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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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]

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

[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: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.

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 ?

Trojan Rabbit

[Templer421]

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

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.

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.

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).