Social [Plastic Waste] Startup turns trash into construction-grade building blocks

The latest idea is turning plastics and rubber into bricks.

Imagine how many low-cost shelters can be build with the millions tons of recyclables that China no longer takes.

They're doing it now in Colombia for a refugees center. A complete house with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a bathroom, and a kitchen can be put together like giant lego pieces by four people in five days and cost less than $7000.

If these pre-fab houses reach mass-production rates, we can say goodbye to all those flimsy canvas tents that usually pops up whenever a massive amount of refugees run away from war, or after a major natural disaster (like earthquake or tsunami) that renders an entire community homeless.


This House was Built in 5 Days Using Recycled Plastic Bricks
by Nicolás Valencia | May 1, 2017​



Ten years ago when Colombian Fernando Llanos tried to build his own house in Cundinamarca, he realized that moving the materials from Bogota was going to be very difficult. After mulling it over, he decided to build his house out of plastic, and after a series of trials and errors, he ended up meeting architect Óscar Méndez, who developed his thesis on the same subject, and together they founded the company Conceptos Plásticos (Plastic Concepts) in 2011.

The innovative local company managed to patent its system of bricks and pillars made of recycled plastic, which is then put together like Lego pieces in a construction system that lets you build houses up to two stories high in five days.

Instead of using brand new plastic, they decided to give plastic that has already been thrown away a second chance at life, keeping in mind that on average it takes 300 years for it to completely degrade. "Working with new plastic is simple," explained Óscar Méndez to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, "because there are defined parameters, but used (plastic) requires more experimentation.”

The base material they work with is obtained from popular recyclers and factories that discard tons of plastic daily. Using an extrusion process, the plastic is melted and emptied into a final mold, creating a three-kilo brick (6.6 lbs), similar to clay ones with the same dimensions. When assembled under pressure, the bricks insulate heat and have additives that retard combustion. Additionally, they are thermoacoustic and earthquake-resistance is up to code for Colombia, taking into account the country’s high levels of seismic activity.

With a final cost of 20 million Colombian pesos (about USD 6,800) per unit, the company had the help of four people to build a 40 square meter house with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a bathroom and a kitchen in only five days.


In their meteoric rise, a major milestone for this small company (with less than 15 employees) was the construction of a set of temporary shelters in Guapi (southwest of Colombia) for 42 families displaced by armed conflict. After winning the bid from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), they completed the project in 28 days thanks to the joint work of 15 people, while recycling more than 200 tons of plastic.

According to the NRC, the shelters have "a design adapted to the need for mobility and climatic conditions," and the layout of the roof "improves both ventilation and lighting allowing for suitable conditions in such a hot climate." The community project also has electrical installations, toilets, and three communal kitchens for the housed families.

The revolutionary initiative from Conceptos Plásticos has already set its eyes abroad and won $300,000 (USD) in the latest edition of The Chivas Venture, to step up its production on a global scale, after beating out 26 other international initiatives with social impact.

https://www.archdaily.com/869926/this-house-was-built-in-5-days-using-recycled-plastic-bricks



That’s fascinating but would it work for the low quality recyclables that are currently being exported? I’d also have a number of safety/toxicity questions about the structure before I was ready to live in one.
 
California has a recycling crisis.
The only way to solve it is to stop making so much trash

By The Times Editorial Board | May 26, 2018

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Then I found out that most countries in the West don't even recycle their shit at all. They have been relying on China to recycle their trash for so damn long, their governments are scrambling now because they don't know what to do with their growing mountains of plastic wastes.
Science has lead me to believe we can simply put it on a rocket ship and send it into space.

This will totally not backfire on us in some unimaginable way that ends up putting a hole in the universe.
 
Recycled plastic could supply nearly three quarters of UK demand
Emily Beament | June 13, 2018

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Recycled plastic could supply nearly three-quarters of the raw materials needed by UK manufacturers for products and packaging, according to a report.

Steps such as bringing in mandatory targets for recycled content in products, short-term subsidies and funding to stabilise prices could help develop a system that sees waste plastic collected and reused in the UK, it said.

The UK, where government policy focuses just on recycling targets, currently only collects a third of its plastic waste for recycling and sends two-thirds of that abroad to be processed, with no guarantee they will be recycled.

China's decision to close its doors to low value waste including plastic is also causing problems for the UK system.

