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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.
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.
Do you have ESP?
Time for plastic roadways! There's already a pilot project in the UK.
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 ?
Nullius in verba
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)?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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"?
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
I don't know, but it works for me.
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.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.