal with a lot of this over-packaging is theft deterrence.

Re: I know how to fix this

[AmiMoJo]

They opened a rubbish burner plant near where I used to live about a decade ago. People objected like crazy but they ignored them. You have to have serious money as national publicity for that to work in the UK, and even then it's more likely than not to fail.

Re:I know how to fix this

[AmiMoJo]

Rubbish sorting is probably the most important problem in machine vision, and one of the hardest.

Re: I know how to fix this

[sydbarrett74]

Yep. Roughly two-thirds of the waste in landfills is packaging, not primary-use objects.

Re: I know how to fix this

[kenh]

Half fired by biomass, with the majority being imported from the US and Canada - 7.5 million tonnes per year.

First, thanks for the info, I appreciate it.

Second, the "majority" of "half" is imported biomass - that comes out to just over 1/4th of the fuel for this facility from the US/Canada

How can this be economically feasible? They really can't find 7.5M Tonnes of biomass on their side of the Atlantic?

Re:I know how to fix this

[suss]

Yeah, the UK already sends lots of garbage to Sweden, but the problem is, that is has to be presorted and it just costs more. They could just indiscriminately send all their waste to China for next to nothing...

Re:I know how to fix this

[TheRaven64]

It's not just labour costs. A lot of the reason things like this end up in China has nothing to do with the cost of labour, it's to do with environmental regulations. A bribe in the right place and no one cares that your factory in China is destroying the local environment and killing the workers. Try to do the same thing in the EU / US and you'll find the plant shut down and be looking at criminal charges. It's become so bad in China that they've started executing the bribe takers, which is probably a big part of the reason that it's becoming harder to put things there.

Re:I know how to fix this

[sa1lnr]

I'm sure brexiteers will be more than happy to have waste recycling plants built near their homes.

Re:I know how to fix this

[stooo]

>> Their ban is terrible for the environment.
Not as much as you think.
It'll make packaging more expensive, thus less attractive, so manufacturers will reduce packaging on the long run.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of recycling depots in the UK, the trouble is red-tape and EU laws that prevent building of new sites due to the bullshit carbon footprint - as ironic as that seems. The least CO2 appearing on your balance books comes from shipping it elsewhere. The whole planet is doing it. How to meet quota? Buy it from elsewhere in exchange for x, y and z.

Don't forget UK household recycling is mandatory from central and EU govts. If you put the wrong thing in the wrong coloued bin, you may not have your bins emptied. And what's more farcical, the rules are applied based on postcode - because various councils outsourced their collection services. Some are still the original operations that spun off from the council to be a limited company and pretend to be part of competitive tendering, whereas other are under national companies that vacuum up the smaller operators until there are none left in a county.

Furthermore, using any large scale processing required even green footprints, which today's EU laws require massive PV installations. The problem with them are two-fold: 1. UK and sun = rare, 2. large required KW output puts the PV installation into "generator" category, which triggers more laws and red-tape, even through the real PV output is 18% of what's needed.

It's BS like this the lib-left pro-federal Europe ignore as they sup bubbly wine and get free housing, food, income the rest of us have to pay for.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Or get prisoners to do it.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ship it to Wales." I was thinking the same. There are lots of old quarries to fill in Wales. ...or just do as everyone else does and dump the plastic waste into the sea.

Re:I know how to fix this

[calexontheroad66]

The UK has delayed getting new infrastructure for years, recycling isn't the only thing the authorities dragged their feet.
This is a very common occurrence and it is probably getting worse as money is being directed to subsidize rentiers instead of public investment.

Now, you can recyble pastics in many ways the problem is the low density and high volume that helps in transport costs for products but is a killer for collection of waste and recycling.
PVC, and composite packaging don't help either, this increases the cost of recycling and the issues with disposal through incineration.
The thing is that we have been focusing in these two main recycling options:
- Clear plastic stream recycling, where only one plastic type is sorted and processed.
- Comingled plastics, the german way, that mixes everything but really has very limited usages.

We haven't seen much being done on pyrolisis and catalythic reconversion of plastic wastes, both of these would turn plastics into feedstock material.
Of course investment would be greater, specially cause it means dealing with all types of contaminants, and it would be similar to refining oil.
I think pyrolisis would be a good option, though I don't know how PVC and Silicone could be handled. Since one would generate organic clorine compounds that would useless and toxic, and the other will leave silicon residue at best.

Re: I know how to fix this

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah. They can totally get in the wayback machine and start building recycling plants 5 years ago to deal with a sudden loss of handling capacity today.

This isn't SimCity. What do they do with the plastics that are in the recycling bin today? Next week? Plus, they still need to have someone take the recycled material from them and use it for something, or you have shredded sorted plastics piling up. Most plastic shit is made in China and shipped elsewhere, so it was a natural fit to ship discarded plastic shit back to China to recover materials for new plastic shit. Giant ships traversing the oceans filled with plastic shit, both ways.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, as someone who lives in North Yorkshire, I can believe they'd have trouble sourcing that much locally. Where there were once forested valleys and upland areas nearby, they have been systematically cleared over the past few hundred years. The result is lots of grass, and marginal land, mostly used for sheep farming and grouse shooting. It's becoming increasingly apparent that this was not a good idea, as heavy rains now cause extensive flooding in downriver locations such as York.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Applehu Akbar]

Give my regards to Osmotherley, where I hiked through in '14. If you want to replace Drax with something more useful, I would add a nuclear plant at the Windscale reprocessing facility, where my hike started and where the nuclear bullet has already been bitten. Every little town we passed through in Cumbria and Yorkshire was fighting the NIMBY battle over its own three-turbine wind installation. Time to replace that whole assemblage of ugly junk with one big old zero-carbon generating station.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they do. Wood burning is a major component of renewable electricity in the UK. Burning wood generated approx 19TWh in 2016 out of a total renewable generation of approx 80TWh and total electricity demand of about 330TWh.

This is mainly at Drax in North Yorkshire, but also at Fiddlers Ferry in Cheshire, Stevens croft, Lockerbie, Scotland ; longannet, Fife, Scotland and until recently Ironbridge in Shropshire (now closed). There are also numerous smaller schemes (blackburn meadows, Sheffield, South Yorkshire).

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

You think they are producing that export rubbish for fun? Suckers like you are buying it. If you didn't buy it they would quickly stop sending it.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

So send the raw material back for China to re-use. Must be easier and cheaper than sending all the garbage in the first place.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until they make you leave your mom's basement and cut off your supply of tendies.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll throw it in a volcano in Iceland.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

" If you didn't buy it they would quickly stop sending it."
Actually, as much as possible, I don't. Boat stuff from France, Australia and New Zealand, Cars from Germany and Italy, Lenses from Japan, Clothes from the US. Yes, MacBooks these days from China, but when I sell them on, (And they hold their value remarkably well...), I include all of the original packaging, right down to the receipt. (I keep the Cube out of nostalgia... but I still have all of its packaging stashed away.)
When I have to ship something, I usually have just the right box handy, and shredded cardboard, styrofoam, papers and junk mail makes fine packing. Blister packs were an issue for awhile, but they shred just fine and go in the Packing Boxes. (AR-9 Speakers came in them originally, and I still have those as well.)
For food scraps and garden clippings I have a Compost Heap, and I buy soups, sauces and drinks in bottles or cans. Milk and juices in Cartons, fresh fruit, veggies and meats go home in my own bags.
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Of course, everything does eventually end up in some Landfill or Incinerator eventually, but rarely on my Watch. It takes me a month to barely fill a 30 Gallon Garbage bin. Right this very now, there is a Chinese Sweatshop Orphan starving, because I rarely buy the Junk they make.
So kindly don't associate me with a Sucker, you loathsome hypocritical motherfucker.
There, I now feel so superior and smug.