In total, only 9 per cent of all plastics are recycled domestically, according to a report by Green Alliance for leading business group the Circular Economy Task Force.

But developing a stronger market in the UK for the plastic that is collected could encourage an additional two million tonnes of plastic to be recycled here.

That could provide 71 per cent of the raw material needed by UK manufacturers for plastic packaging and products, with benefits for the environment and the economy, the report said.

Libby Peake, senior policy adviser on resources at Green Alliance, said: "If the UK wants to lead the world in addressing the global scourge of plastic pollution, that means creating a circular economy at home that allows us to turn discarded plastics back into new products.

"Just collecting plastic and shipping it abroad doesn't solve the problem."

The report also warned that while the UK wanted to be a world leader in electric vehicles and renewables, the country was 100 per cent dependent on imports for key components of the technologies, such as cobalt and rare earth elements.

Standards for recycled content, using public procurement to favour manufacturers which use recovered materials and ensuring car batteries are reused for static battery storage could help with the problem.

Reclaiming these important materials in discarded products which would otherwise be wasted could supply over a third of the domestic rare earth elements and half of the cobalt needed by 2035.

And a market to create high value products from more than seven million tonnes of low value steel scrap could reduce iron ore imports by 40 per cent and cut carbon emissions from steel production by 30 per cent, the report said.

Dr Colin Church, chair of the Circular Economy Task Force, said: “There are currently some significant failures, in resource terms, in the way plastics are used and managed at the end of life stage. Tackling this will require action from all of us – designers, manufacturers, retailers, consumers and resource managers.

"The resource and waste management sector is more than ready to play its part, but it cannot act alone. It needs the right policy framework and the right partnerships to allow it to bring its skills, energy and imagination to bear.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/envir...-waste-uk-pollution-environment-a8397726.html
 
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The Recycling Game Is Rigged Against You
Even if you put everything into the right blue bins, a lot of plastics will end up in landfills and the ocean. Consumers can't solve this problem.
by Faye Flam| June 27, 2018
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Single-stream recycling was such a nice idea.​

Americans were not set up for success in recycling plastics. Even before China stopped accepting plastic refuse from abroad, 91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans. Europe does a little better, with only 70 percent getting tossed.

Why such terrible rates? Partly because some changes that were supposed to make recycling simpler ended up making it almost impossible.

University of Georgia engineering professor Jenna Jambeck said that indeed, part of the reason China is now refusing to process American and European plastic is that so many people tossed waste into the wrong bin, resulting in a contaminated mix difficult or impossible to recycle.

In a paper published last week in Science Advances, she and her colleagues calculated that between now and 2030, 111 million metric tons of potentially recyclable plastic will be diverted from Chinese plants into landfills.

Jambeck said that China used to turn a profit by importing the stuff from American and European recycling bins and turning it into useful material. But as other countries attempted to simplify things for consumers with “single stream” recycling – think of one big blue bin for paper, plastic, metal and glass – the material reaching China became too contaminated with nonrecyclable items. The instructions to put everything in one bin seemed appealing but made it much easier to do recycling wrong.

Plastic matters because it takes centuries to degrade, and there’s a lot of it. Jambeck has estimated that the world has produced more than 8 billion metric tons since the 1950s. To help grasp this quantity, paleontologist Jan Zalasiewicz has estimated that this is enough to wrap our entire planet in cling wrap. Others have calculated that it would make four mountains the size of Everest.

A study Jambeck led in 2015 calculated that about 8 million metric tons of plastic garbage is added to our already polluted oceans each year, killing sea birds, turtles, marine mammals and other creatures. Some breaks down into particles that infuse the fish and shellfish people eat.

How did things go so wrong? I posed the question to Princeton University historian Edward Tenner, author of the new book "The Efficiency Paradox," as well as a classic on unintended consequences, "Why Things Bite Back." He wrote back that single-stream recycling has burdened us with a heavy cognitive load:

This very morning I finally found out how to treat a milk carton with a plastic spout. What about film-protected take-out coffee cups? Toothpaste tubes? Only after your message did I pay any attention to the Wikipedia article on resin codes – and I, like you, am a science and technology writer!

Yes, trash has become complicated, with products that used to come in cans now in combinations of cardboard and plastic. And then there’s the brain-draining complexity of yogurt tubs – one of the items, along with dirty take-out containers, that The New York Times said Americans are recycling incorrectly. I put on my reading glasses and studied a carton of Greek yogurt. I discovered all sorts of mysterious symbols, which may have something to do with the lack of GMOs or gluten.

