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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.
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?
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
How about building recycling plants in your own country? Or is that too much to ask?
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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?
China has introduced the ban from this month on "foreign garbage"
It was already difficult to immigrate to China...
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?
Because that's how you get Autons.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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
Along with a chicken in every pot, there should be one of these on every counter top
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Dump it in France.
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
The graph linked shows only China mismanaged over 5 Million tonnes of plastic waste.
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
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.
Twinstiq, game news
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
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
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?
If that doesn't work perhaps a large plastic Badger?
Seems like a better solution for almost all kinds of waste disposal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
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.
Ken
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.
Ken
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.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
I don't know, but it works for me.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42264788
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
...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.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
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?
..don't panic
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.