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China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

bloomberg.com

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Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#41

Post by contactanother »

mtw wrote: post #23

Is it me or there's been recently China articles with a negative bias recently on hacker news?

Pretty easy to be negative on China when all the news come out of there are: dictatorship, imprisonment millions in concentration camps and brainwashes them, builds artificial islands and claim ownership of seas not even close to their land, blatantly disregards WTO rules and closes off its market to others, hacks and steals other countries and their companies IP, threatens to attack a democratic Taiwan every day, censorship of their citizens, threatening censorship of other countries about China or its concentration camps, depletes fishing supplies in other countries, floods the ocean with plastics, props up dictatorships in other countries, etc etc etc.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#42

Post by p3llin0r3 »

r00fus wrote: post #35
state_less wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 byproduc…

Unfortunately, this probably wouldn't work.

Most plastic waste does not come from rich countries with decent waste infrastructure. It comes from shipping and fishing and industrial vessels who dump their garbage into the ocean, and developing countries who dispose of all of their waste by throwing it into a river or the ocean to be washed away.

You can't tax them because they are not in your country. You would have to stop the plastic being created at it's source, and prevent it from ever being released into the environment.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#43

Post by qqg3 »

ars wrote: post #24
rmshea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should serve as a wake up call for the rest of the world. Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years, most notably touting the fact that they import other countries' trash to use in their recycling plants [1]. How can we recreate Sweden’s model in the US and have our own solution to the trash problem instead of giving it to China? [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s…

> Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years That line is more false than true. For the most part they are not recycling their trash, they are incinerating it. Additionally Sweden is tiny. Trash there is brought to local recycling centers with 6 to 8 or more different bins, and people are expected to sort their trash. How would you do that in the US? Trucks with 8 compartments? Where would you e…

Am in the US, transport my recycling right now as there is no pickup in my county.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#45

Post by bladecatcher »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #7

We 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…

Although not yet commercially viable there are a few companies trying to address this problem. Algopack[0], a French startup is making plastic like material from seaweed (brown algae) and there are others that are trying out bioplastics made from sugarcane

[0] http://www.algopack.com/algopackgb.php

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#46

Post by p3llin0r3 »

athenot wrote: post #22
JulianMorrison wrote: post #7

We 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…

There are many different types of plastics. Some end up in nature as tiny pieces like you mention and are indeed very bad for the ecosystem. But it's also possible to set up a proper recycling & valorization system. Northern Europe already does it: over 98% of consumer plastics are either recycled or valorized through heat (producing power or city heating). Despite that, there's an effort to address the low-hanging f…

Preventing plastic in Europe would have basically no effect on plastic in the ocean. The problem is people with poor waste management infrastructure tossing their junk into the rivers and oceans in developing countries.

https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#47

Post by jacobr »

ars wrote: post #24
rmshea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should serve as a wake up call for the rest of the world. Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years, most notably touting the fact that they import other countries' trash to use in their recycling plants [1]. How can we recreate Sweden’s model in the US and have our own solution to the trash problem instead of giving it to China? [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s…

> Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years That line is more false than true. For the most part they are not recycling their trash, they are incinerating it. Additionally Sweden is tiny. Trash there is brought to local recycling centers with 6 to 8 or more different bins, and people are expected to sort their trash. How would you do that in the US? Trucks with 8 compartments? Where would you e…

> Additionally Sweden is tiny. Trash there is brought to local recycling centers with 6 to 8 or more different bins

Actually a lot of homes now have these bins: http://blogg.tyrens.se/avfallsblogg/files/2017/10/Fyrfackska...

Recycling is simply made very convienient. I never transport my trash more than 5 meters. There's even a box for light bulbs and batteries.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#48

Post by r00fus »

asdsa5325 wrote: post #31
yoran wrote: post #5

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.

Who's buying from the Chinese? It's not like their fault that other people want to buy their stuff.

Look to the supply chain of who's putting plastic spoons/forks in restaurants in the US/EU and you'll probably find lots of profit from non-chinese companies.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#49

Post by JulianMorrison »

state_less wrote: post #29
JulianMorrison wrote: post #7

We 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…

A lot of the time you can substitute paper, glass, wood, wicker, wax, natural fiber cloth or string, the things people were using at the turn of the 20th century before any plastic other than rubber had been commercialised.

There are also bioplastics that degrade quickly, and those could cover some of the remaining gaps.

I don't think even long use products are good uses for plastic, TBH. Long in whose terms? Plastics will hang around for longer than we have had agriculture. Imagine if the Sumerians had made plastic. We'd still have their plastic temple tat, ox yokes, obsolete plough parts etc littering up the Iraq desert.

Re: China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere

#50

Post by sciyoshi »

reaperducer wrote: post #19
rmshea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should serve as a wake up call for the rest of the world. Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years, most notably touting the fact that they import other countries' trash to use in their recycling plants [1]. How can we recreate Sweden’s model in the US and have our own solution to the trash problem instead of giving it to China? [1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s…

touting the fact that other countries in fact buy their trash. How can we recreate Sweden’s model Isn't this exactly the problem? Sweden isn't taking care of its own trash, but instead selling it to China, just like the US and many other countries?

I think GP meant to say that Sweden is buying other countries' trash: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s-recycling...
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