Re:I know how to fix this

[Hognoxious]

For the fraud their banks pulled they deserve it. Chuck some spent nuclear fuel in for good measure.

Re: I know how to fix this

[Anonymous Coward]

just relax and let the market take you over

I know this isn't politically correct

[Trailer Trash]

But plastic waste should be burned for energy. It's made of oil, and most plastics aren't really recycled. They're used to make other things, but there's no net savings of any kind. Burning them would solve the waste problem and extract useful energy.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Monster_user]

Maybe, but as I understand it, plastics produce more toxic chemicals when burned than petroleum.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[HornWumpus]

Plastic needs to be mixed with fuel. so it burns hot enough. It's a solved problem, but 'greenies'.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Not politically correct? The burning of plastic waste is perfectly normal, real world solution. The waste is sorted before burning or recycling by the consumers and the facilities to maximize recycling and minimize toxic fumes. If there would be a single cell organism or an insect to break down the multiple sorts of plastic in a bioreactor cost-effectively in a large scale, that would be nice.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Plastic needs to be mixed with fuel. so it burns hot enough. It's a solved problem, but 'greenies'.

Good idea - why not mix and incinerate with green activists? Volunteering would be a great way for them to prove how sincere they are about reducing their carbon footprint.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

Add to that: there's almost no point in recycling aluminum. It's extremely plentiful on earth and landfills aren't actually a problem

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't get it hot enough, it produces large amounts of Doixins which are not nice at all.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

uh what? aluminum is extremely expensive to refine. it makes a hell of a lot of sense to recycle. since you talk out of your ass, do you shit out of your mouth? that would be interesting to see.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[PPH]

Nope. The combustion products stink of patchouli.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you don't know that plastic is more valuable than steel. Still want to burn it?

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Yes there is. It is economically cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to process from ore.

(Its ore is the oxide, the usual way to reduce it to metal involves a lot of electricity. It's do-able, sure, but cheaper to just melt already metallic aluminum.)

THAT's why it's done so much--there's a clear profit motive!

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you haven't heard that we are already emitting too much CO2 ? If you could trap all of it when burning fuel, coal plants would do it already, yet they still emit too much.

Or maybe you are one of those people who tell a whole scientific field to fuck off and think climate change doesn't exist, because "muh liberals".

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[dj245]

Recycling aluminum is much less energy intensive compared to smelting ore. Recycling is cheaper. Yes, there is plenty of ore, and aluminum is not hazardous so can be landfilled without issue. But that is not the entire picture.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

So then we can pump all the emissions straight into your house?

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[ArtemaOne]

Burning steel would be awesome

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

Huh? Yes there is. It is economically cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to process from ore.

No, if it weren't for the CRV then few people would recycle cans. It wouldn't be worth the effort to pick them up off the ground.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

Recycling aluminum is much less energy intensive compared to smelting ore......But that is not the entire picture.

Yes, that's right......energy use is only one small portion of the total cost.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[ShanghaiBill]

If you don't get it hot enough, it produces large amounts of Doixins which are not nice at all.

Burning PVC can produce dioxin.

Burning polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene produces CO2 and water.

Sort out the vinyl, and almost everything else will burn clean.

You can burn the vinyl too if you keep the temperature high, and/or mix in some powdered limestone to suck the chlorine out of the flue gas. If you are mixing the plastic with coal, then you will need the limestone anyway to scrub out the sulfates.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I read that fish in the oceans are eating plastics. They must want it, so why not just feed the plastics to the fish?

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Trailer Trash]

Add to that: there's almost no point in recycling aluminum. It's extremely plentiful on earth and landfills aren't actually a problem

Piling on because it's important - aluminum absolutely should be recycled. Turning bauxite (oxidized aluminum) into metal is far more expensive than simply melting and reforming aluminum. Same with steel and glass.

Plastic is very different. It can't be melted back to a liquid, so reuse of the raw material is limited.

Cardboard is another good candidate for recycling, and even paper. Anything that can be recycled should be recycled. Plastic? Burn it.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anne Thwacks]

so why not just feed the plastics to the fish?

Because then they would grow up to be plastic fish, and they would not taste very good.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Trailer Trash]

Of course we're emitting CO2. That's not going to stop. Plastic is going to break down eventually, anyway, just long periods naturally.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Trailer Trash]

If you don't get it hot enough, it produces large amounts of Doixins which are not nice at all.

So, get it hot enough. These aren't big headscratcher type problems.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[aaarrrgggh]

The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.

The likes of Amazon need to be doing more to encourage sustainable packaging... which helps them lower their cost; it is asinine to ship shoplift-resistant packaging to the end user.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[careysub]

Huh? Yes there is. It is economically cheaper to recycle aluminum than it is to process from ore.

No, if it weren't for the CRV then few people would recycle cans. It wouldn't be worth the effort to pick them up off the ground.

So, having aluminum cans (which never deteriorate) littering the ground is not a problem for you? Do you live in one of those third world garbage "cities"?

Given that we are not all disposing of our aluminum by throwing it on the ground, then melting it down is indeed a profitable activity.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

so why not just feed the plastics to the fish?

Because then they would grow up to be plastic fish, and they would not taste very good.

Perhaps plastic fish could serve other purposes than as food for us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WC6EbRQmJ0

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[serviscope_minor]

Burning steel would be awesome

IS awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[freeze128]

So your suggestion is to *SORT* the types of plastic so it can burn clean? Well, if you're sorting, why not just RECYCLE it?

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[TeknoHog]

Burning PVC can produce dioxin.

Burning polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene produces CO2 and water.

Sort out the vinyl, and almost everything else will burn clean.

Incidentally, plastic recycling stations in Finland accept everything but PVC. I'd like to think there is some actual recycling going on, since there are separate bins for combustibles. I guess there are concerns about chlorine compounds even at melting temperatures.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[careysub]

The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.

Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, Then get some fine steel wool without soap and apply a torch to it. It will burn.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Maxo-Texas]

I don't think of it as artificially inflating the cost. It's clear that the plastic industry and plastic consumers have externalized their costs on to everyone else.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Glass can be recycled, but it's not clear that the lifecycle cost of recycling is less than land filling it.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Opportunist]

Duuuuuude, the smoke, the SMOKE....

Anyone else havin' the munchies?

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Hognoxious]

How aluminium do you get from a certain amount of bauxite. Got to be less than 100%, unless phlogiston really is a thing after all. By my reckoning it's about half, tops.

