China Bans Foreign Waste – What Will Happen to the World's Recycling?
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
I urge you to stop believing in recycling.
Here's some things to think about:
The "packaging" industry, is in fact a nice way of saying the "garbage manufacturing" industry.
At least in Australia, the "recycling industry" is owned by the "packaging industry". Hmmm.. why is that? It put it to you that the garbage manufacturing industry has in fact worked out how to "own" the environmental movement by pushing "recycling" as the "balance" to the spewing forth of garbage from the packaging industry. The packaging industry must be laughing so hard at how easily it has owned the environmental movement. Have you ever wondered if all that packaging you put in your recycle bin gets recycled? It's a question worth thinking about.
I have come to believe that recycling, which environmentalists embrace deeply as a core value, is in fact just a smokescreen that allows everyone to feel OK about the garbage manufacturing industry creating an unending quantity of plastics that have made their way into every nook and cranny of our ecosystem.
Please, stop believing in recycling.... if you recycle, then you do not question the unbelievable, and unrecyclable, quantity of plastic packaging that you consume. One you stop believing in recycling, you start to ask the question, "why the heck do we permit the packaging industry to create this unstoppable flow of garbage" Seems to me that world MUST eventually move to a solution which is a set of standardised containers for all products, which are durable, washable, have a refund value attached, and may have paper corporate brand stuck on them after being washed.
Another strategy worth bringing forward is the idea of "garbage brands"..... showing off all those precious brands but in their true context... as garbage in our creeks, rivers and oceans, drains and footpaths. Once brands start to become associated with garbage, they might rethinkg whether they want their names and logos on the digusting mess destroying our environment.
Please, stop believing in recycling and the smokescreen will clear and you will start to ask questions about the packaging industry and our community/commercial system that supports it. Asbestos, tobacco, sugary foods, packaging - all industries that have fooled us into believing things that are wrong but served their own ends. The packaging industry has fooled us into thinking that it is OK because recycling exists.
Environmentalists say "reduce, re-use, recycle" - recycling is the last, worst, option in this phrase. Reducing the stuff you buy being the first, best, option.
Everybody doing "some reducing" isn't going to stop an entire industry dedicated solely to creating garbage.
All the graphics designers who design it, all the printers who print it, all the plastic manufacturers who make it, all the software developers who write software to support all these industries, and the brands who buy the garbage/packaging to put their products in. They're all filling every nook and cranny of this earth with garbage.
It's not about "using less". It's about a war that we need to have with every element of the packaging/garbage creation/recycling industry.
And it has to be a war, because the packaging/garbage creation industry isn't going to go without a fight. WE pay them to create garbage by buying products that are delivered in garbage.
We have to hold the brands to account who ship their products wrapped in garbage headed for the ocean.
But all those garbage creation jobs must go. All that garbage creation money must go.
And the smoke screen that we all use to feel OK about packaging... the smoke screen/lie that we call "recycling", it has to go too, because that's what it legitimizing the packaging industries ruin of our earth.
Once you stop believing in recycling, you start questioning why we accept the infinite flow of garbage that this industry creates.
I'm at work so I cannot give you a source, but look at the environmental impact of producing meat vs the packaging.
Switching to reusable containers sounds wonderful, but it's a very hard sell. Standardized sizes would waste a lot of energy in transporting, and proper washing and sanitization will add a significant environmental impact as well, either by energy use, or production of chemicals. Whether or not this is a net positive remains to be determined.
/edit: spelling mistakes
Why?
All I can see is how this would save a lot of energy in transporting by making it easier to stack things together, as well as making it a little more difficult for companies to play games with packaging size and form factor.
If you use standard reusable sizes, cleaning and sanitazation requirements must come first, and it will inevitably be heavier as well.
I suppose the situation is much different in B2B and bulk orders (like gastronomy), when the packaging is not also fulfilling a marketing role.
> If you use standard reusable sizes, cleaning and sanitazation requirements must come first, and it will inevitably be heavier as well.
Yes. But it will not be throwaway anymore. It would be great if someone did the math on that. My gut tells me that even the repeated extra cost of shipping additional mass around is much less than it costs to make and dispose of packaging (the bulk of it being probably in the disposal, which producers externalize on the society, and so they prefer churning out new packaging).
