India Imposes Complete Ban on Solid Plastic Waste Imports
thewire.in
thewire.in
It's not recycling, it's just garbage, but the word recycling makes us feel good about sending it to some other country to be dumped.
With India and China refusing it, look to the "recycling" companies to make deals with countries that don't have the political will to say no to accepting the worlds plastic and paper garbage.
Why are we spewing out an infinite quantity of single use plastic and packaging?
It's all about the packaging industry and profit.
The thing that annoys me most is the in almost 100% of cases, the solutions discussed are about "how do we make use of all this plastic and other waste?", instead of asking the question "why haven't we turned off the tap?"
We need to stop plastic polluttion now, or im afraid the earths ecosystem will collapse sooner or later.
Overall consumption needs to stop. Buying a new electric car requires all the waste that comes with making a car, plus the lithium and other metals needed for batteries that have to be replaced every ten years.
We cannot spend our way out of this. Humanity needs to consume less, to not replace cellphones and laptops every 2~4 years. Anything that fights real, tangible and easily measurable environmental disaster will also reduce CO2 emissions as a byproduct, but emissions themselves should not be and end goal.
The end goal is much much more difficult: convincing the people who run Intel and Apple and Samsung that it is in the planet's best interest to not have higher sales each year and that a better goal are products that last four times as long, where the sale of replacement parts are much higher than that of actual products. It requires fundamental shifts in the way our global economy works.
Talk is cheap. If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. The only way to effect change is to work towards it yourself and gently encourage others to do so. Be prepared to make sacrifices and/or compromises (this is what stops most people, humans are selfish and lazy).
Don't like plastic waste? Make an effort to reduce it. Take reusable cloth bags with you when shopping. A big trend among young people today is takeout food. It seems that fewer and fewer people cook for themselves. This is a massive source of plastic waste. Don't buy new gizmos just because they are new or for status. Use things until they break. Then fix them until they cant be fixed.
Just imagine if everyone stopped talking a good game and started taking small steps to making the world a better place.
I don't want the box in a box in a box with countless plastic air pillows in an Amazon shipment. Nor do I want razorsharp clamshell packaging. Nor do I need plastic bags- I use cloth bags.
Yet I'm the one somehow "responsible" for a variety of pollution and climate change. Its not my fault things are built with planned obsolescence. I can repair a variety of things, but with glues and ultrasonic welding makes things notoriously difficult.
Tl;Dr. Companies are really responsible, but 3 Rs are targeting citizens.
I'm not saying it's bad to do the small things. But it is bad to assume that if only everyone did the small things, the world would be better without having to do the big things as well - it wouldn't. As long as industry continues to be as wasteful as it is, as long as we continue to transport goods over the huge distances that we do, as long as we still grow the huge amounts of animals that go to waste, we are heading for catastrophe regardless of our everyone's individual actions.
Same for climate change, start fixing small things build awareness and move onto bigger things.
Alternately tell people to stop doing anything.
Also, any reasonable changes to your personal buying behavior, and absolutely everyone on the planet's as well, assuming 0 changes in, say, industrial fishing dumping practices, will produce about a 0% change in ocean plastic pollution.
The people that run those companies are just functionaries. It's the owners that call the shots, and they are at this point apparently too far down the road of competitive wealth-hoarding to change.
The people required to make the changes are the "consumers" not the people running the companies. Companies will respond to DEMAND and nothing else.
We don't make companies pay for externalities, and we should. Maybe we could tax companies that sell plastic packaged things to pay for recovery costs, or make them recover it themselves.
There's lots of options and many of them could exist in a world where private interests make profit. We just can't let profit be the goal, it has to be the reward for acting responsibly.
This is also thesis of Naomi Klein book
http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2018/08/capitalism-killed...
The worst part is -- I keep a lot of boxes around for years thinking the little plastic doodads and little accessories might become useful for me someday. What actually happens is that they never get used and then get tossed after the product is no longer useful to me.
I'm afraid that if we hurry into it, there will be all sorts of unintended consequences. I also suspect that it's harder than we realize to keep track of what building houses the nuclear reactor and which one is the bike shed.
Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster. It takes so very much energy to manufacture glass, and it takes so very much fuel to truck it around. I think, rather than micro-focusing on one specific bogeyman, what I'd really like to see is an attack on packaging-related waste and pollution in general.
This is only true if said glass bottles were not reusable (and their reuse wasn't compelled in some fashion).