There were explicit instructions not to put this product in your freezer, which I might have guessed to be the case, but not much help with the container disposal. A tiny, barely perceptible resin code was stamped on the bottom. It was a 5, I think, which means it’s polypropylene, and is accepted as recyclable in some communities and not others.

“Making efficient systems work can be surprisingly inefficient for the human mind, at least for mine,” said Tenner. “It's easy to do the 'right thing' only to discover you've made it more difficult to protect the environment.” It's not just a few of us messing up: Remember that 111 million metric tons of plastic headed to Chinese landfills.

Well-intentioned recyclers probably aren’t the worst offenders; one Waste Management executive quoted in The Times said he had seen "everything from Christmas lights to animal carcasses to artillery shells."

While there ought to be a fine for the carcasses and Christmas lights, for the most part the answer to contaminated recycling streams is not to keep berating consumers over getting Resin Code 5 wrong, but to commit to advancing clean plastic technology. Even if consumer participation in recycling were 100 percent, we wouldn’t be close to recycling 100 percent of the material, said chemical engineer Megan Robertson, who co-wrote a piece in Science last November on the future of plastics recycling. Much consumer waste is simply not recyclable, often because it combines materials.

Given what scientists already know how to do, the future could bring a greener, more fool-proof system. Right now, she said, she and other scientists are starting to develop ways to recycle mixtures of plastics – a tough job because many plastics repel one another like oil and water. One of the reasons China imported recycling was that it was possible there to hire cheap labor to sort the different plastic types by hand. (Worth noting: Over that same span in which recycling streams have become more contaminated, labor in China has also become scarcer and more expensive.)

Another problem is that nearly all current “recyclable” plastics can’t go back into packaging but get a second life as a handbag or lawn chair before settling into landfills as their final resting place. They’re not really recycled so much as “downcycled.” The other author of the Science paper, Jamie Garcia of IBM Research, has invented a new kind of plastic, which can be recycled back into the same kinds of containers hundreds of times. Adopting such a material would require a new approach at recycling facilities, and in the short term could cost more.

Curing the plastic problem is a lot like fighting cancer. Even if everyone stopped smoking, there would still be cancer. And even if we all figure out whether our municipalities accept yogurt containers, plastic waste will still pollute the environment. Compliance won't be a cure until innovations from the lab set us up for success.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...-recycling-is-a-problem-consumers-can-t-solve
 
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Environmentally minded Californians love to recycle — but it's no longer doing any good
By George Skelton | Jul 09, 2018

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Pedestrians walk by a recycling bin on the UCLA campus
Californians dutifully load up their recycling bins and feel good about themselves. They’re helping the environment and being good citizens.

But their glow might turn to gloom if they realized that much of the stuff is headed to a landfill.

That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, plastic and other junk that’s left curbside.

Moreover, people are tossing garbage into those blue bins that they shouldn’t be. It just gums up the process.

“People are engaged in wish recycling,” says Mark Oldfield, public affairs director at CalRecycle, which runs the state’s recycling program. “They think: ‘This should be recycled. I’m going to put it in the bin.’”

“It’s amazing what people put in recycling bins,” Oldfield continues. “Dirty diapers. Broken crockery. Old garden hoses. Some of the worst offenders are old batteries.”

But what constitutes forbidden material is more nuanced than soiled diapers and corrosive batteries. Oldfield says it includes pizza boxes blotched with cheese and grease, plastic wrappers for food, shredded paper, unclean jelly jars, broken glass, unrinsed bottles and newspapers that have lined bird cages. Even paper envelopes with plastic address windows.

Recyclers these days don’t want items with mixed material such as paper and plastic, or cardboard and tape. It doesn’t pay to tear the stuff apart. Off to the landfill.

Moreover, what used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables recently shut its door.

“China doesn’t want our garbage anymore,” says Steve Maviglio, a political strategist who is advising the recycling industry. “It’s time we cleaned up our own mess.”

In January, China began barring “contaminated” material it once accepted. And under China’s new rules, if something is one-half of 1% contaminated, it’s too impure for recycling.

“This policy change is already starting to have adverse impacts on California,” CalRecycle declared last month in a bulletin, “and is resulting in more material being stockpiled at solid waste facilities and recycling centers or disposed of in landfills.”