Thinking that emotion invalidates any argument, the dumbest fallacy of all.
Maybe name them?
> manufacturing industry has in fact worked out how to "own" the environmental movement by pushing "recycling" as the "balance" to the spewing forth of garbage from the packaging industry
Maybe this is just to save costs? This can't be presented as a fact unless there is hard proof.
> Seems to me that world MUST eventually move to a solution which is a set of standardized containers for all products, which are durable, washable, have a refund value attached, and may have paper corporate brand stuck on them after being washed
This is just throwing out a solution. How heavier a standard package would be? What about special cases like materials which are shock sensitive, leaky, smelly, corrosive, ... How costly would be washing them?
> They're all filling every nook and cranny of this earth with garbage.
There must be some data about how are we filling the earth with garbage. Is recycling really useless to combat this?
Isn't the only harm it causes done when it's left to float around the ocean or get eaten by birds? As long as we keep our rubbish more secure and bury it properly, in places that won't leach into water supplies, what's the harm?
No one said that. Read again.
It is both the biggest packaging and recycling company in Australia.
And has the magnificently ironic slogan of "For a better world."
If they didn't have the recycling side of the business, you might say "For a garbage world".
But it's impossible to hold them to account isn't it because they are "recycling".
And now we need to ask "Is recycling real, or is it just garbage being shipped to some other country?"
Pratt has organised the build of a $50 million, 100% recycled plastics plant in Sydney. This plant will enable Visy to make its PET and HDPE bottles out of 100% recycled plastic resin for everything from soft drink bottles to shampoo bottles to milk bottles. At full capacity, this facility will remove some 2 billion plastic bottles from the waste stream and recycle them into new bottles.
The company certainly seems to have had some other controversies, but it's not clear if what you claim is actually true. I would say you are going to have to put in some more work in order to substantiate your claims.
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Your "analysis" that there are warnings on the entry could be improved by chasing down the supporting citations, looking at the talk page, and the edit history. This is simply more effort than I'm willing to go to in order to justify the claims made by the OP.
I went on a holiday to the pacific recently and stayed on a remote island and walked around it and every 10 feet - literally - was a plastic drink bottle.
Is that not enough to convince you that there's a problem?
The message is not that recycling does not work.
The message is that because recycling half-works, you feel comfortable consuming vast quantities of garbage packaging.
Recycling is the mechanism that permits you to not question the packaging industry.
I did not say that recycling does not work.
The genius of recycling is that it half works, with the incredibly powerful outcome that people like you argue on behalf of the packaging industry.
Recycling is a sleight of hand. Like a world class magician, it is a redirection of our attention away from what the packaging industry is doing.
Recycling is the "look here, see everything is OK, we're not actually doing anything so bad".
Why doesn't recycling fully work?
Is the garbage generated from packaging higher in the countries where more recycling is made?
Sources with data and numbers would be very welcome.
There is a problem but it's not a problem with recycling.
The only recycled plastic in your life is:
1. polyester clothing 2. building materials 3. agricultural materials
3 is pretty ironic. You're allowed to grow a plant in a recycled container, but once you harvest that plant, it must be stored in a food grade container which cannot be recycled.
Edit:
I recently watched this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGpot7L7hA and it seems so ironic how dirty and industrial everything is, and then, all of a sudden the peas get washed and put in food grade plastic bags and we make this huge theater about sanitation.
It's refreshing to spend time in the undeveloped world and see how glass bottles are re-used hundreds or thousands of times, how many things you buy don't come wrapped in plastic and how people simply buy less crap.
In order of importance - Reduce, re-use, recycle.
The developed world is just now catching on to the worst of the three.
Our household waste stream is quite low (UK). Less than a small carrier bag per week of what basically boils down to plastic wrapping and lids. Most of which is unnecessary.
All our food wastes, cardboards, poor quality papers, (pretty much anything the worms will eat) ends up in the compost heap. Nature is a good recycler in that regard.
