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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills
A Guardian investigation reveals that cities around the [US] are no longer recycling many types of plastic dropped into recycling bins. Instead, they are being landfilled, burned or stockpiled. From Los Angeles to Florida to the Arizona desert, officials say, vast quantities of plastic are now no better than garbage.
The "market conditions" on the sign [Pearl] Pai saw referred to the situation caused by China. Once the largest buyer of US plastic waste, the country shut its doors to all but highest-quality plastics in 2017. The move sent shockwaves through the American industry as recyclers scrambled, and often failed, to find new buyers. Now the turmoil besetting a global trade network, which is normally hidden from view, is hitting home.
"All these years I have been feeling like I'm doing something responsible," said Pai, clearly dumbstruck as she walked away with a full bag. "The truth hurts."
[...] [Cobe] Skye and [Habib] Kharrat emphasized that the situation was not unique to Los Angeles. "From what we're hearing from our colleagues, what's happening in Los Angeles county is representative of what is happening all over the US and all over the state as a result of these international policies," said Skye.
The China ban revealed an uncomfortable truth about plastic recycling, Skye said: much of this plastic was never possible to recycle at all.
"[China] would just pull out the items that were actually recyclable and burn or throw away the rest," he said. "China has subsidized the recycling industry for many years in a way that distorted our views."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Thursday June 27 2019, @07:41AM
Technically, most plastic is downcycled, not recycled. Recycling involves turning it into the same kind of material as before, plastic is turned into lower-quality plastic. This can be more efficient than making lower-quality plastic from scratch, but it doesn't eliminate the problem of there being a huge quantity of low-quality plastic that needs disposing of... somehow. Themoplastics can often be melted and reformed, but only if you can separate them by purity, which is an energy-expensive process. As another poster pointed out, it's better for the environment to burn it than to let it degrade into nanoparticles and enter the water supply. The best thing to do is use less plastic.
It makes sense to recycle things like aluminium, because easily-accessible aluminium deposits are a finite resource and there's a huge cost to extracting and purifying them. Plastics, on the other hand, are made out of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen: three of the most abundant elements on the Earth's surface. Literally the only cost in making plastics is the energy cost in cracking and polymerising them. Recycling them will often consume more energy than growing a bunch of high-oil plants and turning that oil into new plastic (and much less than using fossil fuels, though that has other externalities).
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