Eric Potashner, a government relations official for Recology, a curbside hauler that sorts San Francisco Bay Area trash for recycling, says, “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”

One big problem, he says, is mixed paper — newsprint, magazines, junk mail. China no longer wants it. So it’s being sold to smaller markets in India, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. The issue is compounded because, unlike with Chinese vessels, there are fewer ships making round trips from Southeast Asia to California.

“A year ago,” Potashner says, “we were getting $100 a ton for newsprint. Now we’re getting an average $5…. Revenue has fallen off the cliff.”

Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an advocacy group, says: “China’s not the bad guy. To the Chinese credit, they’ve decided they don’t want to have Third World [trash] sorting in their country.”

The Chinese have a growing middle class, Murray continues, and “they don’t want kids and families sorting through mixed paper and plastic. They want to hire factory workers, not people doing the dirty work.”

Collapse of the China market is just the latest recycling problem for California.

There’s continuing struggle with the popular beverage container recycling program that originated with passage of California’s convoluted so-called Bottle Bill 32 years ago.

Under it, people can ostensibly cart their used bottles and cans to a recycling center and collect the nickel apiece — or dime for larger ones — that they deposited when buying the beverage at a store.

But the program itself needs recycling. It’s not generating enough money, in many cases, to make recycling pay. Scrap value has dropped — especially for plastic. When oil prices tumbled, it became cheaper to make plastic bottles from all-new material than recycled matter.

Nearly 1,000 recycling centers have closed in the last two years, about 40% of the total, leaving consumers in many communities with no local place to leave their bottles and redeem their nickels.

California’s once-proud recycling program “is teetering on the edge,” says state Sen. Steve Glazer (D-Orinda). It was hit hard in 2016 when the state cut back on fees it paid to recyclers. The old fees served as recycling incentives.

Glazer has a modest bill that he says is “better than doing nothing at all.” His measure would return fees to their 2015 level.

That’s a carrot. There’s a stick in a bill by Sen. Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont). It would require all beverage containers sold in California to contain a minimum amount of recycled material. CalRecycle would establish the minimum.

The bill is particularly aimed at plastic containers. The goal is to establish a bigger market for plastic recycling in California. It also would help reduce greenhouse gases, the senator says, because “we wouldn’t be burning more oil to make plastic bottles.”

Gov. Jerry Brown, in his new state budget, shifted $15 million in bottle bill money to private firm incentives for processing and purchasing recycled plastic.

Nice touches, but they’re Band-Aids.

Consumers — taxpayers — will need to put more into the pot to pay for sustainable recycling and creating a bigger market for California trash.

We’ve got to stop dumping useless, filthy crud in blue bins.

It’s either that or spend more money for ugly landfills.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-recycling-problems-california-20180709-story.html
 
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Why can't all plastic waste be recycled?
August 2, 2018 by Sharon George, The Conversation
The UK produced 11m tonnes of plastic waste in 2017, and recycled around two thirds of it. Or so it seemed. A report by the National Audit Office (NAO) shows that over half of the UK's recyclable waste is sent overseas for recycling, but much of it is likely to end up in landfill or the ocean instead.

The recycling regime is a mess in the UK—but what's stopping Britain from making all of its plastic waste recyclable and ensuring it is actually recycled?

Public engagement has played a big part in tackling plastic waste in the environment. Reaction to scenes in Blue Planet 2 where marine wildlife struggled with plastic in the ocean prompted government action. The recent ban on microbeads in cosmetics and the 5p charge for plastic bags are positive steps, but these gestures are just a start.

Supermarkets have promised in a "Plastic Pact" to eliminate avoidable packaging and ensure all of it can be reused, recycled or composted by 2025. One third of supermarket plastic cannot easily be recycled at present, and while the pact among retailers is only voluntary, its target is welcome. That said, just because a plastic is recyclable does not guarantee that it will be recycled. Local kerbside collections vary from place to place and many authorities only accept limited types.

The barriers to recycling plastic waste

There is a huge range of different types of plastic used in disposable products and packaging. One solution is to limit the types of plastic to a single standard which is easy to recycle. This might mean fewer coloured plastics. Black food trays are a particularly troublesome example as they contain pigments that make packaging harder to detect by sorting technology.

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Mixed material waste (which includes some types of coffee cup) is currently difficult to separate and recycle.
Mixed materials are those that have different types of material in the same product. For instance, a plastic bag with a foil lining or a disposable coffee cup made of paper with a plastic lining. These are especially difficult and expensive to separate. They are considered in many cases contaminated and worthless.

