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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

#91

Post by majewsky »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #49
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…

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? Plastic…

> 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.

That would actually be great for archaeologists. /s

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

#92

Post by justin66 »

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…

> Glass isn't biodegradable either, but for some reason that's OK.

Regular glass in the environment is eventually pulverized into dust, it doesn't react with much of anything, and if the little bits that persist longest in the environment are ingested by an animal, it's handled biologically like any other nontoxic stone or grit. Pretty much the worst you can say about its environmental effect is that the broken bits can be pretty sharp when they're new and it's rather heavy, making disposal and recycling expensive in some respects.

Plastic is quite different.

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

#93

Post by r00fus »

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…

Taxing the usage of plastic will reduce it's use because it kills the market and reduces.

Just like GDPR killing off companies that could only exist where reasonable regulations didn't exist, the same would apply of plastic.

If taxing plastic in US/EU creates alternative packaging/disposable options that are cheaper or more effective (doubtful but possible) then the developing world can leapfrom from plastics to non-plastic.

Also you're ignoring all the waste that's not ocean-dumped. The billions of tons in landfills.

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

#95

Post by neolefty »

Rotdhizon wrote: post #4
ribrars wrote: post #2

More like there was a huge trash problem and they don't want it anymore... how is them handing the world a problem when the root cause of the problem is unsustainable packaging and recyclables?

The title is either purposefully misleading to get views, or just to express anti-china sentiment.

To me, it didn't sound derogatory to China at all—just a country shifting its priorities, saying "Y'all got to deal with your own garbage now."

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

#96

Post by jacobr »

ars wrote: post #69
jacobr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?…

I live in a house and each bin is emptied bi-weekly by a regular garbage truck. The two front-most compartments are actually not fixed to the bin, so the bin is lifted up, the front-most part is lifted and emptied (in a vertically split compartment), then the rest in another. (I used to watch this with the kids a lot...)

Apartments often have a similar setup but with one large bin per category in the basement. There is also another system where you are supplied with color coded garbage bags for each type of waste that you then throw in the same bin.

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

#97

Post by imhoguy »

justinator wrote: post #54

"Plastic Recycling" always seemed like such a scam. Very little of it can be turned into the same thing it was, before. Most of it can only be downcycled to an inferior product (and then it's mostly the end of the line). To think we've simply shipped it off to another country to deal with the problem is criminal. Another part of my childhood where the details were far less idealistic than the big picture.

Exactly this. As China bans to buy European "recyclable waste", then it is imported into countries with legal loopholes e.g. to Poland [1], Serbia, Italy[2] and so on and somehow landfills start to burn accidentally. Even if the law changes [3], there will be other places where a penality for such criminal act is lower than cost of recycling or proper storage.

100% plastic recycling is a dream.

Don't want to even start story about toxic fluids recycling... accidentaly leaking into rivers.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8p7wnr/major_danger...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_(Italy)

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-waste/poland-vows-...

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

#98

Post by samatman »

justinator wrote: post #54

"Plastic Recycling" always seemed like such a scam. Very little of it can be turned into the same thing it was, before. Most of it can only be downcycled to an inferior product (and then it's mostly the end of the line). To think we've simply shipped it off to another country to deal with the problem is criminal. Another part of my childhood where the details were far less idealistic than the big picture.

It basically is. The most reasonable approach to plastic waste is controlled incineration for power. That means at least the oil we dig up performs some yeoman duty as a container or padding before being turned into work and greenhouse gas.

A bit of recycling on the margins, perhaps. Biggest thing would be to stop making plastic products that fall apart into biotoxic pieces.

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

#99

Post by oasisbob »

justinator wrote: post #62
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…

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.

The #1 ingredient in glass isn't sand, it's previously manufactured glass. You can pretend it's sand, but it's not.

The economics of all this is very geographically dependent.

In many parts of the country, the transport cost isn't a big deal because there are glass manufacturers who use cullet nearby. It's not clearly superior to transport glass to a landfill instead of a place that can recycle it.

Glass recycling isn't economical enough to reuse brown bottles in Montana? Understandable - so it's not collected.

Saying that glass recycling is economically and ecologically unsustainable everywhere is a bold statement.

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

#100

Post by pkaye »

zanmat0 wrote: post #59
asdsa5325 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is the one creating the plastic in the first place. Don't act like they have a moral high ground.

If no one was buying it, would they still be creating it?

Yup just like the oil companies are not at fault. If no was buying it, would they still be pumping it up?
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