Good for them. Let the rest of the world fix the problems they're creating themselves.
China is the one creating the plastic in the first place. Don't act like they have a moral high ground.
China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
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Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#32Is it me or there's been recently China articles with a negative bias recently on hacker news?
Do you expect us to speak kindly of their social credit system?
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#33Seems like Northern Africa would be a pretty logical place for disposing waste. Lots of unused desert land very close to the sea for easy access by barge.
Barge access isn't the problem so much as deep-water port capacity is as most waste is transported via cargo container. It takes years to build up the infrastructure needed to handle the increased garbage and transport it to massive landfills, even if you've got cheap land for them. I'd expect that it'd stress existing African port capacity, even if we're only talking about a portion of the waste that was previously sent to China.
With luck, we'll see improvements in recycling technology and investment to compensate. In the meantime, the bulk of it's already going to landfills with all of the problems that entails.
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#34Is it me or there's been recently China articles with a negative bias recently on hacker news?
With a looming trade war feature the US and China as primary actors, it's pretty understandable.
I also don't think this article really has too much of a negative bias, aside from the title itself.
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#35We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists. The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a…
Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on. The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due…
> Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?
If you put a price (read: tax) on plastic, I'm sure many folks would jump at the opportunity of replacing plastic-heavy stuff with no/minimal plastic options possibly using glass or paper (or metal where things are disposable that shouldn't be).
Thing is, plastic has a subsidized price right now due to petroleum supply chain being subsidized - plastic is a byproduct (we even fight wars to keep the price low).
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#36Is it me or there's been recently China articles with a negative bias recently on hacker news?
how is this a negative article? If I had to decide it's positive. No more imported trash means a certain level of development
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#37We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists. The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a…
The problem with switching to alternatives like "compostable plastics" is they need to be composted in a special facility that most people aren't going to have easy access to so they'll either throw them in with their recycling (which contaminates the recycling stream) or they put them in with their garbage (which, in a oxygen starved environment like a landfill, causes them to release a lot of methane as they decompose).
So now the consumer often has to to decide if they want more greenhouse gases or more microplastics in the environment.
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#38Seems like Northern Africa would be a pretty logical place for disposing waste. Lots of unused desert land very close to the sea for easy access by barge.
Isn't there a lot of desert land in the US as well? and easier access than going all the way to Northern Africa
Yep and some is already being used as landfills.
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#39I feel like this is one of the most important underreported stories today. It's a massive, sudden change that is having ripple affects on the entire global supply chain.
We've written quite a bit about it on Waste Dive: https://www.wastedive.com/news/what-chinese-import-policies-... California is particularly hard hit and is likely to relax laws about how much recyclable material is allowed to be sent to landfills. There's nowhere else for it to go.
Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere
#40Before building industry and infrastructure to support it this is how my SimCities made money.
Is this what we're seeing here?