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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?
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.
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They'd stop be 'developing' and go back to being 'dirt poor'?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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
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.
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If that doesn't work perhaps a large plastic Badger?
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Isn't there a higher-value cargo the UK/EU could send to China on these ships instead of waste plastic and e-waste?
Ken
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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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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
...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.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.