So why would it make sense to dig out & transport two tons of ore instead of one ton of metal that's literally just lying there?

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume that neither you nor the people who modded you up are engineers.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Rick Schumann]

Burning most plastics isn't energy-efficient, and also most plastics produce rather nasty toxic chemicals when you burn them. Burying them in a landfill like they used to would be less toxic overall than burning them.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use pyrolisis technology, 0 emission. Works like a charm since the 30s'!

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Plastic is going to break down in orders of magnitude longer than it will take to decide whether climate change will be catastrophic or just a real pain in the ass. That's not relevant to the current problem. Burning it will increase CO2 levels immediately, just as every other sector tries to reduce them.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Bury it. Stable carbon sequestration.

Oh, wait, are we for or against that now?

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

Try recycling aluminum without the CRV some time.......that stuff is not worth much until it gets processed.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[kenh]

Millions of Americans recycle cans without a deposit - it's called recycling and most American communities engage in it.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[blindseer]

Recycling is a complex process, burning is not.

Also, we'd have to only separate the plastic into two piles, not several. We separate the chlorine containing plastics from those that don't. We can burn one pile. The other pile, maybe burn that too but in a facility equipped to contain the chlorine. Where do we put the chlorine? Recycle that. Put it in new plastics, use it for water treatment, whatever.

PVC can be recycled, though I question the economics of it. We could also burn it without separation from other plastics but this means building all plastic burning facilities to handle the chlorine, and depending on the relative costs of separation may in fact be the better option.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

You're making a statement of ideology, not of practicality.
IT's fine to do something based on ideology, but you should be aware of it.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[russotto]

I read that fish in the oceans are eating plastics. They must want it, so why not just feed the plastics to the fish?

Study retracted.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Applehu Akbar]

Good idea - why not mix and incinerate with green activists?

We've tried this in Arizona, but the engineers in Tempe have not yet come up with a clean-burning liberal.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

.that stuff is not worth much until it gets processed.

Duh, that's the whole point of recycling. If you want to reuse, get a cup or bottle, cans are just too thin to be sturdy.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[thinkwaitfast]

that would be nice

Or not as planes started falling out of the sky like in The Andromeda Strain.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the built a landfill for glass next to a sand mine?

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[thinkwaitfast]

Nobody left here is an engineer. Just comic book nerds.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Solandri]

Cardboard (and paper) should be thrown in the trash. Our problem with climate change stems from pumping hydrocarbons (coal/oil/gas) out of the ground, and burning them. This combines the carbon with atmospheric oxygen to create carbon dioxide (and releases energy). The CO2 is released into the atmosphere.

Trees pull CO2 out of the air and use sunlight to convert it back into hydrocarbons (sugars, eventually linked together to form cellulose). When you throw paper and cardboard into the trash, it ends up in a landfill. i.e. Back underground where we pumped the carbon out of in the first place. Some biological decomposition happens in landfills (we pump methane out of landfills). But core samples drilled into landfills has turned up bits of newspaper from the 1800s, still legible, indicating the carbon has for the most part been successfully sequestered underground.

If you eliminate recycling of paper and cardboard, this increases the price of paper. Trees have to be cut down to create new paper and cardboard, and the higher price creates an incentive to re-seed the forests where these trees were cut down, so they can be harvested again in a few decades. These additional trees pull even more CO2 out of the atmosphere. We could even get into a situation where the slash and burn practices in the Amazon are reversed - it could become more valuable to plant trees to replace those which were clear-cut.

Recycling cardboard and paper is bad for the environment.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

You're making a statement of ideology, not of practicality.

Let's review:

Millions of Americans recycle cans without a deposit - it's called recycling and most American communities engage in it.

Those seem to be statements of facts, not even an expression of preference, just something that is or is not true.

You should not misrepresent other poster's comments, but endeavor to portray them accurately. Otherwise, you are more likely succumbing to your own ideology without being aware of it.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude you always have the most insanely informative posts. What the hell do you do for a living??

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[TheRaven64]

They're too wet to burn.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[TheRaven64]

Not sure about where you live, but when I was at school we had a wheelie bin to collect aluminium cans that a company paid to take away. The school donated the money to charity and encouraged people to bring aluminium cans to fill it. The gave a talk about their process. Apparently, after taking their costs into account, they made about 1p (in early '90s money) per can. Possibly not enough money to be worth picking them up off the floor, but if you're throwing them away anyway then after sorting it's definitely a profit centre for them. They also made a point that they were not receiving government subsidies for it.

Talking to one of the people in charge of waste management where I used to live, I heard a similar story. The council pays companies to process various kinds of waste, but the company that takes aluminium pays them.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[TheRaven64]

Actually, it's one really huge portion of the total cost. Bauxite is abundant, but until about 100 years ago aluminium was one of the most precious metals because the energy cost of smelting it is insane. It is so high, that aluminium smelters are only built in places where electricity generation is cheap (e.g. near hydroelectric dams) because it is not economically feasible to smelt aluminium using normally-priced electricity.

One ton of aluminium costs at least 14,000kWh of electricity to produce. One can is about 14g of aluminium, so that works out to about 0.2kWh per can. Even if that's the only cost, then that works out at about 2-4 cents per can if you're paying normal electricity prices, and well over 1/can even if you're getting a huge discount. That's very close to the wholesale price of a can.

TL;DR: The energy cost of smelting is the vast majority of the cost of aluminium.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[TheRaven64]

Recycling glass always feels wasteful. We take a bottle, put a load of energy into melting it, and then use the melted glass to make an identical bottle. I find it really hard to believe that this is more cost effective than simply cleaning and refilling the bottle.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[TheRaven64]

It's hard to see because of the torch flame. Apply a large enough current across it and it burns quite prettily though.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

This is something that must be investigated. When I have time.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[dunkelfalke]

PET bottles recycle very well into polyester fibres.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Alioth]

Washing and reusing used to be a big thing in the UK: the dairies always did it on a big scale (they would deliver you milk, you'd use it, and put the empties out, the milk float that delivered the milk took the empties back to the dairy which would clean and re-use the bottle). There were soft drinks companies that also did the same thing.

This practise started dying out in the 1980s. There are still some dairies that do milk rounds and wash/reuse the bottles, but that's now a minority.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[thogard]

The can deposit laws are currently reducing the total percentage garbage being recycled. Most of the research compares different areas over time or fail to consider how many cans get imported to a region for a deposit that was never paid. It turns out that cans and glass bottles can pay for mixed recycling sorting and turn a profit. That allows other things like paper and metals to be effectively recycled. Where I live, if the state passes a container deposit law, the curbside recycling collection contracts are void. That means a majority of recycling will end up in the landfill.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[thogard]

Cleaning of glass bottles went away after someone poisoned people with Cyanide in Tylenol bottles.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[jareth-0205]

Add to that: there's almost no point in recycling aluminum. It's extremely plentiful on earth and landfills aren't actually a problem

What a shitty way to look at the world....

Yeah, let's not do one of the easiest forms of recycling, and instead mine it out of the ground... from underneath forests generally. We don't need to breathe, right? And more landfill is always a fun things to have around.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Cytotoxic]

Scrap metal recycling is a fully developed market, at least in the US. You can just visit the website of a local company to get spot market prices.