Designing packaging so that it's easier to separate is vital. Some consultancies offer advice to companies on how to achieve this, for instance, by having outer layers that are removable by the consumer and using water-soluble glues. This design-for-disposal approach would mean that food-grade plastic streams – materials which are safe to use in direct contact with food – are easier to identify and separate, increasing their availability and making them worth more as a material to put back into the cycle.

The raw feedstocks for most plastics are fossil fuels, which are cheaper to use than recycled material. Plant-based feedstocks are a good lower-carbon alternative but are often in competition with crops used to produce energy or food and are not always as sustainable as they might appear. This is where government intervention can have a big impact. A levy on making new single-use plastic rather than using recycled material would create a level playing field and raise funds to subsidise the development of new, cleaner materials.

A plastic-free future?

Could we just get rid of all plastic packaging? Sadly, no. Some of it is considered unavoidable. Plastic prolongs the life of produce. It provides a barrier to bacteria, a film to lock in protective gas and a convenient waterproof layer. It would be difficult to imagine buying products like raw fish without it.

But there are solutions – consumers can take their own reusable containers to shops, and retailers can use more recycled (and recyclable) materials. 2025 is a long way off when plastics are in food chains now. Eliminating single-use materials is possible but it's going to involve us all in the solution.

Businesses are talking about the issue but the public could be forgiven for impatience over the lack of choice and commitment. They need to innovate. The government, meanwhile, has made some positive changes but these have been easy wins so far. They need to provide funding and legislation which supports alternatives to single-use plastics. Consumers also need to be prepared for a little inconvenience. Plastics are not a disposable commodity, they last hundreds of years in our environment and until now their true lifecycle cost has not been reflected in the price at the till.

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-plastic-recycled.html
 
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For the longest time, I believed that ALL the recyclable materials we drops off at the local recycling centers would be taken care of at a recycling plants in our own states, and they magically turns into new products that would make Captain Planet proud.

I was deceived. As were you.

As it turns out, we only cherry-pick the highest-quality stuff that's easiest to recycle with maximum returns. The rest are crushed into giant cubes about the size of your bedroom and sent off on cargo ships to China. What happens to them next is no longer our concern.

For the record, we don't bother dealing with those low-quality recyclables not because we don't have the technology or know-how, but simply because it would cost us WAY less in labor, raw material, and energy to just produce new materials rather than recycling old materials.

Well, that sweet deal is now coming to an end, and the world has just awakened to the new reality: we'll now have to deal with our own plastic waste.








EU proposes ban on plastic straws and other single-use plastic products

By Raf Casert, The Associated Press | May 28, 2018​
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Sea Turtles with plastic straws up their noses say "It's about damn time, littering humans!"



Sweet deal? China was throwing all that shit in a river.

After we build a wall along the southern border, we should chuck all of our garbage over the wall into Mexico. It will serve as an extra layer of security.
 
Environment Officials Reveal That 90% Of Canada’s Plastic Is Not Recycled
Less than 11 percent of the plastic in Canada actually gets recycled.
By Nicole Hui | Nov 20, 2018

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Today, Canadian environment officials revealed that the vast majority of plastic in Canada is actually not recycled, according to The Weather Network. In fact, a whopping 90% of the plastic in the country is not getting recycled.

Canadian officials from Environmental Defence have told The Weather Network that less than 11 percent of plastic in Canada actually gets recycled and the remaining 90 percent ends up "incinerated, or in our landfills, lakes, parks and oceans" and "once in the environment, plastic waste contaminates ecosystems, kill wildlife, and leach toxic chemicals".

"Something’s got to give – Canada needs to step up," Keith Brooks, program director at Environmental Defence, told The Weather Network. "We have been pushing the feds to come up with a strong national plan to deal with the 89 percent of plastic not being recycled in Canada each year".

Brooks added that there is currently no national recycling target in place. "There are no rules requiring or even encouraging plastic producers to use recycled plastic," said Brooks. "There are not even bans on hard-to-recycle or toxic plastics like styrofoam. Producers are allowed to put any kind of packaging onto the market, and municipalities have to figure out how to deal with it."

