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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

#121

Post by imhoguy »

cashsterling wrote: post #103

I am not an expert but I am a PhD chemical engineer and I have though about this issue for years and years. My 0.02... Short term --------------- a) give houses smaller trash cans and charge a lot for bigger trash cans. Town I live in already does this... at first I was like "wtf with this tiny trash can... I can throw away like one, two bags of trash tops per week"... well, now my household of 4 averages one bag of…

> give houses smaller trash cans and charge a lot for bigger trash cans.

And then find garbage illegaly dumped in forests.

> d)We need packaging laws and taxes that address waste caused by excessive/unnecessary packaging... particularly for commercial/industrial use.

This. Taxes and import duties should penalise overuse of hardly recyclable products and packages.

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

#123

Post by Grazester »

lopmotr wrote: post #111
Grazester wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes with the glass bottles please. In the Caribbean Soda use to come in glass bottle with a $0.50 deposit. You would never find a bottle on the side of the street, kids lamented losing their deposit if they broke a bottle(also ran the risk of getting yourself cut if you did) so they made sure to hold on to those bottles with both hands. Now soda comes in a plastic bottle with no deposit on it and isn't recycled on th…

Isn't that a problem that could be solved with law enforcement and cleaners like what developed countries do? That still seems to be cheaper than glass bottles.

Yes there are law's against littering and that doesn't mean much. I live in New York City(in a "developed" country). Yet some streets can become pretty littered.

The glass bottle made the people police themselves instead of having the governments use public resources to do it.

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

#124

Post by joecot »

dghughes wrote: post #87
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…

> We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due respect to the long term consequences. Those properties are also used in place of other materials. Gears in devices that were once metal are now plastic which works OK for w while but it's not even close to the durability of metal. The result is the device with plastic gears fails and a new one is made to…

> How many vacuum cleaners, washers, dryers, microwave ovens from the 1970s and 1980s are still in use versus the same devices from the 1990s/2000s?

I don't doubt that metal is more durable than plastic, but there's some survivor's bias in that statement. We usually think of 70s and 80s appliances being more durable because we see people still using them. The truth is that we've always had a mix of cheaply made vs durable products, and the cheaply made stuff broke years ago and was replaced. We're comparing our cheapest made products of now to the most durably made products of decades ago.

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

#125

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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?

They drastically underbid western recyclers for a long time, economically disincentiving other better solutions. Ideally, western governments should have seen this coming and fixed the problem earlier, being a failing of capatalism unchecked.

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

#126

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

Sounds kind of like Japan, but there seemed to be more than 10 bins. Japan is a lot less tiny than Sweden in terms of population.

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

#127

Post by rmshea »

sciyoshi wrote: post #50
reaperducer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, thank you for the source. I've fixed my wording in the original post.

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

#128

Post by ams6110 »

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…

Most plastic degrades rather rapidly in UV (sunlight). Buried, it may not, but it's also rather inert underground.

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

#129

Post by dflock »

lopmotr wrote: post #111
Grazester wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes with the glass bottles please. In the Caribbean Soda use to come in glass bottle with a $0.50 deposit. You would never find a bottle on the side of the street, kids lamented losing their deposit if they broke a bottle(also ran the risk of getting yourself cut if you did) so they made sure to hold on to those bottles with both hands. Now soda comes in a plastic bottle with no deposit on it and isn't recycled on th…

Isn't that a problem that could be solved with law enforcement and cleaners like what developed countries do? That still seems to be cheaper than glass bottles.

Cheaper is not the measure of everything. Glass bottles, returned and re-used are much better for the environment than plastic bottles.

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

#130

Post by imhoguy »

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…

Upcycling! Pack stuff into reusable durable plastic bags. Reuse small bottles - fill them with tap water or water from large refillable dispensers.
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