China and the world : The dark side of recycling Part 1

All is NOT green. The recycling industry is the 21st Century’s grey area with plenty of dark, dirty secrets.

“Recycling is such a moral gray area,” said Adam Minter, a recycling expert and the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. “When you put your recyclables in the bin, you want it to feel green, but it’s really very complicated. If you think you’re not wasting resources and not making an environmental or social impact, then you clearly don’t understand what’s happening.” 

Are we as green as we’d like to believe? Does recycling our plastic waste end with dropping it down a large green can with the recycle symbol on it? What happens to the enormous quantities of plastic waste once it is removed from our sight by garbage trucks? 

Why is it so important to address waste segregation at an individual level? As citizens, we need to each do our part to ensure that waste is properly segregated. Otherwise, we end up destroying oceans, villages, cities and entire countries.  

WHERE DO PLASTICS REALLY GO AFTER COLLECTION? 

They are shipped overseas. Yes really. Your tin Coca-Cola can isn’t recycled in your country as you would like to believe. It is segregated in garbage collection centres, packed into gigantic piles of plastic and shipped off in large vessels bound towards South Asia.  

Hong Kong, China – October 8, 2012: Garbage being hauled on boat in Victoria Harbor. The dense population means its existing landfills are expected to be full by 2015. SOURCE: Tradevistas.org. CREDIT :  SeanPavonePhoto | Credit: Getty Images

“Consumers, especially those in the West, are conditioned to believe that when they separate their recyclables and throw them out, that it’ll be properly taken care of. But that’s been exposed as a myth.” Von Hernandez, the global coordinator for the Break Free From Plastic initiative.

The multibillion-dollar recycling industry that had us believing that our products are recyclable and that we’re doing our best for the environment was recently exposed in early 2018, when China closed its borders to 24 kinds of recycled waste, including scrap plastic and mixed paper. Thus far, China is the largest importer of plastic from all over the world, as the plastic serves as raw feed for their manufacturing processes. But the process was fraught with complications. While China has huge recycling plants set up all over the country to deal with the enormous quantities of waste pouring in from the US, UK, Japan, Australia and Europe, the process was anything but green.  Most of the trash brought in from these countries contained material that was not recyclable and clogged up their machines. Plastics that shouldn’t have been part of the export were often snuck in to help dispose of them from the source country and ended up in huge landfills in China, or worse, burnt, releasing toxic chemicals into the air.  

The idea was that plastics from Western countries would be sorted in the collection centres to ship out only the recyclables to China, which paid good money to ship and feed the plastics as raw materials in their factories and industries after recycling. (Converting used recyclable plastics into resins for raw material). This did not happen though, and over the years, China ended up becoming the recycling bin of the world, with increasingly polluted towns and cities, more garbage than its massive recycling plants could handle and non-biodegradable and non-recyclable waste from other countries clogging up its sanitation systems. 

WHY DO THESE COUNTRIES SHIP THEIR TRASH? 

Recycling is a difficult, labour-intensive process that is not cost-effective. There are seven different categories of plastic out of which only Numbers 1,2 & 5 are recyclable. What happens in our daily lives, however, is that we mix all our plastics and these plastics go to our garbage collection centers as one gigantic pile of plastic.  

To start the recycling process, plastics that cannot be recycled, cling films, plastic bags and plastic contaminated by food, liquid or medicine have to be manually sorted into different piles, as they clog the machines. With the high wages paid in Western countries for manual labour, this is a very expensive process. Only industrial plastic is recycled in the US while other plastics like those used in stores and homes are sent out to Asia for recycling.  The cheaper, “cleaner”, more profitable alternative was to ship mixed plastics to China where hourly wages were low and have them collect, sort and dispose of plastics in their country. China, fed up with overflowing landfills, waterways and the pollution from illegal burning closed its doors to plastic trash. This had a devastating effect on the rest of the planet. Up until its ban, China imported about 45% of the world’s plastic waste, from the USA, UK, Europe, Japan and Australia, about 110 million tons of plastic between 1992 and 2016.  

With China’s ban, the ripples began to be felt worldwide. Western countries were suddenly left with 250 million tons of plastic waste and nowhere to put it. Their landfills, waterways and collection centres were suddenly full of contaminated, non-biodegradable waste with minimal potential for recycling. Of the 6.9 billion tons of plastic waste, the world has collectively been able to recycle only an abysmal 9% of trash, even with China importing huge quantities to feed into their factories and plants.  The rest remains in landfills, has flown into oceans to destroy marine ecosystems or has been littered about our roads, parks, and public spaces and worse still, burnt to release toxic fumes that add increased pollution trifold.   

What did the world do after China closed its doors? It looked further South, at South East Asia, at Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, India and other countries to take in plastic trash. 

Please click here to read about the current scenario and the stance taken by Malaysia against importing plastic trash from the East.  

REFERENCES:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/world/asia/asia-trash.html>

From <https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/03/heres-why-america-is-dumping-its-trash-in-poorer-countries/>  

Netflix: The Series “Broken”: Recycling Sham.

About the Author

You may also like these