They even have pricing for common parts like electric motors or compressors.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for clarity since the link was provided out of context: the study that was retracted overstated the harm of current levels of microplastics in the marine environment. There is still plenty of existing evidence that it is harmful and scientists still agree it needs to be banned/reduced/etc. And marine life eats lots of it because they either they can't tell the difference or it's already in the food they normally eat (e.g. other fish).

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[hazardPPP]

The first solution is to tax plastic packaging to make it significantly less attractive to use it for single-use applications. Once you artificially inflate that cost to reduce volume, you can likely burn a good part of it for energy, or subsidize recycling costs.

Right now we are artificially reducing costs by not including the externality of waste disposal (often just of the packaging itself) in the cost of the product. In some areas waste disposal costs are being added to products (engine oil, tires, auto batteries, electronics) already. If these costs are imposed based on the packaging used, more intelligent packaging choices are likely to be made.

Back in university many years ago, at a lecture we were told of a country (Ireland? Iceland? I can't remember anymore) that brought in a law which simply said that stores that sold products had to take back all of the packaging of said products. That is, you could buy something, open it on the spot and leave the packaging there, or open it at home and bring the package back. Apparently, very quickly packaging got a lot simpler, smaller and easier to dispose. Now I don't know if this story is true and where exactly it happened, but it sure does sound like a great idea.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[PrimaryConsult]

Canada still does refillable bottles (as does Mexico). I make it a point to bring the glass bottles back up there because of this (I buy them at IGA instead of duty free, so I'm not cheating the deposit system).

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

A 9 volt battery will do it.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Strider-]

Well, that's a stupid system, fix it.

We have deposit on all non-essential beverage containers (ie no deposit on milk jugs, and basic food containers), and we have curb-side recyling. Other than beer bottles (which are handled by a brewery consortium, as the bottles are refilled dozens of times), the same company handles both the deposit system and the curb-side system. Higher recovery rates, fewer empties being left around and entering the waste stream.

If you have a stupid system, you fix it. You don't keep digging the hole deeper.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Strider-]

It's what we do with beer bottles in British Columbia. The Brewery Standard bottle is used by most of the breweries in the province. The bottle return centres separate out the standard bottles, and send them back into the distribution system. The bottles are washed, inspected, and then put on flats and sent back to the breweries who in turn fill it with beer again, paste on a label, box it, and sell it.

On average, each beer bottle makes it through the system an average of a dozen times, before it breaks or otherwise fails inspection.

There is about a 90% return rate on the bottles due to the $0.10 deposit, and for the breweries (even the small ones), being a member of the system is much cheaper than doing their own thing. The only thing is that they have to stick with the standard long-neck twist-off beer bottle, they can only paste on a paper label and their own fancy cap.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[phantomfive]

What a shitty way to look at the world....

For you, but that's your perspective. To me it seems like a good way to look at the world.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Shotgun]

There's no CRV in my state. People still have can collection drives to raise money for charities, and you rarely see them on the side of the road. Homeless and the poor can make a quick buck by collecting them. I did it myself when I was a kid.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Shotgun]

Duh! I have. Walked down the street with a garbage back picking up cans to make a few bucks. Got paid by weight. It wasn't much, but my family was poor and I was in middle school. There weren't many people wanting their yards mowed in late November.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[Shotgun]

You're right, but for a different reason.

Very few landfills do not use a biogas system nowadays. The line the bottom with a layer of clay, lay down some aeration pipes, dump in the trash, cover with more pipes and then a layer of plastic. A leachate is pumped in through the top pipes which seeps through and is picked up by the bottom ones. The leachate contains enzymes that break down anything organic and produces methane. The methane is collected and powers a generator that is providing electricity for thousands of local homes.

This type of landfill has replaced all others not just because it is "green", but because the decomposition reduces volume of trash by 70% within a few years and the electricity more than pays for itself. The volume reduction means that they can pull the plastic up, dump more trash and keep using the same land. Getting a new dump past the NIMBY factor makes this the biggest win.

But, definitely don't bother "recycling" paper. There is not point in it.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[Anonymous Coward]

which is profitable and good

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[ebvwfbw]

Anytime you think of introducing a new tax, slap yourself hard. Seriously. We don't want that monkey on our back. Too many taxes already.

We need to ban the plastic packaging that we see out there. Go back to before when we had plastic bubbles. They used to print what it was on the package. Some things that are for the most part useless like water bottles could be eliminated entirely. Some people drink only bottled water because they think tap water is poison. Even though that's clearly wrong.

I think you're onto something. We really should ban a lot more plastic. We have way too much floating in the oceans. Even in very small sizes, like less than the size of a grain of sand. It's getting into sea salt as well.

Re: I know this isn't politically correct

[drinkypoo]

Try recycling aluminum without the CRV some time.......that stuff is not worth much until it gets processed.

Aluminum may not be worth much per gram, but it's still eminently recyclable even when not already sorted, because today you can identify alloys of aluminum with laser spectroscopy.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[drinkypoo]

For you, but that's your perspective. To me it seems like a good way to look at the world.

Well, it's an ignorant way. Aluminum is interesting in large part because of how cheap it is to recycle. It takes around twice the energy to refine Aluminum as it does a steel part which will do the same job. But it costs a small fraction as much to recycle the aluminum back into the same alloy you started with as it does to recycle the steel into a more carbon-poor and harder version of itself. Thus, using steel once is cheaper than using aluminum once, but using aluminum twice is cheaper than using steel three times. At least, when it comes to the energy involved in refining.

Unsorted aluminum can be sorted automatically using laser spectroscopy. But one place there is massive savings as compared to steel is in recycling of manufacturing scrap, like cutoffs and knockouts. Since the grade is already known, the consumer can sort the waste by grade and it can be recycled back into the same grade again cheaply — not only does recycled aluminum have the same properties as the material you started with, but it melts at only around 1250 degrees. My understanding is that Alcoa put some emphasis into recycling when they started providing Audi aluminum for the A8, but IIRC it's Novelis (in their relationship with Ford) that really has the scrap sorting process down in a way that's saving everyone a lot of money. Ford is not spending so much more on aluminum bodies for the F-Series as people tend to believe.

Steel gets harder and more brittle every time you recycle it. This used to be a benefit — to the Japanese. We made cars out of mild steel, and then the Japanese bought our scrap (for literally pennies to the ton) and refined it into a harder steel that would make more lightweight automobiles. Auto body made out of harder steel is more difficult to repair, but that's what the pin welding gun and plastic body filler are for. Now we're going through that all over again with aluminum cars; aluminum-bodied cars are almost as old as cars with bodies, but aluminum unibody vehicles are a relatively new thing (the Honda NSX in1990 was the first production aluminum unibody) and you need a different pin gun and ideally even different hammers to work on aluminum.

Re:I know this isn't politically correct

[TheRaven64]

It's been about 20 years since I did this, but I remember that with a battery you could get it to glow red and slowly burn. With a bench supply you could get it to glow white and throw off small burning particles that made it look like a firework.

foreign garbage go home!

