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

I predict it won't be long before using non-biodegradeable plastic in any packaging or short-lived product will be banned. It's outrageous that everything is packaged in material that will almost certainly not be properly recycled, and end up in landfill or the ocean.

Problem is, plastics are entirely a byproduct of the hugely dominant petrochemical industrial complex (sibling of Big Oil). Bioplastics exist, but the reason we use so much plastic instead of glass/paper is because it's cheap because it's actually a waste product of oil refinement.

Realistically, yes, it's poisonous (so are the superfund-sites-to-be we call gas stations, not to mention the offshore rigs, refinery sites, etc) but Big Oil is super powerful.

Is there any likelihood any of that changes?

If you are willing to wait eons to solve a problem, poisoning everyone is a fine solution.

There are many different types of plastics. Some end up in nature as tiny pieces like you mention and are indeed very bad for the ecosystem. But it's also possible to set up a proper recycling & valorization system. Northern Europe already does it: over 98% of consumer plastics are either recycled or valorized through heat (producing power or city heating).

Despite that, there's an effort to address the low-hanging fruit of plastics that end up in the oceans and waterways, specifically single-use plastics: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/plastic_waste.htm

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 respect to the long term consequences. So we use things like plastic containers, forks, cups, bottles and spoons.

What are some alternatives? Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?

The problem with switching to alternatives like "compostable plastics" is they need to be composted in a special facility that most people aren't going to have easy access to so they'll either throw them in with their recycling (which contaminates the recycling stream) or they put them in with their garbage (which, in a oxygen starved environment like a landfill, causes them to release a lot of methane as they decompose).

So now the consumer often has to to decide if they want more greenhouse gases or more microplastics in the environment.

Although not yet commercially viable there are a few companies trying to address this problem. Algopack[0], a French startup is making plastic like material from seaweed (brown algae) and there are others that are trying out bioplastics made from sugarcane

[0] http://www.algopack.com/algopackgb.php

Most plastic degrades rather rapidly in UV (sunlight). Buried, it may not, but it's also rather inert underground.

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.

The biggest problem with making statements about "plastic" is that it's such a broad category of materials that you almost invariably doom yourself to talking nonsense.

Most plastic (particularly PET, PP, HDPE, and LDPE) is not poisonous, even when decomposed, and does not bioaccumulate in the conventional sense. Perhaps by "poison sponge" you don't mean that it's poisonous; you mean that it absorbs poisons. Well, isn't that what you would want to do with poisons? Clay and activated charcoal absorb and adsorb poisons too. That's why you feed them to poisoning victims. The problem is the poisons, not the plastics.

Using alternatives where they exist may or may not be an improvement. Usually you can use glass bottles instead of plastic bottles, for example. But a PET 2-ℓ bottle might be 27 grams of extremely nontoxic PET. The corresponding glass bottle weighs nearly a kilogram, 30 times as much. This means that most kinds of environmental damage associated with it increase by one and a half orders of magnitude; you need 30 trucks instead of one to transport the bottles to the bottling facility, 30 tons of raw material instead of one to make 30,000 bottles, and so on. The glass also needs higher processing temperatures, using more energy, and produces broken glass when discarded, so the disparity is actually somewhat larger.

Similarly, a traditional plastic shopping bag is entirely nontoxic, weighs 100 milligrams, and can be reused three or four times, but is sterile the first time you use it. If you replace it with a canvas bag that weighs 65 grams and can be reused hundreds of times, you're using 650 times more material in exchange for only 100 times more uses, and you dramatically increase your risk of food poisoning from raw vegetables. Washing the canvas bag once will typically use both more energy than the plastic bag used during its entire lifecycle and also more material — it's hard to get it clean with only 100 milligrams of soap!

A better tradeoff is to use slightly thicker plastic bags which can survive dozens of uses, use new plastic bags for your raw vegetables, and bury the plastic safely when you're done with it. (A common pathological effect of regulations against plastic shopping bags is that people have to replace them with plastic garbage bags.)

