China is no longer importing waste – 111M tons will have to go elsewhere • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by heurist » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:16 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #26

fredley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I predict it won't be long before using non-biodegradeable plastic in any packaging or short-lived product will be banned. It's outrageous that everything is packaged in material that will almost certainly not be properly recycled, and end up in landfill or the ocean.

For a while I've been scavenging devices. So I have my eyes on people's waste quite regularly.. I'm thinking of starting a recycling factory. If people just threw all their waste in my yard I'd be rich. - Tons of cardboard - Tons of batteries - Tons of partially working devices - etc etc The thing is, 'you' buy the packaging most of the time. People are stupid, they just follow the stream of 'nice' from nice looking…

In my area there's a market around finding used items at Goodwill outlets, fixing them up, and reselling through Craigslist/Offer Up/neighbors/etc. My wife and her mother find a lot of useful, inexpensive things at Goodwill outlets, including nice furniture, kitchen utensils, decoration, and electronics I now use daily. As someone who used to shop by hunting down brand name products in big box stores when I needed anything, the realization that used, nearly-free items are both readily available still functional was surprisingly profound.

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

#62

Post by justinator » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #56

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…

Actually, yes. Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough). Paper bags are also a great technology. I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working…

Glass is a terrible material in a recycling sense, as it's weight makes transport costly and wasteful (fuel). The raw material is essentially sand (silica) which we're not going to run out of, soon. Burying it in a landfill won't make a worst landfill - it's essentially inert.

It's literally better to NOT recycle glass than to recycle it. Reuse it.

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

#63

Post by oppositelock » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

p3llin0r3 wrote: post #42

r00fus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I don't know why you're being down voted. China, India and Africa are responsible for 90% of the waste in the ocean. All of them are smaller consumers of it than the US. (https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/891361/Plastic-waste-po...)

I can't stand these various doomsday scenario stories. Yes, it's certainly wasteful to have single use plastic products. Consumers like them, though, and they're sometimes the only way to comply with various regulations about cleanliness. For example, washing and steam cleaning glass to sterilize it uses more energy than just making a plastic bottle.

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

#64

Post by jseliger » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #39

I 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. T…

A useful post. Have you read the Adam Minter book Junkyard Planet? https://jakeseliger.com/2018/04/10/junkyard-planet-adam-mint.... It's a deep and excellent look into how the junk supply starts in the United States and goes (went, now, I guess) to China.

"Waste" made sense for China when the country was poor and desperately starved for raw materials. Now the country is less poor; we are going to have to somehow subsidize the recycling of waste (expensive) or landfill it (terrible for the environment).

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

#65

Post by bilbo0s » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC

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.

Not really.

We design the products and the packaging as part of branding. The Chinese ship us what we order.

When was the last time you bought a star wars action figure, pair of rollerblades, computer, or smartphone where all that design work was done in China? You likely haven't. We design and order, they manufacture and fill the order. Not making a moral judgement here. It's just that right or wrong, that's how things work currently.

We order the plastic, China is now saying that we have to keep what we order.

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

#66

Post by radicalbyte » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

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…

In The Netherlands we burn our waste or recycle.

I have a separate bin for plastic, food/garden, paper/cardboard and general waste. Glass and clothes are collected at the supermarket. Most glass and plastic drinks bottles are reused, you pay a deposit for them (excellent system!).

Oil, batteries, light bulbs are collected at schools/supermarkets. Electronics can be returned to stores or more often taken to the skip. They're put in shipping containers and I assume sold somewhere.

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

#67

Post by protonfish » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

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…

Glass isn't biodegradable either, but for some reason that's OK. Paper uses more energy (fossil fuels) and pollutants in production than plastics. Taking a rational look at environmental impact of different materials contradicts the knee-jerk anti-plastic attitude that is popular. Unless I am missing something, I can't see a rational reason that using plastics for packaging, then properly disposing in a land fill is not the sky-is-falling bogeyman it is portrayed to be.

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

#68

Post by JulianMorrison » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

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…

Recycling is less help than it looks. Assuming it's captured (big assumption with a lot being binned and straight into landfill) it gets made into degraded products, it can't cycle back to the original use good as new like glass. And a lot of those products are things that look like big plastic dust sources.

And nobody recycles dust.

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

#69

Post by ars » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

jacobr wrote: post #47

ars wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> have these bins

Those bins looks pretty nice, although the balance between the comportments seems odd. (The paper compartment (2 of them?) is too large, as is the white one the right - is that for "other"?)

Not sure I'd be able to get that down my stairs though.

> I never transport my trash more than 5 meters.

How is it picked up? Curbside? Curious what kind of truck they use.

Also, do you keep that in your house? Do you go outside in the winter for each item? Or do you stage the trash in the house, and sort it later?

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

#70

Post by murderfs » Thu, Jun 21, 2018, 8:18 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #56

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…

Actually, yes. Glass jars/bottles and metal cans are great for recycling (sometimes even reuse if standards are high enough). Paper bags are also a great technology. I could see a standardized beverage container format (including a paper wrapper lightly glued on) and cheap reusable metal 'silverware' that is also magnetic (because we're a nation of idiots and this stuff is going to get in to the waste stream) working…

Recycling glass is essentially pointless. It costs the same amount of energy to recycle glass (possibly even more, due to transport) as it does to just make new glass, and we're never going to run out of sand.