For more than 25 years, rich countries shipped their plastic trash to poorer Asian countries, many of them developing nations lacking the capacity to manage such waste.
China alone took in the lion’s share—45 percent of the world’s plastic waste imports. Then at the start of this year, it refused to take more, citing local environmental concerns. China’s move threw the recycling industry into turmoil as nations scrambled to find new buyers."
That was 2018. It is interesting that, in Hong Kong, we have seen a significant increase in plastic rubbish on beaches which seems to correlate with when China stopped accepting and processing that plastic. More investigation would be required...
"Recycling of plastic has always painted a complicated and uninspired picture. It is a challenge to recycle, thanks to the variety of additives and blends used to manufacture what the study’s authors describe as a “multitude of products.” Only nine percent of the plastic produced globally is recycled. The remainder ends up in landfills, incinerators, or floating free and polluting the environment. Since 1992, as wealthier nations shipped recycled plastic to China and other developing Asian nations, this new export-import industry of plastic trash grew by 800 percent.
(...)
In 2015, Jambeck published the first comprehensive global count of plastic trash, which concluded between four and 12 million metric tons of plastic slips off the coastlines and into the oceans every year. This new study, which she co-authored with Amy Brooks, a University of Georgia doctoral student, suggests that China’s action may force the world to come up with “bold global ideas and actions” to more realistically dispose of a material that has accumulated more waste than any other material.
(...)
Additionally, China remains without fully developed waste management systems, the study concludes. An estimated 1.3-to-3.5 million metric tons enters the oceans from China’s coastline. Between 2010 and 2016, imported plastic waste to China added an additional 10 to 13 percent to the country’s domestic waste, increasing China’s difficulties in managing its garbage.
(...)
Redesign of plastic products that takes into account what happens to those products at the end of their life will also go a long way toward improving recycling. Failure to create effective domestic recycling programs only enhances motivation to use less plastic overall.
The Basel Convention, the international treaty that controls movement of hazardous wastes and their disposal, could come into play. “If plastic waste were characterized as waste requiring special consideration, then export could potentially be regulated,” Jambeck and Brooks say. They also suggest importers could tax plastic waste, to create enough funding to construct solid waste management infrastructure to handle it."
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/china-plastic-recycling-ban-solutions-science-environment/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/plastic-planet-waste-pollution-trash-crisis/?beta=true
"After years of hearing that we should recycle more, it’s pretty shocking to realize that we don’t have an infrastructure that can deal with all of it.
Recycling started in the ’70s and ’80s but it took a while to really spread and certainly to become kind of mandatory. [Over the past 20 years] there was no matching or building of recycling capacity along with the increase in recycling programs. I was living in New York in the mid ’90s and I remember when the recycling came in, that maps directly onto the years when we started exporting to China.
There’s an interesting debate warming up about if we should focus on improving our recycling or if that is going to enable our continued consumption of plastics. In other words, let’s not focus on recycling, let’s just focus on not using plastics. I personally think that we need to do both, and I’m concerned about this argument that we shouldn’t even be improving recycling, that we just need to focus on not using plastic, because that seems like a lot harder of a goal to reach."
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/4/2/18290956/recycling-crisis-china-plastic-operation-national-sword
" 'There's no magical land of recycling with rainbows and unicorns. It's much grittier than that,' says Martin Bourque, executive director at the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a non-profit group that has been engaged in curbside recycling programs since 1973.
At the center's plant, laborers wearing protective aprons and work gloves sort through a grimy procession of metal and glass refuse that clatters along a conveyor belt.
Bourque says the recycling of paper, tin, and aluminum 'saves a ton of energy and natural resources.'
But approximately 40% of the non-bottle mixed plastic that his organization gathers is not recycled -- either because it's made from plastics that are too costly or hard to process, have been contaminated with food or other materials, or there simply isn't a market for that type of plastic.
Therefore, this plastic goes directly to landfill. Bourque says that's because he cannot find a destination that can recycle the plastic without causing additional harm to the environment.
'We would much rather see them in a landfill then being exported to a foreign country where we don't know what the final destination will be,' Bourque explains.
(...)
To ensure its plastic was being properly recycled, the Berkeley facility carried out an experiment. Using a GPS locator to track plastic waste, they learned that their shipments ended up in China and Malaysia.
There, Bourque says, local environmental investigators found signs of plastic dumped in ravines and waterways. For the plastic that did reach a recycling factory, there were reports of poor working conditions and contaminated water being discharged into local creeks from such facilities."
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/26/asia/malaysia-plastic-recycle-intl/index.html?no-st=1556670802
"The increase in large plastic pollution has been happening since 1957, with a significant increase since the 1990s, according to this study.
The researchers didn't set out to do a study about plastic pollution. They were initially studying plankton.
'This happened through chatting with the guys that do the metal work to fix the equipment and the volunteers working to tow the recorders,' said study co-author Clare Ostle, a research scientist at the Marine Biological Association in the UK. 'They were talking about how this plastic kept getting tangled up in the equipment.'
There are very few historical records of ocean plastic pollution, she said, so the researchers used the incidents to investigate exactly how much plastic pollution there was and how often these entanglements happened.
(...)
Ostle and her team looked at 60 years worth of ocean data covering over 6.5 million nautical miles in the North Atlantic and adjacent seas. They found that plastic entanglement on the equipment used to measure plankton increased by about 10 times from 2000 on.
(...)
A previous study found that between 4.8 million and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2010 from people living within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of the coastline.
Global plastic production has quadrupled over the past four decades, a separate new study found.
That study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that if the trend continues, the making of plastics will comprise 15% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; by comparison, all of the world's forms of transportation now account for 15% of emissions."
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/16/health/ocean-plastic-study-scn/index.html?no-st=1556670938
Action plan
1. 1st world countries should ban all single-use plastic (bags, bottles, straws, etc), which would force adaptation. This is actually done by many countries and cities. However, until the top5 users of single-use plastic lead the way, change won't be material
2. Internalization of plastic management by having local laws (in can start at the municipal level, then extend to country level) preventing exporting plastic trash, thereby forcing development of local solutions.
3. Involve the "brains" in the private sector and crowdsources - that is the kind of challenge for Google and Musk, or crowdsources; have the technology to sort plastic automatically in large quantity with AI, at the municipal level.
