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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

#71

Post by justinator »

mtw wrote: post #20
seanalltogether wrote: post #9

Seems 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

Deserts aren't inhospitable. They're still ecosystems for animals that perhaps do not want their groundwater (perhaps) tainted by a landfill. Problems are already happening with pretty terrible materials that have been dumped,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/25/radioactive-...

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

protonfish wrote: post #67
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by justinator »

p3llin0r3 wrote: post #52
baxtr wrote: post #27

This is actually great news. Western people will have to get innovate about avoiding garbage, plastic in particular. Oceans will intake less waste (Yes, I’m optimistic about this one)

Western nations aren't the problem, it's developing countries with poor waste infrastructure and industrial vessels. https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

Yeah, we're the problem. It's OUR plastic that China isn't allowing in anymore.

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

#74

Post by devoply »

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.

They create the plastics for those who buy them. Don't act like anyone has the moral high ground.

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

#75

Post by RealityVoid »

jseliger wrote: post #64
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 su…

Is landfilling truly terrible for the environment? It seems to me as though if a concentrated area were used for landfilling, that area is ruined, but overall the surface is small in the grand scheme of things, so it should have a relatively small impact. Can anybody expand _why_ landfills are bad? It certainly seems better than simply leaving junk everywhere.

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

#76

Post by aleksei »

squozzer wrote: post #21

We could (and maybe should) demand in trade deals that if you ship us plastic, you take it back. Easy to enforce? I dunno - why not require country of origin for packaging? But assuming that won't happen - sounds like an opportunity for US jobs. Plastic might make decent bricks for building.

Shouldn't rather the entity importing the plastic take responsibility for disposing of it? As you say it might even create jobs, but I'd say it should befall the consumer to take care of the waste they produce in any case, instead of simply shipping it away.

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

#77

Post by bilbo0s »

gowld wrote: post #15
contactanother wrote: post #13

That's hilariously ironic because China is the biggest exporter of plastics. 1.) China: $17.9B (24.7% of exported plastic items) 2.) Germany $9B (12.4%) http://www.worldstopexports.com/plastic-item-exports-country... plastics are now drowning the ocean, choking fishes (which the Chinese fisherman has a habit of overfishing, even going out to other countries' sea to fish). not to mention coral diseases, as well as mic…

I don't see the irony. World consumers asked for plastic. China provided it, and doesn't want to take it back.

Yep. We designed the products, and the packaging. Then ordered that exact combination to be manufactured in China.

You don't get to order a balsa wood table, of your own design, from a woodworker, and then complain that they won't take the balsa wood back when you want to throw the flimsy table away. Especially when you specifically asked them to make the table from balsa wood.

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

#78

Post by justinator »

oldcynic wrote: post #60
p3llin0r3 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Should we ignore the escalating amounts of waste, mainly from single use packaging, in the developed world meanwhile?

The developing world has their own problems - how is a developing country going to deal with these problems without first getting the infrastructure needed? Let's focus on our wasteful selves - we're the one's who've been benefited from the consumption of cheap, throwaway products.

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

#79

Post by r00fus »

mc32 wrote: post #28
r00fus wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, plastics are entirely a byproduct of the hugely dominant petrochemical industrial complex (sibling of Big Oil). Bioplastics exist, but the reason we use so much plastic instead of glass/paper is because it's cheap because it's actually a waste product of oil refinement. Realistically, yes, it's poisonous (so are the superfund-sites-to-be we call gas stations, not to mention the offshore rigs, refinery sit…

Ironically Aramco in planning for future with less petro-derived fuel, is planning on making other things from petroleum, mosltly more plasticky stuff... Can’t blame them much since that is the source of ~80% of their revenues...

Plastic is already everywhere already - is this just a push to increase it's usage?

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

#80

Post by fake-name »

murderfs wrote: post #70
mjevans wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's actually much cheaper to recycle then make from fresh due to dramatically lower energy costs.
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