[Anonymous Coward]

China has introduced the ban from this month on "foreign garbage"

It was already difficult to immigrate to China...

How ecologically sound!

[helpfulcorn]

So use tons of oil to ship plastic -- made from tons of oil -- to be recycled so that you can pat yourself on the back for recycling plastic rather than throwing it away in order to keep carbon out the atmosphere, yet you're putting right back in via shipping the shit? I can only imagine the reason for this fantastic waste of money and oil is something like: plastic recycling plants put out too much carbon dioxide so we pretend we're not doing it and thus following our treaties by making China do it instead and then bitch at other nations who have a larger carbon footprint?

Re:How ecologically sound!

[MightyYar]

The ships go back to China anyway, so sending them back full of plastic waste instead of empty still makes sense from an environmental perspective. If trade weren't so imbalanced, your comment would be spot-on.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

And despite countries like China (and India) taking the burden, they still have a lower carbon footprint per capita than that of the UK (which in turn is dwarfed by US/Canada/Australia). Imagine what'd happen if developing countries wanted these dirty, polluting manufacturing industries out of their countries.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[HornWumpus]

They'd stop be 'developing' and go back to being 'dirt poor'?

Re:How ecologically sound!

[iggymanz]

it's not that bad

how about Emma Mearsk that can carry 154,000 tons but burns 380 tons of oil a day for 30 days to do UK to China trip. 11,400 tons of fuel to move 154,000 tons of plastic....hmmm, that seems okay to me

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

And despite countries like China (and India) taking the burden, they still have a lower carbon footprint per capita than that of the UK (which in turn is dwarfed by US/Canada/Australia). Imagine what'd happen if developing countries wanted these dirty, polluting manufacturing industries out of their countries.

But that's exactly what is happening in this case. The Chinese recycling centers undoubtedly sent most of what they got to a local landfill and only bothered with the most valuable and cheaply recycled items, leaving toxic waste everywhere along the way.
The Chinese government shutting down these operations only makes sense.

The UK will just have to find a way to solve this themselves, with the associated costs being absorbed by the consumers.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Lunix Nutcase]

Because the ships aren’t already going back anyway? It would be a bigger waste to have them go back empty.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[dk20]

(which in turn is dwarfed by US/Canada/Australia).

Pretty much our entire nation is in a cold weather alert (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/extreme-cold-national-1.4468792) so pardon us for heating our homes.

London +8C
brussels +6C
Toronto -13C
Resolute - 26C

By the end of the week, Toronto will be as cold as Resolute is.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because Android phones that will mostly never get updates are just so much more ecologically friendly.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody throws away an iPhone. They have high resale values.

Clearly you know nothing about it.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[serviscope_minor]

So use tons of oil to ship plastic -

If something's going by ship, that part is likely by far the most efficient. I calculated it once: shipping white goods from China to the UK by boat takes less oil per item than moving the item from the shop to your house by lorry.

The large cargo ships are incredibly efficient.

Re: How ecologically sound!

[Godwin O'Hitler]

Does that factor in the footprint of making a floating steel cathedral?

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Hognoxious]

Plus the plastic that can be reused to make new shit is made into new shit where? China.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[110010001000]

Sure they do. How many iPhone4 do you see around (other than mine)

Re:How ecologically sound!

[110010001000]

Right, Trump isn't so bad because Mussolini.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[kenh]

Isn't there a higher-value cargo the UK/EU could send to China on these ships instead of waste plastic and e-waste?

Re: How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the one made with highly recyclable materials like glass and steel?

Re:How ecologically sound!

[John.Banister]

So what's the differential between it going back with the plastic, and it going back empty?

Re:How ecologically sound!

[John.Banister]

Coal

Re:How ecologically sound!

[iggymanz]

I don't see any data for fuel consumption of ship running around empty. Probably would let it sit rather than do that.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[TheRaven64]

Apple doesn't encourage you to throw away old phones, they encourage you to trade them in for newer ones. Apple recycles them and benefits from reducing the size of the second-hand iPhone market, pushing up prices and making people more likely to buy a new one.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[thegarbz]

so sending them back full of plastic waste instead of empty still makes sense from an environmental perspective.

Not in several ways. While 500000T is not much in terms of shipping weight it still is 500000T that needs to be moved by ship with the energy required to move it. However that is not the significant aspect of it. By sending the ships back empty maybe some countries can stop using other countries as their own cheap dumping ground and actually start to take responsibility for the waste they generate in the first place.

Sending ships back empty because there is no 500000T to move, or because it is being reprocessed locally is far more environmentally friendly than the alternative, which is a landfill in China.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

No there is not.

Re: How ecologically sound!

[serviscope_minor]

Does that factor in the footprint of making a floating steel cathedral?

No, I computed marginal costs only for the two journeys. I didn't factor in the cost of creating a legion of road vehicles either.

The mistake most people make is looking at those ships and thinking they're MASSIVE, then extrapolating that. Thing is while they're massive they represent a large concentrated cost, they do a vast amount, so the result is actually efficient in terms of footprint per thing shipped.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[John.Banister]

I don't think sitting is an option. The boats have to go back to China to bring more stuff people want to buy that has been manufactured there. It's a matter of whether they go back empty or go back with cargo.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[MightyYar]

stop using other countries as their own cheap dumping ground

I think the argument is that plastic is a petroleum resource, and China as a global manufacturing base has a lot more capacity to use recycled plastics than GB. If you are going to make the effort to recycle, then it is only logical to return the recycled material to the manufacturing center.

As to the moral question, remember which country it is that is using so much disposable plastic in their manufactured goods. No one holds the high ground - there is demand and there is supply.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[helpfulcorn]

I had not even thought of that, you got me, I retract my comment.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[drinkypoo]

Apple recycles them and benefits from reducing the size of the second-hand iPhone market, pushing up prices and making people more likely to buy a new one.

When automobiles are recycled, they are broken down for parts so that you can make repairs on the ones that aren't being recycled, saving the cost of producing a new vehicle. Well, in theory anyway; automakers produce a lot of vehicles nobody wants just to inflate production figures, and then sell them to themselves to inflate sales figures. But when Apple recycles a phone, all of the parts are destroyed. It's ecologically unfriendly, to say the least.

Re: How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

The "floating steel cathedral" has already been built and would be going the same route whether it was carrying plastic or was empty.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[ImprovOmega]

Maybe we could build a converter on the ship so that it can optionally burn plastic for fuel. Then, instead of sending it back empty to China, we could send it back with enough plastic to make the trip and all the noxious chemicals (like dioxin) that gets spewed out from burning it goes over a wide unpopulated area.

Re:How ecologically sound!

[Anonymous Coward]

>shipping white goods from China to the UK by boat takes less oil per item than moving the item from the shop to your house by lorry.

And if the item were made next door, even that little bit of oil would not be needed.

Your point?

Change what materials you use

[Anonymous Coward]

I think changing what products are made of can help with most of that. popcorn instead of packing peanuts, reusable containers/boxes. METAL, glass bottles and so forth.
Stop all paper ad-mail...

