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from the Betteridge-Says:-Reduce,-Reuse,-and-THEN-Recycle dept.
For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
Most are choosing the latter. "We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can't afford it," said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin's residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn't want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there's not much she can do. "Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for," she said.
The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. "It almost feels illegal, to throw plastic bottles away," the town manager, Kyle O'Brien, told me.
Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill. The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 11 2019, @01:05PM (4 children)
So what? Your intentions aren't absolutely pure in everything you do either. That's why I care about outcome than motive.
What would be the point. Even with pure landfill disposal of plastics, the developed world isn't the source of the global plastic waste problem. This economic thrashing you advocate isn't going to fix any important problems.
A real big problem here is that people haven't shown that developed world usage of plastics are environmentally unfriendly. It's merely assumed. Plastic doesn't magically teleport from your garbage can to the middle of the ocean. Transport is the big problem and the developed world would solve that problem by locking stuff in landfills - where it won't go anywhere.
Going back to the relative environmental impacts of disposal and recycling, we see that there were large hidden environmental consequences to recycling which weren't present with landfill disposal. But the worst, is simply that recycling wastes resources, both physical and human time. Somehow it was better to ship a very low value resource to China (which has a huge problem of dumping plastics and such into the environment!) and waste the energy and human effort that goes into that, rather than just move it to a landfill where it can be extracted at a future time when recycled plastics are actually valuable.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday March 11 2019, @02:59PM (1 child)
>A real big problem here is that people haven't shown that developed world usage of plastics are environmentally unfriendly. It's merely assumed. Plastic doesn't magically teleport from your garbage can to the middle of the ocean. Transport is the big problem and the developed world would solve that problem by locking stuff in landfills - where it won't go anywhere.
You're right, it doesn't "magically" get transported to the middle of the ocean. But take a good hard look around and you'll see a whole lot of plastic trash that *isn't* in trash cans. And the combination of wind and gravity will keep that trash mostly moving downhill until it hits water, at which point it floats downstream, into the ocean, where currents eventually carry it into one of those giant floating garbage patches. Or do you think the plastic magically disappears at some point along the way?
If we could keep plastic in trash cans and landfills, it might not be a big problem - but we obviously haven't been able to do that.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 11 2019, @03:51PM
Not really. Sure, I see some trash.
Except when that doesn't happen, of course. And we're missing the elephant in the room, namely that virtually all [soylentnews.org] plastic waste in ocean comes from the developing world.
8 of those rivers were in Asia, 2 in Africa.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday March 11 2019, @05:25PM (1 child)
Well...until the landfill floods [sciencedaily.com]...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 11 2019, @11:51PM