Being able to use 30 or 100 times less material, and common, nontoxic materials like carbon and hydrogen instead of rare, toxic materials like boron and chromium, are major environmental advantages of many plastics in many uses. There are some uses of plastics which are environmentally harmful, and there are some plastics which do generate toxic products if they are allowed to break down — most notably PVC.

Car fuel consumption is, generally speaking, closely proportional to weight; and, for a given emissions control system, harmful emissions are closely proportional to fuel consumption. Individual car weight has diminished enormously during the last 50 years primarily due to greatly increased use of plastics, though improved metals have also played a role. You can build cars almost entirely from metals, with only a few crucial components such as gaskets and hoses made from plastics, but doing so is environmentally harmful.

So why is there so much anti-plastic sentiment? I think there are four main reasons, aside from the actual environmental damage from some uses of plastics.

1. Plastic is very visible, and renouncing plastic is a low-cost, high-visibility way to advertise your virtue as an Environmentally Conscious Person. Doing things that would actually have a significant benefit to the environment, such as not having children, not eating meat, not financially supporting the US military through taxes, carefully weighing the costs and benefits of possible actions, and using passive solar climate control in your house, is costly and therefore unpopular.

2. I'm a hippie, and the horror at what industrial civilization is doing to our beautiful planet leads many hippies to reject industrial civilization entirely. This kind of anarcho-primitivism, which I do not agree with, considers products of industry and especially petroleum and chemistry to be undesirable, at times even ritually impure, like cannibalism. Thus canvas bags are preferable to plastic bags, wool (such as actual fleece) is preferable to microfiber polyester ("polar fleece"), and brass is preferable to plastic, entirely independent of their actual environmental impact. This creates a sort of coincidental association between environmentalism and the rejection of plastic which provides fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments.

3. At least in the US, the upper class considers wool preferable to microfiber polyester and brass preferable to plastic for an entirely different reason from anarcho-primitivists: they consider innovation and cheap goods to be déclassé, deriving much of their social value from a traditionalist, Romanticist value system. Cynics might also point out that using expensive goods where cheap ones would do serves as a form of conspicuous consumption, reliably signaling the wealth of the consumer to observers. Either way, the upper class — which still controls much of the press in the US, and thus has a powerful role as tastemakers, despite the rise of lower-class celebrities like the Kardashians and Trump — is also fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments.

4. Selling alternatives to disposable plastics is very profitable. As a simple example, a supermarket can sell cloth bags instead of giving away plastic bags for free. Many times, its customers will forget to bring cloth bags with them, and will buy more bags than they need, so in practice a single cloth bag will replace 10 plastic bags instead of 100. This works as a form of price discrimination, since customers on tighter budgets will be more careful to bring bags to avoid the artificially imposed cost. Finally, this makes the supermarket appear upscale, both because it's advertising its hip environmental consciousness, and because it is less associated with déclassé things like plastic bags. This enables it to charge higher profit margins on its other merchandise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

That would require anyone but a modern nation taking the blame for something bad on this Earth and we all know that is not going to happen.

Forget it's the Asian countries that produce the plastic. White people did everything didn't your hear?

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 subsidize the recycling of waste (expensive) or landfill it (terrible for the environment).

As a fellow member of the waste and recycling industry, thank you for your work. I love Smart City and Waste Dives.

Exactly this. As China bans to buy European "recyclable waste", then it is imported into countries with legal loopholes e.g. to Poland [1], Serbia, Italy[2] and so on and somehow landfills start to burn accidentally. Even if the law changes [3], there will be other places where a penality for such criminal act is lower than cost of recycling or proper storage.

100% plastic recycling is a dream.

Don't want to even start story about toxic fluids recycling... accidentaly leaking into rivers.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8p7wnr/major_danger...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_death_(Italy)

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-waste/poland-vows-...

It basically is. The most reasonable approach to plastic waste is controlled incineration for power. That means at least the oil we dig up performs some yeoman duty as a container or padding before being turned into work and greenhouse gas.

A bit of recycling on the margins, perhaps. Biggest thing would be to stop making plastic products that fall apart into biotoxic pieces.

The title is either purposefully misleading to get views, or just to express anti-china sentiment.