Re:Change what materials you use

[Anonymous Coward]

What's old is destined to be new again ? Whe I was little we had glass Coca-Cola bottles (among other things). When they emptied we simply took them to the supermarket and they would then send them to be recycled (which meant be cleaned and filled again).
You can't do more re-usable than that.

Re: Change what materials you use

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. We are realizing that we have too much waste in our societies. Time to place restrictions on the import of products that are made from low value non-biodegradable materials.

Re: Change what materials you use

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sociopaths are weaker than our American ones. We make sociopaths capable of cleaning bottles, depositing transparent, heat resistant lacquers inside that survive the cleaning process, but dissolve in weak acidic solutions over time. Aka time release poison. And then theoretically holding the maker liable for deaths.

That's why we don't refuse bottles the way poorer/less criminally insane countries do.

Yes It's Terrible

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the solution to the waste products of humanity?

Plastic overload

[Anonymous Coward]

We as a world has become obsessed with plastics. Seems a bit of a waste to buy water in plastic don't you think? Since plastics are contributing greatly to polluting our world. Lot of good potential here for building their own solutions such as high temp incinerators or creating incentives for companies in the UK to produce locally and reuse their waste. Stop looking for answers outside your own boundaries all the time UK.

Do you want Autons?

[Hal_Porter]

Because that's how you get Autons.

So we can colonize Mars if we work hard

[Anonymous Coward]

But we can't build an infrastructure to recycle our plastic waste?

Re:So we can colonize Mars if we work hard

[Anonymous Coward]

Just colonize Mars, and then send the plastic there.

Re:So we can colonize Mars if we work hard

[kenh]

But we can't build an infrastructure to recycle our plastic waste?

We had one, it's called China, but China is trying to break it's addiction to our trash, so now we need a NEW plan - build a recycling plant locally, don't ship your trash half-way around the globe.

Re:So we can colonize Mars if we work hard

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how good that radiation shield made of waste plastic could be. Maybe it could be heated up and filled with liquid bubbles and Martian sand. Need to investigate, like, right now!
-- Martian greetings and salutations from Ophir Chasma Dunes, among the vibrant. Mememe!

Re:So we can colonize Mars if we work hard

[jrumney]

I can see where this is headed. Next you'll be wanting to create local manufacturing jobs to make use of all the recycled plastic.

mother of invention

[bugs2squash]

Put some money up for a national challenge to come up with a way to do something useful with the waste and start importing and processing it from Europe. Doesn't the UK already do this with Nuclear waste ?

Re:mother of invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Put some money up for a national challenge to come up with a way to do something useful with the waste

The is the UK - America's outpost for neoliberalism in Europe. The correct answer is that we should give more tax cuts to the rich so they can come up with a solution to the problem for us. Our ruling class promises us that this is how the economy works...

Re:mother of invention

[kenh]

The is the UK - America's outpost for neoliberalism in Europe. The correct answer is that we should give more tax cuts to the rich so they can come up with a solution to the problem for us. Our ruling class promises us that this is how the economy works...

Trump Derangement Syndrome much?

Seriously, just build your own damn recycling plant... Shipping waste half-way around the globe was never a long-term solution.

Re:mother of invention

[Anonymous Coward]

If you could reason with Trump supporters, there wouldnt be any.

Re:mother of invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump Derangement Syndrome much?

It's Margaret Thatcher's own plan.

Seriously, just build your own damn recycling plant... Shipping waste half-way around the globe was never a long-term solution.

Worked with Australia.

Printer filament

[fustakrakich]

Along with a chicken in every pot, there should be one of these on every counter top

Ways to fix this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandate disposable items must either be biodegradable, or made from post-consumer recycled materials.
Mandate all government issued printed documents must be printed on post-consumer recycled paper.
Consider grinding up disposed plastics and using them in concrete, bricks, and asphalt.

Re:Ways to fix this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a simpler solution:

Mandate that consumers must be biodegradable
Consider grinding up the government.

They'll never notice it.

[rotorbudd]

Dump it in France.

They made the case for not shipping to China

[Trax3001BBS]

The graph linked shows only China mismanaged over 5 Million tonnes of plastic waste.
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Re:They made the case for not shipping to China

[crimson tsunami]

The graph also had some helpful words right underneath it.

China was top of the list of countries mismanaging plastic waste, but the US also featured in the top 20 and contributed a higher rate of waste per person .

China is bigger than the US, who knew !

Just like cleaning the oceans.

[Anonymous Coward]

it should be possible to make money off of this waste.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROW9F-c0kIQ

Not unique to the UK

[HalAtWork]

It's a problem in every developed part of the world, as is proper disposal of e-waste. We simply can't keep this up.

I am buying as little as possible of both. Choosing foods that have as little packaging as possible, bringing my own container to the butcher, baker, resisting upgrading or buying gadgets as much as possible and finding people who can actually use my old stuff.

*in the short term*

[Anonymous Coward]

How about reading the fantastic summary? Or is that too much to ask?

Why not crack and refine them?

[Tangential]

Plastics are complex hydrocarbons. Seems like you should be able to crack and refine them. Then make more plastic, fuels, etc. it may be expensive to start but as the world switches to more and more renewable power the costs for cracking should come down. I suppose then that the big problem will be NIMBY issues

umm

[Anonymous Coward]

stop producing plastic waste?

Negotiate a trade deal with China

[OneHundredAndTen]

Brexiteers claim that things are going to be wonderful outside that EU, for the UK will negotiate terrific trade deals with everybody. Well, this should be good practice: strike a deal with China so that they will carry on keeping the trash generated by the UK. It will be a very easy deal, right?

Re:Negotiate a trade deal with China

[JustNiz]

Screw China. Fill the channel tunnel up with it. That way it both gets rid of trash and keeps the illegal immigrants out.

Re:Negotiate a trade deal with China

[Anonymous Coward]

And extra bonus points for keeping the limeys on the island, too!

Re:Negotiate a trade deal with China

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw China. Fill the channel tunnel up with it. That way it both gets rid of trash and keeps the illegal immigrants out.

I'm all for it as long as we build a big large cupole that englobes the entire wreteched island (sorry scots you're married to crazies). We don't want you coakroaches invading the continent either.
If only we dump the whole lot of you into the sun but oh well nothing's perfect in this world.

You reap what you sow

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's time to put your own people back to work.

simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

add the cost of recycling to the product price, and the responsibility, to the producer.
No Styrofoam cups needs to be made, paper works OK, and is not carcinogenic.

Trojan Rabbit

[Templer421]

If that doesn't work perhaps a large plastic Badger?

Plasma incineration

[rapjr]

Seems like a better solution for almost all kinds of waste disposal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Lesson time

[Godwin O'Hitler]

I would advise the British govt not to do anything. There's nothing like being up to one's neck in plastic shit to drive home the consequences of a total lack of giving a shit.

Pyrolysis!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a false problem, it's sooo simple to deal with RSW and particularly with plastic, high in BTU... But there little to no political will behind this old good technology because oil barrel is "cheap" for now. http://www.energy-pyrolysis.org/

Geez...