These statistics are absolutely crucial for people to be aware of. Many Canadians swim in the beautiful oceans and lakes of this country and this means that they could be swimming in potentially plastic-filled waters. Furthermore, when plastic waste infiltrates natural ecosystems, the wildlife becomes problematically exposed to it. This, in turn, affects all of the Canadians who interact with the exposed environment or consume local wildlife, particularly fish.

Plastic waste is also damaging to ecosystems and natural enviroments and can be life-threatening to the animals inhabiting them. There are many more reasons why plastic not getting recycled in Canada is highly detrimental.

So what measures can Canada take to reduce plastic waste in the country? Brooks is hoping to address several measures at the next meeting with environmental officials, called the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, taking place on November 23rd.

He proposes banning certain plastics, such as Styrofoam, implementing a national recycling target of at least 85 percent by 2025, and using legislation methods to help producers be more responsible in cleaning up their plastic products, according to The Weather Network.

You don't need to be an environmental official to positively impact the environment. There are several measures people can take to reduce plastic waste and they're not hard to do.

For instance, you can stop using plastic straws and buy a reusable straw. Getting a reusable bag for shopping instead of using plastic bags. Another easy method is to buy food in bulk and fill a reusable container – this helps save money, time and prevents unnecessary packaging.

https://www.narcity.com/news/environment-officials-reveal-that-90-of-canadas-plastic-is-not-recycled
 
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The problem is there are too many fucking people and our economic systems are rigged to keep increasing in population. That's the root issue and these problems will never disappear until that issue is addressed.
 
Wow 11% that's a sad number. You'd think with technology that it'd be higher. Def time to either ban or tax hard to recycle plastics. Seem sweet can't do it the free market way
 
Recycling: Where is the plastic waste mountain?
By Roger Harrabin & Tom Edgington, BBC Reality Check | 1 January 2019
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A woman collecting plastic at a waste dump in Indonesia - in the year to October, the country received 63,000 tonnes of UK plastic

A year ago, experts warned that the UK could face a mountain of waste plastic as China imposed a ban on waste imports.

In recent years, the UK has heavily relied on China to take our unwanted plastic packaging. Three years ago, the UK was exporting half a million tonnes of plastic to China and Hong Kong - accounting for almost two-thirds of all our plastic sent abroad.

China introduced its ban on "foreign garbage" as part of a move to upgrade its industries 12 months ago. At the time, the UK recycling industry warned that the decision would be a "game-changer" and that it would be a struggle to deal with the country's waste.

Where is that plastic mountain?

Well, it hasn't appeared - partly thanks to other countries taking our waste plastic instead, and partly because we are burning more of it.

In the wake of mass public alarm about plastic pollution we may also be producing less plastic waste, although it's impossible to be sure of the figures

Who has taken our waste instead of China?

In the 12 months to October 2018, our analysis of Environment Agency figures shows that the UK exported a total of 611,000 tonnes of recovered plastic packaging to other countries.

In the previous 12-month period (ie to October 2017), the UK exported 683,000 tonnes.

So that works out as a drop in exports of 72,000 between 2016-17 and 2017-2018.

It's clear that other countries have imported much of the plastic packaging previously reprocessed by China.

But incineration in the UK has also increased, and we may be seeing the benefits of the Blue Planet effect on public behaviour.

The fact is we can't be certain from the data what exactly has happened to the shortfall.

Where did our plastic packaging go in 2018?

Well, where there's waste plastic there's potentially profit - because some of it can be lucratively recycled. So some nations have geared up their reprocessing plants to welcome our waste with open arms.

Many Chinese recyclers moved their operations abroad to benefit from cheap flows of plastic in the region before then re-exporting it back to China as recycled pellets.

But not all of it has been welcomed. Several countries including Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan have heavily restricted imports because shipments were blocking ports and the quality of the material being imported (from all countries) was poor.

So while the amount of plastic taken by China dropped by 94% between 2016-17 and 2017-18, Malaysia, Turkey, Poland and Indonesia led the pack in gobbling up the slack.

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Malaysia imported 105,000 tonnes in total and was way out in front. That total was 42,000 (68%) more in 2017-18 compared with the previous year.

The second most popular destination was Turkey (80,000 tonnes).

Poland is in third place on the league table - although it actually received slightly less UK plastic in 2017-18 than it did in 2016-17. It's not clear why.

In fourth place is Indonesia, which along with Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam - is in the top 10 for the quantity of waste plastics polluting the ocean.

Which countries recorded the biggest increase in UK plastic over the period?