Our recycling bin is mainly full of glass and metal. These packaging materials do feel rather extravagant, but at least they are simple mostly non-composite materials. I still don't understand how and why it's worth recycling a Tetrapak.
While I agree many plastics are probably better burnt for energy rather than shipping them to China; buying into incinerators just perpetuates this rubbish packaging industry.
Simple compostable packaging is certainly a swaying factor for me when buying a food item.
How about we convert as much oil as we can into plastic, bury it in the ground for a few 100s of years and stop worrying?
So, let's take Visy, in the context of this post, they are in the business of waste disposal, recycling, and packaging. For their packaging business, they turn raw materials into packaging. For cardboard, that's either dead trees or recycled/reprocessed cardboard.
So they either pay for brand new raw materials or recycled materials. They decide to skip the middle man and setup a plant, negotiate contracts with councils/governments and take peoples waste so they can turn it into packaging.
That's what recycling is. It's not magic. If there is no one/business on the other end to consume or process it, it's not recycling, it just garbage and goes to a land fill.
I'm just using cardboard as an example because it's easier to grok (trees/cardboard etc), but over the last 5 years there has literally been occasions where the price of brand new cardboard has been lower than recycled cardboard. So yes, sometimes this the recycling industry is all sorts of fucked, but if you don't have industry/business/consumer on the other end of this recycling equation it's worthless.
Maybe 150 of them as a guess.
Legal requirement to use them.
Laboratories definitely worry about cross contamination for reagent (or even worse, culture) containers. The vast majority of containers used in Microbiology labs are disposable and incinerated after use.
And they certainly dont drink or eat their contents, which was the point you were responding too.
It will move to another country whose leaders value money over the environment. China now has enough money and clout to say no.
There are plenty of places that don't.
Now, it looks like it might be a shrewd environmental decision, if you are a province in China with a huge pollution problem from plastics recycling. Voila! export the problem to Africa. .. (not saying this is good in any sense, but it would make sense as an operating model: its what we did to them, so they do it to the next emerging colonial empire)
In general, I've found that Western media outlets are gratuitously negative to certain countries - especially if they were under colonial control at some point.
Colonialism never really died, they just rebranded it as "globalism".
Therefore relocating recycling businesses overseas makes sense. China has now deep roots in Africa primarily aimed at extraction of raw materials but also for sale of goods and services (Huawei for instance supply African mobile operators with turnkey solutions) so inviting African economies with low barriers to pollution and lax labour laws to bid for contracts to reprocess waste is surely normal?
Isn't that why the UK and Europe export the waste to China?
Britain used to make ships. Then ship making moved to Portugal and then Poland, and then Korea. Trade moves to low labour cost economies. As China tightens pollution and labour law the cost of processing waste will rise until it's more economic to do it somewhere else. I just expect Chinese business to defiantly retain a role in that.
The votes in the UN yes, that was perhaps unfortunately said. I apologize. If I said China was merely redressing systemically acquired imbalances by investing in Africa and the Pacific islands,and the quid pro quo was mutuality, would that be better?
I love China. I visit it frequently, lots of Chinese companies invest in Australia, our economic future is closely tied. I am tired of dissembling in this space. What China is doing is not immoral: it's amoral, no different to what the west did, does.
Yet, each time there is an article about China, people here feels the need to point out what China is doing wrong and how China is going to dominate. Also there is a lot articles from the nytimes published here who feels more like warning people that China is going to dominate "us".
This is a long-time classic pattern actually : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril I am french and white here. When I was young I read, as plenty of my friends, these kind of book : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Lotus or Lucky Luke with its really cliche depictions of Chinese. It was normal but for sure it shows some racist patterns towards chinese people and people perceived as chinese here in France. Actually the consequences are obvious : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/28/police-and-pro...
I think it doesn't free China of criticism and what is happening in Africa is wrong. But coming from westerners like me.. I mean a french criticizing China taking over Africa feels more like a dog fighting other dogs to keep his bone. After you are free to act like if US or other imperialist power/western countries are so different but I am very skeptical when I see reactions here. People from our imperialist countries act like if they wanted to keep Africa for their own economic development, otherwise they would massively protest against our militaries and our companies ruling over Africa.