A simple ban on plastic bottles would address none of this. You'd have to look at the big picture to be sure you can achieve good results.
I'd wager that we'd get much better results by instead introducing a tax on, say, every beverage container that enters the waste stream. Or, maybe easier to enforce, that cannot be proven not to have entered the waste stream. That would be a single legislative string to pull that would give the industry a strong economic incentive to address all (or at least most) of the real causes of the problem.
This to a book that enlightened me to the chaotic world of globalised recycling: Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1608197913
I've worked at a recycling plant so I know that it's different than the old landfills. But we just separated parts, components and fabrics out of various items. Never saw where they ended up.
Unfortunately it's also true, in a sort of self-fulfilling prediction kinda way.
And even if not, and it remains true for the majority of others, what have you done? Put in a load of extra effort and made your own life more difficult, but achieved nothing.
This is why collective action at the state level is necessary.
If you can sell cigarettes to kids...
The metrics are based on unimportant factors like “diversion” (meaning it was dumped in a foreign country as “recycling” rather than safely burned or land filled), and the measurements are almost All estimates.
It will be a long road to change a culture that demands “recycling” simply because a politician or CEO committed to “Zero Waste by 20X0”, and the recycling rate must always go up year over year.
Edit: I notice you said plastic packaging. Which made me thing of the massive amount of plastics in retailed packaging. My answer there would be that reducing is always better than recycling - start shipping with less material and/or more paper based products that naturally decompose in a few days/weeks.
My point was that paper can decompose more easily if/when it’s improperly disposed of/littered. It’s not ideal, but at least it will be gone in shorter time than plastic, and it won’t destroy wildlife, etc.
The other benefit of more paper based products is they retain greater value than plastics (both economic and practical - your McDonalds napkin was formerly a newspaper, which is former office paper, etc) and therefore market forces will typically support a clean stream recycling program for mixed paper, office paper, and corrugated cardboard.
I wasn’t aware plastics could be burned and the exhaust contained / treated / whatever.
The way to deal with plastic, especially packaging is to have a regulatory framework that makes it more expensive than putting it in a cardboard box.
That is, recycling plastic X might be very profitable in 2015 and not at all be profitable in 2019. It is the same problem that producers of oil, aluminum and everything else have from time to time. Prices go up and prices go down.
If you don't care about money, then just give it all to me. If you do, then these people do too, which is why it's about profit and loss.
Not sure why the outburst/snark, I started my comment with "I understand commerce makes the world go around" ...
Because making money by doing an activity is one well known way to do it long term, in a self-sustainable fashion. The other way is by force, which has many issues. Furthermore, in an open society (like most Western democracies), force use is very limited and cannot be sustained.
Either we find a way to make money out of fixing climate change or it won't happen, unless you're OK with global dictatorship.
Pricing, supply, demand, are ways consumers indicate their interest in products and services, and recycling is very low value, because nobody cares.
In the late 1970s there was a a panic over energy and Aluminum prices were sky high. With no bottle deposit at all my dad and I picked Aluminum can out of dumpsters all over Manchester, NH and made enough money in a few weeks to buy a new Aluminum bicycle.
Later on the price collapsed and it was not worth doing.
The bigger factor that makes recycling harder to justify is that it’s very easy and cheap to make new stuff.
Last I looked most countries get very upset when others dump products on their markets at below cost. Chinese steel in America being a prime example.
Edit: Agree on turning off the tap. That's the primary thing we need to focus on.
Aluminum is pretty much the only material that is economically viable to recycle.
Cardboard is recyclable.
A pizza box soaked with grease ins't, and can contaminate other potential recyclables as well.
Everything is about profit. The invention of the assembly line was about profit. Toothpaste is about profit. YC companies are about profit.
It’s how our society works, and it’s not enough to just claim it’s about profit and call it a day. Good things are also about profit. What makes this bad?
The lack of pricing in negative externalities. That is the root of all capitalist evil. Global warming, micro plastics, holes in the ozone layer, all of it can be traced back to negative externalities not properly priced in.
Once you do that: saving the planet becomes about profit. And something tells me, we’d be pretty good at saving the planet, if there were money to be made… :)
It is the fashion, and it is a fashion, for small government that comes with neoliberalism which has made everything about profit. Most countries (as opposed to shareholders) are worse off in many ways as a result. Not every state sale provided benefit, nor every privatised industry more efficient.