Another way of analysing the data is to rank the numbers in terms of net increase (ie which countries recorded the biggest increase in 2017-18 compared with 2016-17).

On this measure, Malaysia and Turkey remain at the top while Indonesia stays in the top five.

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The new entries (replacing Poland and the Netherlands) are Spain and France. Spain recorded an increase of 14,000 between 2016-17 and 2017-18, and France was just behind on 9,000.

Of course, sending material abroad for recycling doesn't necessarily mean it actually gets recycled.

Waste firms in the receiving country may sift through the rubbish, take out the economically valuable material and burn or even dump the rest. The waste industry is notorious in some places for its links with criminal activity.

The global illegal waste trade is estimated by the UN to be worth between £8bn-£9.5bn a year.

Case study: Malaysia

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Since China's ban, Malaysia has seen a big surge in the amount of plastic it has received from abroad, including from the UK.

"Malaysia is not able to process all of the imported waste, there are limited plastic waste factories", says Mageswari Sangaralingam who works for the Consumers' Association of Penang and for Friends of the Earth, Malaysia.

According to Ms Sangaralingam, not only is Malaysia receiving more plastic than it can properly dispose of, some of it is low-grade which ends up as landfill. There are also some rogue recyclers who, she says, burn plastic in the open - leading to environmental harm.

The Malaysian government has announced stricter conditions on the import of plastic and says it wants to phase it out over the next three years - but Ms Sangaralingam wants an immediate outright ban.

"Malaysia is not a dumping ground and hence should stop importing plastic waste," she says.

What's the UK doing about the issue?

The British Plastics Federation (BPF) told us it was "very worried" about the export of poor quality plastic waste. The chairman of its recycling group, Roger Baynham, told us all that UK companies should make the very best efforts to ensure plastic goes to reputable recyclers:

"The export of plastic waste is out of the control of the industry and the BPF is particularly concerned about recent reports of illegal and fraudulent exports of plastic packaging waste routed to Asia through Holland."

The BPF also told us it would support a global accreditation system for the waste export sector and that recycling should be done at home.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove says the UK must stop "off-shoring its dirt". We asked the UK government why it didn't simply ban the export of waste plastic.

We were told that while the UK was committed to "recycling more at home" there is a "legitimate export market for plastics particularly for countries that manufacture new products out of recycled plastic waste".

Mr Gove wants to stimulate more recycling, but UK firms wanting to process more waste in Britain complain it's hard to get funding.

"There are very few countries left where we can comfortably export to and the market is shrinking," warns Simon Ellin, chief executive of the UK Recycling Association.

"People don't want to buy this material, so where on earth is this all going to go?" he adds.

Mr Ellin is largely supportive of the government's new waste strategy plan, but says the UK must expand its processing capacity at a faster pace:

"We're almost at a crisis point, unless we get a plan quickly," he says.

Less than half of all household waste is recycled

Overall recycling figures have stagnated and some councils are burning 80% of all residual waste, including recyclable plastic and paper.

In the 12 months to March, 50 of 123 councils incinerated more than half the household rubbish they collected, including plastic and paper, official figures recently revealed. The worst are in London. Westminster burned 82% of all household and recyclable rubbish.

Less than half of all household waste (45.2%) was recycled in 2017 - a minuscule rise of just 0.3% on the previous year. The UK now seems unlikely to reach the EU-enforced target of 50% recycling in the next two years.

The Western Riverside Waste Authority, which covers Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth and Wandsworth, incinerated 79% as did Lewisham and Tower Hamlets. Slough, Kirklees, Sunderland, Portsmouth and Birmingham councils all incinerated at least 70% of all plastic, paper and household rubbish.

Swindon Borough Council said in November it wants to burn plastic along with other rubbish rather than sending it abroad for recycling - saying some "isn't properly recycled".

Analysis by the BBC suggests that recycling rates are being hindered by the myriad of different rules which are in play up and down the country. It found that nearly half (47%) of Britons asked said they disagree about what should and should not be recycled.

Claire Shrewsbury, from the recycling body Wrap, told BBC News: "The time has come for the UK to take more responsibility for its own recovered materials, and move towards a circular system for plastics and other materials.

"There is a global market for high quality resource exports to countries that manufacture products, and this is something the UK should explore.

"This will require fundamental change from all of us. And that means regulatory transformation, collaborative industry action, together with citizen behaviour change."