[kenh]

This is an EASY problem to solve - simply build your own plastic recycling plant! It's a known science, and think how much better the planet will be when you don't have to ship your recycling half-way around the planet.

If you start recycling plastic, you'll have the raw materials to create plastic trash in your own UK factories - a huge environmental win and a great job creator. You'll have new jobs building and then running the plastic recycling plant, and then when you realize you have a glut of raw materials in country, you'll likely start manufacturing plastic item domestically, creating more manufacturing jobs.

Re:Geez...

[iggymanz]

no, most plastic can't be recycled at all outside of tabletop laboratory experiment, contrary to popular belief. look it up.

better to just burn the stuff as fuel, it's only 4% of crude oil use anyway and would displace burning coal or oil

Re:Geez...

[Anonymous Coward]

you'll likely start manufacturing plastic item domestically, creating more manufacturing jobs.

You're not from the UK, are you?

Re:Geez...

[drinkypoo]

no, most plastic can't be recycled at all outside of tabletop laboratory experiment, contrary to popular belief. look it up.

These days there are processes that recycle literally all plastics, using thermal depolymerization. Unfortunately, it doesn't return as much usable material as other recycling methods. However, it is still applicable when you have unsortable or inseparable plastics.

Dump it at sea

[Anonymous Coward]

The oceans are unimaginably wide and deep. They can absorb centuries of waste material without problem. The solution is to ship the plastic far, far from landfall to the middle part of the ocean. Dump it there. Most of it will sink within a few minutes -- probelm solved.

Re:Dump it at sea

[hyades1]

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42264788

Burn it

[blindseer]

I remember my chemistry professor in college commenting on the stupidity of recycling plastic. We haul around this plastic and burn a lot of fuel doing it. As I recall the neighboring city was at the time proposing a waste burning power plant. Made sense to me. Burn the plastic so we're not just burning more oil to keep moving it around.

I know the adage, any simple solution to a complex problem is often wrong. I'm trying to see the failure in this simple solution.

I understand that these plastic burning facilities have to be built, and we're still carrying plastic to these facilities, but it's not like we don't need the energy anyway or haul fuel to the power plants. We'd be moving the plastic but we don't have to be terribly concerned about separating one kind of plastic from another. All plastic will burn. Paper does too. Burn it all. Separate out the metal and glass, then burn the rest. Rubber, paper, wood, cloth, plastic, just burn it.

Recycling of most things is just stupid, my chemistry professor told me so.

Re:Burn it

[drinkypoo]

Recycling of most things is just stupid, my chemistry professor told me so.

Those who can, do. Those who can't pretend that scrubbers are 100% effective at trapping dioxin, which is released when you burn certain plastics.

Maybe you could burn all but the PVC. But there's a lot of PVC out there. Most plastic cases were still made out of it last I looked, for example. Like most toxic things that we still use, it's cheap and easy to handle.

Re:Burn it

[Anonymous Coward]

Your chemistry professor told you so? That is a piss poor argument from authority.

How about some numbers on this, don't forget to include the environmental impacts of all options in the numbers.

Re:Burn it

[blindseer]

I did about 2 minutes of searching on this and found that dioxins are destroyed when they reach temperatures of about 850 C. Another 2 minutes tells me that steel melts at about 1500 C. It's not that hard to get something hot enough to destroy the toxins, people have been melting steel for a very long time.

Okay, got it, any solution that is so simple has to be wrong. Is that what you are saying? Maybe it really isn't that hard. Burn the stuff but do so in a way that it's too hot for the toxins to get out.

We know how to burn stuff, and how to get that fire really hot. I still think that burning the stuff is easier, cheaper, and more ecological than recycling.

Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[La Gris]

Plastic bags are already prohibited.

How many disposable single-use containers made of oil sourced plastic are still produced and sold around the world?

This is such an horrible waste of resources.

Why can't I come to the supermarket with my containers to refill with whatever I need, like liquid soap?

I buy my dish washing soap by 5 litters high concentration Teepol for €8.5 and have 13 refills at 50% water dilution for a 750 milliliters Paic bottle I bought 10 years ago for €2.5. An average consumer person would have bought and trashed 50 plastic bottles once empty by now. I went 10 years with only 2 × 5 litters soap containers. And I save money at that.

Kids buy fluff candy in strong transparent polyethylene boxes that go to trash. The plastic box weights more than the fluff it contains, and it is made of fossil oil.

All this should have been prohibited decades ago.

Re:Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[nwf]

Plastic bags are already prohibited.

Not where I live. I just wish they'd make them more re-usable. Target ones are good for re-use, but the supermarket one aren't even good for groceries. The reusable bags are a source for food-borne illness.

How many disposable single-use containers made of oil sourced plastic are still produced and sold around the world?

Since there are strict requirements for food storage containers, re-using isn't very likely. Lunch meats often come in re-usable containers, which is cool, but they are all different and impossible to store more than a few efficiently.

This is such an horrible waste of resources.

Preventing theft is likely the major reason for large packaging. It's harder to stash a huge, sharp plastic package down your pants. As we get more things from places like Amazon, I'd hope companies will package products specifically for markets where theft isn't much of an issue. I've purchased some Amazon Basics stuff that comes plainly wrapped with thin cardboard. Works fine and I can easily recycle the cardboard.

Why can't I come to the supermarket with my containers to refill with whatever I need, like liquid soap?

Whole Foods does this for some items, but it's not very popular.

I buy my dish washing soap by 5 litters high concentration Teepol for €8.5 and have 13 refills at 50% water dilution for a 750 milliliters Paic bottle I bought 10 years ago for €2.5. An average consumer person would have bought and trashed 50 plastic bottles once empty by now. I went 10 years with only 2 × 5 litters soap containers. And I save money at that.

I buy large refills for liquid soap, but not much else is economical. It's cheaper for me to buy two small laundry detergents on sale than the huge one that's discounted the same amount as a single small one. In fact, I've noticed many large-volume items aren't really any cheaper per gram or liter than the smaller versions. That's marketing.

Kids buy fluff candy in strong transparent polyethylene boxes that go to trash. The plastic box weights more than the fluff it contains, and it is made of fossil oil.

To make it look nice and large enough to reduce theft. Those concerns will not change. If the government legislates this, stores will likely just not sell a lot of stuff because it becomes less attractive for an impulse buy or too much of it walks out the door.

All this should have been prohibited decades ago.

Sadly, we can't legislate reason.

Re:Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Plastic bags are already prohibited.

All of my plastic bags are used for food storage in the refrigerator (like for opened cheese) and then graduate into garbage bags. If it weren't for plastic bags, I would have to buy ziplock and hefty garbage bags that would still end up in a landfill. It saves me a lot of money. They also make great pet waste bags for going to the park.

Re:Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the country side and still the idiot council require you to put each and every dog poo into a plastic bag so this plastic can hit the landfill instead of breaking down naturally into the earth.

Re:Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[Bert64]

Plastic bags are convenient to carry if you're on foot or taking public transport, and they're available from the store whenever you go there.

Paper bags are better in some cases, but they will fall apart if they get wet (eg in the rain).