I think it should serve as a wake up call for the rest of the world. Sweden has had incredible success with recycling in recent years, most notably touting the fact that they import other countries' trash to use in their recycling plants [1]. How can we recreate Sweden’s model in the US and have our own solution to the trash problem instead of giving it to China?

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/sweden-s-recycling...

EDIT: Fixed wording and added source. Sweden is buying other countries' trash, not selling theirs.

They drastically underbid western recyclers for a long time, economically disincentiving other better solutions. Ideally, western governments should have seen this coming and fixed the problem earlier, being a failing of capatalism unchecked.

China is the one creating the plastic in the first place. Don't act like they have a moral high ground.

You realise they weren't doing it out of the goods of their hearts right? They were being paid...

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.

Western nations aren't the problem, it's developing countries with poor waste infrastructure and industrial vessels.

https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

That would be an awesome outcome. I picture a more likely one is that they will incinerate a lot more. I would like to be incorrect about that.

Isn't there a lot of desert land in the US as well? and easier access than going all the way to Northern Africa

Who is going to pay to ship it there? The whole recycling supply chain is based on selling waste to China.

Barge access isn't the problem so much as deep-water port capacity is as most waste is transported via cargo container. It takes years to build up the infrastructure needed to handle the increased garbage and transport it to massive landfills, even if you've got cheap land for them. I'd expect that it'd stress existing African port capacity, even if we're only talking about a portion of the waste that was previously sent to China.

With luck, we'll see improvements in recycling technology and investment to compensate. In the meantime, the bulk of it's already going to landfills with all of the problems that entails.

I wonder if (solar) pyrolysis of plastic for turning it back into fuel would be feasible.

Sort of historical note. Depending on how such a program is formed, you could inadvertently spawn e.g. Somali piracy out of illegal dumping. So while the idea could work, it could also be implemented in such a way to go horribly, horribly wrong.

> give houses smaller trash cans and charge a lot for bigger trash cans.

And then find garbage illegaly dumped in forests.

> d)We need packaging laws and taxes that address waste caused by excessive/unnecessary packaging... particularly for commercial/industrial use.

This. Taxes and import duties should penalise overuse of hardly recyclable products and packages.

Do you expect us to speak kindly of their social credit system?

With a looming trade war feature the US and China as primary actors, it's pretty understandable.

I also don't think this article really has too much of a negative bias, aside from the title itself.

how is this a negative article? If I had to decide it's positive. No more imported trash means a certain level of development

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, censorship of their citizens, threatening censorship of other countries about China or its concentration camps, depletes fishing supplies in other countries, floods the ocean with plastics, props up dictatorships in other countries, etc etc etc.

How is this a negative China article? No one is implying they are wrong for doing so.

I don't feel this article is particularly negative about China except title, but the negative tone in comments are surprising considering HN being tech and business focused.

I don't think it's negative bias; it's just reality –– massive pollution issues, expansionism, imperialism, racism, shining lasers in pilots' eyes, issuing balloon loans to weak African countries.

All bad stuff, and presided over by a man who is now dictator for life.

It's counterintuitively hard to send something into the sun. You have to cancel out all of Earth's velocity.

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/07/heres-why-we-cant-just...

Seriously? I’m going to have to follow the rules and charitably assume that you’re serious.

Rocket fuel is expensive, the process of launching and recovering the vehicle is expensive, and every kg lifted is incredibly expensive. You would also need to launch it somewhere, or you’d just be launching garbage into a decaying orbit. You might as well dispose of garbage by burning it on a pile of diamonds.

Shouldn't rather the entity importing the plastic take responsibility for disposing of it? As you say it might even create jobs, but I'd say it should befall the consumer to take care of the waste they produce in any case, instead of simply shipping it away.

I don't see the irony. World consumers asked for plastic. China provided it, and doesn't want to take it back.

> plastics are now drowning the ocean

Virtually all of that comes from just a small number of nations that dump trash in rivers, and the rest from lost fishing gear.

The ocean plastic is not from household plastic use/trash in places that might recycle it. So instead of working on recycling, maybe we should work on getting those countries proper trash service.