I fully agree that pricing in externalities and environmental costs should be in all goods. Nothing to do with profit though. It's the only way to compare in a market economy. I also tend to sympathy with Keynes in aspiring for a middle ground somewhere between rampant market dystopia and communist dystopia.
There are lots of other kinds of market failures; markets diverge from the Efficient Market Hypothesis in certain quite common conditions, markets can produce monopolies, etc.
And even without all of those failures, markets inherently attach an unconscionably disproportionate value to the desires of the wealthy unless a serious redistribution mechanism is layered on top of them.
Also I mostly agree with your point about externalities. I think a large portion of the evils of capitalism can be attributed to mispriced externalities, but certainly not all of it.
The 2008 crash involved a combination of a principal-agent problem (between mortgage underwriters and the ultimate sources of capital that bought the CDOs) and the limits of the market as a transmitter of reliable information.
The market does not by default transmit its signals in a way that humans respond optimally to (not even from the point of view of their interests). e.g. people discount the future gas savings of a slightly more expensive car in a way that implies an implicit interest rate much higher than the actual one.
The market assigns the power to consume (money) in ways that do not reflect actual human values - i.e. the decision that someone whose skills are in demand should be able to consume 4x what their neighbor can, rather than 2x, is not a question of efficiency but of values, and when it comes to the high and low ends the market's values are inhuman.
I have come to a similar conclusion; the funny part is I have observed the most ardent supporters of capitalism and the free market generally seem to plug their ears and go "lalalala" the moment I utter the word "externality"
Some materials can truly be recycled, like steel and glass.
In the end that is really just about giving the good incentives. India blocking waste imports is a good way. Countries blocking waste exports or forcing actual, effective and demonstrable recycling may be another.
So why do people use single-use plastic? Because they are lazy, and it's convenient.
In a similar vein, a majority in a country can choose to oppress the minority but that doesn’t mean government should let it happen because the people made the choice.
Going back will mean going to the market, getting fresh vegetables and potatoes and shit, and put them in either paper bags or reused burlap sacks. I think an individual's biggest contribution would already be changing their food habits; stuff like keto, primal diets, vegetarianism / veganism are a step in the good direction. Assuming you cook your own food, instead of idk, grabbing a McD's salad (in a plastic container) or pre-packaged vegetables (plastic bags).
My brother worked produce when they switched from paper to plastic packaging. Moisture issues ruin lots and lots of produce at a much higher rate in the plastic.
The other driver is the industrialization and centralization of production. You need plastic packaging and controlled delivery to ship your produce from irrigated desert in California to Maine. Of course in the process you kill off all of the regionalized produce growers as the whole supply chain needs to adapt.
Even meats are this way. Meat is packaged in plastic because the industry was allowed to consolidate to a few fly-over states with awful labor practices. When I was a kid in NYC, whole sides of beef were delivered and cut in the supermarket or butcher. No packaging required until retail, and retail packaging was mostly paper. Now some dis-assembly worker butchers meat in Colorado or Iowa, which must be shipped in cyrovac plastic to the retailer.
Scenario: I need to buy some water or milk. I go to the market... what are my options? My grocer does not provide water in plastic or metal bottles, and no longer provides cardboard milk cartons.
Scenario: I need a quart of oil for my car. Packaging options are: 32oz PET bottle.
Scenario: I need a laptop computer. I order it online. There is no way for me to tell what packaging is used. I open the box and the laptop is protected by polystyrene and accessories are in taped plastic bags.
As a diligent consumer, wtf am I supposed to do?
Longer answer: reduce your buying habits. Keep your laptop/phone around for longer before replacing it. Buy second hand or refurbished devices.
Do you need to buy water, or could you drink (filtered) tap water? Do you need to buy milk, or can you replace it with an alternative? Soy and oat "milks" are different, but serviceable replacements. Avoid almond and other nut "milks".
Sometimes you can't really avoid the packaging, but you can make sure the product in that packaging has a smaller environmental impact.
As for motor oil, most cars only one oil change per year, so that bottle of oil isn't the worst item in your example. But you should probably drive less.
The global solution to reducing plastic packaging is to reduce the use of plastic packaging, mostly by using cardboard and glass instead. That's driven by manufacturing, not consumer action.