A few years ago the stores used to provide cardboard boxes to customers for free, the same boxes that much of their stock was delivered in. If you've travelled to the store on foot then these boxes are useless, but if you've travelled by car then it's actually much easier to put your goods in the boxes and load them into your car. Once bags are in the trunk of your car they have a habit of falling over and spilling their contents, boxes don't do that. The boxes were also a waste product to the shop, if customers didn't take them then they had to be disposed of.
Now the boxes are just disposed of and not made available to customers.

If you make a conscious plan to visit the shop on foot you can take bags with you and reuse them, but sometimes you just visit the shop on a whim and don't have a bag with you. Carrying bags with you at all times in case you might want to buy something is annoying and stupid.

And yes existing containers should be usable for certain goods, but this requires infrastructure both to physically supply the product and to handle charging for arbitrary quantities instead of fixed size units.

Re: Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy, make dogs illegal, presto no more waste

Re: Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously this. Why the fuck does every idiot human need one or more idiot dogs?

Re:Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[Anonymous Coward]

In San Diego and Los Angeles there has been a hepatitis outbreak among the homeless possibly due to new rules regarding plastic bags.

Re:Prohibit disposable plastic stuffs

[vivian]

You don't have to put it in a plastic bag. Pick that shit up in a washable tupperware container and bury it in your back yard, if that suits you better.
Either way, the rest of us still don't want your dog's crap all over the pavement so we have to dodge it when walking down the street, and be bothered by flies that have hatched in it.

Astonishing!

[hyades1]

So oil companies, which are subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars per year, use their unfair market advantage to transport plastic (also made from oil) to Third World countries like China, where it is disposed of in ways that are at best questionable, at worst environmentally disastrous. In so doing, they sell more plastic and more transportation-related oil and gasoline. This is called "recycling", and corporate-owned First World governments allow the situation to continue unchallenged.

People pointing out that transporting plastic to Third World countries is economically viable mainly due to these subsidies are dismissed as "tree-huggers", "eco-warriors" and "Global Warming alarmists".

Petro-chemical companies have been externalizing the cost of manufacturing, distributing and disposing of plastic for decades. They have also been lobbying with great success against even small subsidies for renewable energy generation. And thanks to sophisticated marketing campaigns similar to those that kept the debate about tobacco's health effects going for decades longer than necessary, uninformed and willfully-ignorant voters continue to allow them to get away with this.

Ironically, it is one of those Third World countries, one with a frighteningly authoritarian government, that appears to be throwing a monkey wrench into the petro-chemical industry's smoothly-operating, oil-consuming pollution machine.

I wish I thought this was good news, rather than just an indication that the existing system will simply start looking for different markets for First World garbage.

Re:Astonishing!

[Miles_O'Toole]

The effects of Big Oil's interference in the world economy go even further. Hemp would be a lower-impact substitute for a lot of plastic, but industry lobbying has kept it illegal to grow in the US and elsewhere. The "War On Drugs" has focussed on marijuana thanks to its close relationship with hemp.

This website is admittedly a cheerleader for hemp, but there's a lot of information on it that's accurate and eye-opening:

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2012/04/01/5-ways-hemp-will-change-our-world/

Re:Astonishing!

[jblues]

I've been spending new year in a poor area of a developing country - the Philippines - visiting family. Although it is illegal for super-markets to use plastic bags. The hawker stores here sell everything in little plastic sachets. Eg if someone wants to wash their hair, they buy a sachet of shampoo, then three days later come back for another one. Ditto for toothpaste, cups of noodles. Actually just about everything.

When there's no trash collection service, the rate of pile-up is alarming. Horrible wrappers everywhere. They're usually swept up and burned, which damn well stinks and certainly isn't healthy.

I was just day-dreaming about a way to incentivise hawkers to buy in bulk and use bio-degradable wrapping. While googling around I found out why the Manila Folder was called as such - originally they were made from Manila Hemp, a type of fiber obtained from Musa Textalis, which is related to edible bananas. In the meantime the humble banana leaf makes an excellent wrapper.

Re:Astonishing!

[Miles_O'Toole]

Thank you for that! Your entire comment was a learning experience for me.

Re:Astonishing!

[jblues]

Glad you found it interesting. Hey, there's evidence that Australia was a hemp colony (the sativa kind) too.

Re:Astonishing!

[hyades1]

I'm going to thank both of you guys. I hadn't considered the hemp aspect.

This is for the best.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well,

It is high time a lot of countries starting tackling overconsuming and recycling. Landfills have never been the answer.

Stupid packaging

[Bert64]

The problem is caused by the ridiculous packaging that most items come in...
More than 90% of my weekly trash is made up of plastic packaging, usually the packaging is much larger than the item it contained and is designed to look pretty on the shelf.

Packaging should be more sensible... Plain cardboard that can biodegrade or be easily recycled, glass bottles that can be cleaned and reused (not melted down and recycled as that's a hugely energy intensive process).

Re:Stupid packaging

[ebvwfbw]

Yes. Back to the way we used to package before WWII. Let's do it.

Re:Stupid packaging

[drinkypoo]

glass bottles that can be cleaned and reused (not melted down and recycled as that's a hugely energy intensive process).

Glass recycling does save a little bit of energy as compared to virgin glass, and we are actually have sand shortages right now because we're using sand faster than the beaches we take it from can be replenished, so there are good reasons to recycle glass as well as reusing it.

If only...

[uohcicds]

...there were some supra-national bloc of countries that could pool their resources and have a joint approach to this, that the UK could be a part of and...

DOH.

Re:If only...

[Chrisq]

...there were some supra-national bloc of countries that could pool their resources and have a joint approach to this, that the UK could be a part of and...

DOH.

Don't worry, Comrade Corbyn will have us joining the Russian Federation

A FINAL solution -- Full stop

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Buy a rocket. Tie the trash to it --existing, and current not future trash.
2. Aim for the sun. No astronaut required.
3. Lift off. (The trash will disintegrate and harmful by-products dissipate. Noxious fumes to be inhaled by alien visitors)
Let's think of real solutions -- for the inevitable next big wave of trash.
4. Profit! (If Elon picks up on it)

Councils and Cities are Forked

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all the tips and landfill were sold to private operators with non compete clauses.
Then they got rid of council trucks -privatized that.
Then they closed tips, and sold off key land for housing - that should have been reserved for municipal use. Land is in short supply - nobody wants smells near them!

Now ratepayers will have to pay double/triple, as you cant simply turn on a switch.
In Australia, one recycling centre closed because electricity and water went up 100% and became unprofitable under the wink wink ship it to china policy, which will now become ship it 800kms north to Queensland.

Now the free market worm has turned. Strange how some Nordic countries use their own waste. I suspect closed down car plants can be reopened for waste smelting - or rates can rise a few thousand per year.

just no

[Anonymous Coward]

About 50 other comments show you are wrong.

Rephrase: "UK faces build up of oil reserves"

[xtal]

Plastic is basically refined solid oil.

There is an easy solution. Burn it and make electricity. Or heat. Or hell, just burn it.

Problem solved. ..surely you don't think there's no burning of oil going on anyway?