Ms Shrewsbury aims her comments at anyone who buys stuff and throws packaging away.

That's all of us.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46566795
 
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If we killed off 80% of the population I think we could get a handle on the problem.
 
Malaysia and the Philippines to send back plastic waste to foreign nations
The Associated Press | May 28, 2019

105936937-1559090843655gettyimages-1146679770.530x298.jpeg

Malaysia's environment minister Yeo Bee Yin (L) shows a container of plastics waste shipment from Australia on May 28, 2019.

Malaysia will send back some 3,000 metric tons (3,300 tons) of non-recyclable plastic waste to countries such as the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australiain a move to avoid becoming a dumping ground for rich nations, Environment Minister Yeo Bee Yin said Tuesday.
Yeo said Malaysia and many developing countries have become new targets after China banned the import of plastic wastelast year.

Last week, the Philippines said it would ship back dozens of containers of garbage which Filipino officials were illegally shipped to the country from Canada in 2013 to 2014.

Yeo said 60 containers stacked with contaminated waste were smuggled in en route to illegal processing facilities in Malaysia and will be sent back to their countries of origin.

Ten of the containers are due to be shipped back within two weeks, she said, as she showed reporters contents of the waste at a port outside Kuala Lumpur.

The displayed items included cables from the U.K., contaminated milk cartons from Australia and compact discs from Bangladesh, as well as bales of electronic and household waste from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Saudi Arabia and China. Yeo said the waste from China appeared to be garbage from France and other countries that had been rerouted after a ban imposed by China.

In one case alone, Yeo said a U.K. recycling company exported more than 50,000 metric tons (55,000 tons) of plastic waste in about 1,000 containers to Malaysia over the past two years.

"This is probably just the tip of the iceberg (due) to the banning of plastic waste by China," Yeo told a news conference. "Malaysia will not be a dumping ground to the world ... we will fight back. Even though we are a small country, we can't be bullied by developed countries."

The government has clamped down on dozens of illegal plastic recycling facilities that had mushroomed across the country, shuttering more than 150 plants since last July. Earlier this month, the government also sent back five containers of waste to Spain.

Yeo said China's plastic waste ban had "opened up the eyes of the world to see that we have a huge garbage and recycling problem."

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to forcibly ship back dozens of containers of garbage to Canada and his government recalled its ambassador and consuls in Canada over Ottawa's failure to comply with a May 15 deadline to take back the garbage.

Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said the Canadian government had awarded a contract to French shipping giant Bollore Logistics Canada that calls for the return of 69 containers filled with household waste and electronic garbage to Canada by the end of June.

The Philippines, however, rejected Canada's plan. Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said the government will proceed with a plan to look for a private shipping company to rapidly transport the garbage to Canadian territory.

Philippine officials were assessing separate shipments from Hong Kong and Australia which environmental activists said allegedly contained garbage and should be sent back to their points of origin.

In Port Klang, Yeo said citizens in rich nations diligently separate their waste for recycling, but the garbage ended up being dumped in developing nations where they are recycled illegally, causing environmental and health hazards, she said.

"We urge the developed countries to review their management of plastic waste and stop shipping the garbage out to the developing countries," she said, calling such practices "unfair and uncivilized."

Yeo vowed to take action against Malaysian companies illegally importing used plastic, calling them "traitors to the country's sustainability."

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/05/29/malaysia-to-send-back-plastic-waste-to-foreign-nations.html
 
If you really want to lower pollution, we must lower consumption. Consumption won't be lowered until the population decreases (unfortunately).

Food and aid should not be sent to any country that cannot feed itself. If the country cannot feed itself, that means it is overpopulated. We also need to stop killing our forests and wild life in order to create even more housing and/or farmland. All the drinking water has chlorine in it and all the fish have disappeared from my childhood spots.


We also need to also stop receiving further products, especially disposable goods. Dollar stores everywhere are filled with tons of plastic, disposable, shit tier products that shouldn't even be legal.

For years and years our irresponsible government not only condoned, but encouraged companies to set up shop overseas, in places like China. That killed industry back home and created a middle class which previously hasn't existed in China. Now, the new middle class all want more and more. Cars (oil), air conditioning, etc.

While doing all this, the USA killed local industry, created an incredible amount of pollution (cargo ships are the worst) and also financed China's military- so a small handful of people could pad their pockets.


It's disgusting and this push for globalism is only making it worse.
 
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