Lifestock farming is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. By choosing alternatives, this contribution can be lessened. I very specifically said not to buy nut milks, because they're also rather bad for the environment, especially in terms of water usage. Soy and oat milks have lower impacts than dairy and nut milks.
Just because your individual action doesn't make much of a difference in and of itself, that does not mean we should just give up. Obviously it shouldn't be a case of ignoring the big polluters just because you did a small thing, but by changing our habits, we can use consumer demand to change the production and packaging practices of corporations.
Individual action does make a difference. Everything counts.
Is there any other nation (North Korea aside) that would let foreigners ship trash to be dumped on their land?
1. Some other country exports its trash to Poland.
2. The trash is stored at a specific place and not a few days go by until an "accidental" fire erupts.
3. The "entrepreneurs" who originally took the trash profit not only from that, but any potential insurance claim.
4. Rinse and repeat.
2. The people that accepted and disposed of the waste, on the difference between how they declared to do it vs. how they actually did it.
So there obviously value being extracted. This isn't a story of the 1st world paying to get rid of their waste.
I agree with you in general. We should be generating less waste and recycling and we should be taking responsibility for that waste and recycling. I would stop short of cutting out the 3rd world from the opportunity to benefit from the opportunities waste and recycling bring though. Theres money to be made, they have the ability to compete. We developed nations shouldn't let it become a race to the bottom though. If China wants clean pure plastics, we should be willing to supply that.
China and India's plastic and garbage pollution is one thing, but Japan is the place that irks me the most when it comes to plastic use.
I bought bananas that were wrapped in plastic (go figure, right? ) And what did the cashier do? She wrapped it in more plastic! THEN she gave me a plastic bag to put it in!
That blew my mind. Like, why? Just _why_?
Go to any supermarket in Japan and you'll see fruit and vegetables wrapped in plastic for no good reason at all. It's one of the reasons I typically buy my produce from the local farmers instead of the market now.
I mean, why would you _individually_ _wrap_ oranges?
With developed countries, with all educated residents, are finding hard to curb plastic use (or lack of effort), it looks humanity is still some distance away to make a serious dent to use of plastic overall.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/a-rare-glimps...
It's time to start considering CO2 emissions as our transparent, unmanageable trash. Each Singaporean is generating 10 tonnes of it yearly, and each American is generating 16 tonnes of it yearly.
The climate change issue is that, when burning it, you release carbon just like when burning any other fossil fuel.
Waste-to-energy is a growing part of Singapore's energy mix, and that's not exciting news.
Environment be damned and let’s get it out of sight once it is ugly.
If there was any country to lead a full on plastic bag ban you would think it would be Japan just given the heavy reliance on imports.
Especially peeled ones. Right? I asked this some time ago here, and the answer I got was "people with motor skills problems". I still don't know how to feel about it - I don't know the relative sizes of genuine demand vs. the scale at which such goods are provided.
Still, that's an exception. What you described is absolutely ridiculous. I'm already appalled by the amount of packaging we use here in Poland for no reason other than providing advertising surface, but the stories from Japan make my heart bleed.
Recycling items is way harder than it needs to be.
First companies need to re-engineer their products to minimize the solid waste and maximize recyclability
Second, people need to easily understand what can be recycled and what can not so they can make an informed decision
Third, communities should not have the option to ship out their waste and have someone else deal with the problem. By shipping out their problems they never have to deal with the consequences.
Solid waste is as much pollution as smog has been in large cities. Clean air laws have changed the whole environment in cites like Los Angeles.It's time we start doing the same with solid waste.
As much as smog "has been"? Los Angeles today is still full of SUVs belching smog. The air quality is still insanely awful. Yet the dialog has moved on (maybe because SUVs are for the wealthy?).
Why care about landfills? Air pollution kills people, in addition to hurting them less severely and blocking the views. And on a global scale, climate change is going to hurt everyone on Earth. Landfills in the United States, where they should be properly lined so they don't leak poisons, don't hurt anybody. Plastic in landfills even sequesters carbon.
Meh, there's no need to resort to conspiracy theories to explain why the conversation has dropped off the radar. The level of smog in LA is _drastically_ lower than its peak, both quantitatively (as one figure, ozone levels are 40% of what they were in 1970) and in terms of how the man on the ground experiences it. Most people stop caring about a problem when it stops being so dramatically visible.
This is a government ban, which means they want to stop people who want to import this waste. Are those importers too financially illiterate to realise that they're costing themselves money? That even though their business is dealing with this waste, they need you and the Indian government to tell them that recycling is actually pretty tricky?
