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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

#131

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lopmotr wrote: post #108

What's wrong with putting it in landfills? The world has no shortage of wasteland. If we can afford to ship it to China, can't we spend the same money driving it on trucks into a nearby desert or valley?

There is a huge assymetry between shipping to and from China. Since China exports so much, those containers often come back empty. In finding something to fill these empty containers on the way back, some smart guy (proabably in China) came up with garbage.

They’ll think of something else to fill the containers with, but it isn’t that uneconomical to shop garbage to China given the circumstances.

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

#132

Post by dflock »

oppositelock wrote: post #63
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…

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 w…

Right, but if your energy comes from renewables, then this calculus changes.

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

#133

Post by smallnamespace »

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…

> molds and fungi don't feed on it

At the macro level this is a bug, not a feature.

The fact that it doesn't biodegrade easily is what makes it accumulate in the environment, with more and more toxic effects as we go up the food chain.

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

#134

Post by dflock »

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.

We actually _are_ running out of sand, btw.

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

#135

Post by gascan »

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…

we are going to have to somehow subsidize the recycling of waste

Our recycling would be worth a lot more if we could train consumers to stop throwing junk in the recycling. Supposedly, junk in the recycling was a big part of the crash in the value of recycled material, and China's subsequent refusal to take more.

Maybe if it's no longer something we can ship off to "far away" and forget about, people will begin to care enough to sort their recycling out better.

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

#136

Post by sgnelson »

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…

Sure, and I agree that many products aren't built like they once were (with or without survivorship bias, as well as the ability to fix older products is way easier than newer products) but, the cost of metal gears versus plastic gears, for instance, was much much higher. (now with Metal Injection molding, the prices would be closer, but the MiM are still more expensive.)

For better or worse, people are almost always going to choose cheaper products.

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

#137

Post by contactanother »

628C6l0 wrote: post #109
contactanother wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ce…

Nuke China.

You literally said you're Chinese, in one of the comment a month ago.

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

#138

Post by aarongough »

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…

A friend of mine is a researcher in water quality, I asked him what the primary source of microplastics was and his answer surprised me: textiles.

Apparently things like fleece shed small plastic fibres constantly every time they're washed, and those fibers make up the bulk of most microplastics.

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