Maybe they should ban it because it's causing health or environmental problems, but banning activity you think is uneconomical is pointless at best and harmful at worse.
> communities should not have the option to ship out their waste and have someone else deal with the problem
Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything here. If you pay someone to take your trash, or if someone pays you to take your trash, both of you are better off. Banning the activity makes everyone worse off.
There are a LOT of places where people don’t need to use plastic, it’s just how things are done and it’s convenient. Small example, individually wrapping fruit in plastic at the grocer. Fruit comes with its own packaging!
Container ships have to make the voyage from the US back to China, why do it empty? They need massive tonnage to bring back, and the US just doesn’t export enough into China so let’s carry recycling? (This assumes the ships that bring X from China to the US can bring Y from the US back to Chine without expensive reconfiguration, and perhaps also that the ports of entry are reasonably close?)
Also, the amount of money that China was willing to pay for the material (or be paid for taking the material) was so outside the market price as to essentially be “dumping” (economically speaking) their recycling waste capture product on the US. In the presence of Chinese dumping no US facility could fairly exist in the market, so they all shut down. Now that the Chinese economic dumping had ceased, the US is left without a functioning market.
Yes, it pleases me to no end to frame the problem of US recycling as China dumping. No, I haven’t been able to determine if there is any factual basis to this hypothesis!
So, uh, basically the business model of venture capitalism? Go into a market, crush all the competition with massive amounts of cheap money and then jack up prices?
Don't call me surprised when China opens its ports for waste again but at 10x or 100x the price...
Obviously part of the solution is going to necessarily require companies stop putting so much waste packaging on products.
Avoid producing waste, reuse, recycle, incinerate it, final disposal (or reuse in concrete etc): that's the chain to follow, and each part is important.
There is almost no focus on reuse in the US. If you want to get groceries, you don't take a container to fill, you buy your food wastefully prepackaged. Fast food restaurants don't give you a plate and glass, they give you disposable wrapping and a plastic cup. Even clothes are meant to be disposable - most people don't repair their shoes, they just throw them out and buy new ones.
I don't see this mentality changing any time soon, and it's really sad. We should start changing companies for the disposal costs of their products and packaging, rather than hiding the cost in environmental damage.
The supermarket sold some sturdier and bigger bags for like 50 cents, who can be reused for years and they even replace it for you if the bag is ruined for some reason, but using this was socially frowned upon. After the tax, it is socially acceptable to reuse bags now.
It is possible to change this on a society level, and the change can be vary fast on our current hyper-connected economy.
A similar thing happened with lunches. Before 2008, people would never carried their own lunches from home, it was a total social faux-pa. The mix of economic downturn (even if the same people did not feel it), healthy lifestyles are trendy and the classic one-upmanship between who would bring the fanciest lunch lead to droves of people carrying their lunches on public transit almost overnight, special stores that sell thermos and special bags, and hundreds of cook books.
Why not more of both?
I let my nephews tear down broken old laptops for parts reuse, for example ... quite fun and useful.
And since I am in germany, I can also add more to the recycling part. We sort old glas by colors - they do get recycled. Old paper - same.
And even plastic to some extent, even though I know that most of that gets burned. But some of it actually does get recycled.
Our ordinary trash bin is quite small.
Background: I would like to start or buy a recycling business because I want to be part of the solution instead of the problem (and if it can make a profit, I'm not independently wealthy). Yes, I know we need to reduce and reuse first, but we're now also sitting in a mountain of plastic and given inertia, it's not going to go away anytime soon.
I did read this one already [1], which I recommend to get a basic understanding of the various forms of recycling and the profitability.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1569906769/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
Pick one, they're all just as depressing as the next.
* Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koqNm_TgOZk
* Penn & Teller - Recycling - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jac96QNtRmU
* Debunking recycling paper (P&T segment) - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM
* The shocking scale of our waste - and the myth of recycling | Irene Rompa | TEDxMidAtlantic - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTgTWLYCeOU
A better set of ideas that might actually help:
Reduce - as suggested elsewhere, eliminate parts of the packaging that aren't strictly required (outer seals, etc).
Reuse
* Create a set of standardized, rugged, containers that seal around foods.
* Actually use them to pack foods in standard containers.
* Which are then returned for cleaning and reuse.
* Many bins, one for each type of allowed recyclable plastic.
* Also a compost bin
* Which would be different from a yard waste bin
* Make sure the reusable containers are also easy to recycle.
* Also, make an easy to read (human and machine) /large/ 'number' label.
We used to actually have this: it was wooden/plastic crates and boxes, pallets, burlap bags, and glass milk/juice/beer bottles.
We're moving backwards, and it's all due to economics. Reuse of those materials back then was motivated by the cost and difficulty of producing those containers. It simply was not economically feasible to produce a single-use crate or glass bottle--too expensive. Economics and the wonder-engine of capitalistic progress has now given us the ability to manufacture trillions of single-use containers for literally less than a penny a piece. It's just far cheaper and less of a headache to just produce, wrap, and then toss the waste. No one wants to deal with all the niggling details of carting bottles back and forth, washing, them, filling them. Just too much of a pain in the ass. So we get what we have now. Clean, no fuss, no mess. Just toss it.
In many ways, our older economies--full of poor working saps who had to lug bottles back and forth--was far more sustainable than today's system. But today we're rich and lazy and awash in our own trash. Progress!
Unfortunately, we've also lied to ourselves about our Gelbesacks (packaging recycling bags) to the extent that there are a lot more things in single-use containers and a lot of fruit and veggies are in pre-weighed, plastic-wrapped packages.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...
We don’t feel so bad about using paper or wood because it now biodegrades, but if those organisms hadn’t evolved, we’d be worried about wood and paper the same way we worry about plastic.
This article suggests there are some bacteria that has already evolved to eat kinds of plastic:
http://theconversation.com/how-plastic-eating-bacteria-actua...
Maybe in a few decades with more research, we’ll have solutions for plastic that don’t involve sending it across the world?
You should research the types of recycleable plastics and how they are marked[0] - some types can release toxic fumes which are bad for both you and the planet. I've heard you can develop allergies to plastics from breathing some of the nastier fumes, and while that may be an urban legend I would definitely advise caution.
Still, HDPE and LDPE seem fairly safe and easy to recycle without adding things like plasticisers, and HDPE bricks make for great CNC stock.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_degradation_of_polymer...
It doesn't lend itself to 3D printing because it is similar to Teflon/PTFE in not wanting to stick to anything, but it is still astonishing stuff. You can melt/press it into molds, and if you toss it in a toaster oven you can even knead it like putty through welding gloves if you're careful. Metal tools will chew through it like butter with hardly any wear, and it is very light for its strength. You can even melt down the shavings. And if you need to, you can often "glue" it to things with anything from a soldering iron to a blowtorch.
The Filastruder filament extruder needs chunks of plastic that are no larger than 5mm on any side.
So it’s missing a step from being an actual recycling bin.
A relatively painless guide to cutting plastic out of your life
Getting a bulk supply that doesn't use plastic (or send you to some funny store that you have to drive further to and that costs more) is presumably the hard part...
Natural soap does work well on hair.
Soap occurs in nature?
Regardless, I think his point is that shampoo as we know it today is very much a product of the modern marketing/industrial complex.
Plastic avoidance should first target plastics that can't be recycled.
We have this complicated recycling sorting program in Waterloo. And months ago I noticed that they simply stopped giving a crap about the sortedness or cleanliness of anything that isn't aluminum.
Are papers still decently recycled?
Every day, I’d spot at least one garbage scow hauling stuff off to be dumped somewhere in the bay/ocean.
That was about the same time they banned single use plastic bags. The hypocrisy of inconveniencing everyone to make a show of doing something while still allowing the garbage scow pisses me off to this day.
I wish these environmental greenwash programs came with a legal requirement to do a end-to-end impact study after implementation.
I agree with the concern about not being handled properly. How many biodegradable really end up in a compost pile>
Hopefully everyone learns from this. Recycle where it makes economic sense, or bury in an approved manner. It will be interesting rock in less than 1M years.
At home, they collect plastic waste once a week. We are expected to clean the plastic properly and dry it before handing them over. I was really surprised to see how much plastic waste we generate every week in our 2 people household. Seeing that has motivated me to reduce waste as much as possible.
They are also replacing all the city public transport buses with electric. They had some trial runs and electric buses made good amount of profit for them. So hoping to see an all electric fleet in another 5 years. Another major source of pollution is the 3 wheeler auto rickshaws (tuk tuk). News reports say they will also eventually become electric.