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From the Recycling Bin to the Landfill: The Major Flaw in Plastic Recycling

April 4, 2024

From the Recycling Bin to the Landfill: The Major Flaw in Plastic Recycling

Reports estimate that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is recycled, pointing to the impracticality of recycling on a large scale.

People may be putting plastic into recycling bins, but most of it generally ends up in landfills or incinerated.

Yet the demand for more plastic production continues—at a growing cost to human and environmental health—because of the belief that recycling offsets the associated waste and risks. A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) alleges that the plastics industry knowingly caused the current plastic waste crisis.

The nonprofit’s report claims that as the plastics industry faced mounting concerns over plastics being incinerated and piling up in landfills, they promoted recycling as a viable solution while dismissing it internally as impractical.

“They knew since the 1970s that plastic recycling was not going to be scalable and effective in tackling the plastic waste crisis,” Melissa Valliant, communications director of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit aiming to reduce single-use plastic use and production, explained to The Epoch Times.

The report asserts that the efforts to sell the false promise of plastic recycling were to avoid restrictive regulations and potential product bans.Plastic Recycling Poses Many Challenges

According to the report, one problem with plastic recycling is that it is not technically or economically feasible at scale. Unlike glass and metal, plastic cannot be repeatedly recycled without quickly degrading in quality. Most recyclable plastics can typically only be recycled once. As a result, most recycled plastic eventually ends up in landfills, even if it goes through an additional use cycle as another product.

Between the 1970s and 2015, 91 percent of plastic was either landfilled, burned, or leaked into the environment, according to a global analysis published in Science Advances. Another recent report published by Beyond Plastics estimated that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is successfully recycled.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

“Pollution Panic” Strikes US Cities As Officials Face Consequences of China’s Waste Blockade

March 10, 2019

“Pollution Panic” Strikes US Cities As Officials Face Consequences of China’s Waste Blockade

Beginning in Feb 2017, as part of China’s broader “National Sword” campaign, the largest buyer of recyclables from the US, banned 24 types of solid waste from being imported and placed tougher restrictions on the ones it continues to accept.

The move left the recycling industry and authorities in a number of US cities struggling with the disposal of plastic, paper and glass trash, and as RT reports, US officials say it creates pollution, negatively impacting the health of residents.

“Communities around trash incinerators have experienced elevated levels of certain cancers,” environmental activist Mike Ewall told Ruptly video agency in Chester, outside Philadelphia, where a large incinerator is located.

It burns around 200 tons of recyclable materials every day.

Ewall noted that burning trash releases “28 times more dioxin pollution” than burning coal, emitting “the most toxic chemicals known to science,” like mercury and lead.

The residents complain that the incinerator affects house prices as well.

“It destroyed the sense of community, because people that were here moved. You cannot sell the house. It has destroyed the foundations,” local activist Zulene Mayfield told Ruptly.

Finally, some have suggested Beijing’s move to crack down on waste imports may be part of the ongoing trade war with Washington:

“I have to take off my hat to China: it’s a very clever trade move,” Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director at the American Institute for Economic Research, told RT, adding that Beijing “would never admit that this is part of the trade war.”

For some context, U.S. plastic waste exports to China plummeted by 92 percent between the first part of 2017 and the first part of 2018. 

Infographic: China Won't Accept U.S. Plastic Waste. Now What? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

“It’s a way of putting a huge tariff or a blockade on the worst of American exports to China. If it is a tactic, it’s a brilliant one.”

US Cities Face “Moment Of Reckoning” As China Halts Trash Imports

February 22, 2019

US Cities Face “Moment Of Reckoning” As China Halts Trash Imports

In the Trump era, the American garbage business is changing in ways that Tony Soprano never could have anticipated. And it’s creating serious problems for American cities, who might soon find themselves with nowhere to turn to export their trash and recyclables (most of which have almost no value above rubbish due to contamination, and are typically disposed of in the same fashion).

And while an unrelenting river of garbage with nowhere to go might be a mafioso’s dream, small towns like Chester City, PA., a small town in Delaware County that is best known as Philly’s waste pit, is demanding that something be done since China’s sleeper ban on recycling imports – which arose from Beijing’s desire “not to be the world’s landfill” – has led to a host of new deadly contaminants polluting the impoverished town’s air as its incinerators now burn more of the plastics that China will no longer accept.

As we explained last year, since 1992, China and Hong Kong have taken in approximately 72% of global plastic waste according to a study in the journal Science Advances. However, since January 2018, Beijing stopped accepting most paper and plastic waste in accordance with new environmental policies.

Garbage

What they do still accept: cardboard and metal, now has an extremely low contamination threshold of just 0.5% – a level far too low for current US recycling technology to handle. Where China used to take 40% of the US’s paper plastics and other trash, that trade has now ground to a halt.

It is “virtually impossible to meet the stringent contamination standards established in China”, according to a spokeswoman for the Philly city government. Because of this, the city’s garbage problem has become a “major impact on the city’s budget”, at around $78 a ton. Now, half of the city’s recycling is going to the Covanta plant.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?

February 26, 2018

Junk Planet: Is Earth the Largest Garbage Dump in the Universe?

Is Earth the largest garbage dump in the Universe? I don’t know. But it’s a safe bet that Earth would be a contender were such a competition to be held. Let me explain why.

To start, just listing the types of rubbish generated by humans or the locations into which each of these is dumped is a staggering task beyond the scope of one article. Nevertheless, I will give you a reasonably comprehensive summary of the types of garbage being generated (focusing particularly on those that are less well known), the locations into which the garbage is being dumped and some indication of what is being done about it and what you can do too.

But before doing so, it is worth highlighting just why this is such a problem, prompting the United Nations Environment Programme to publish this recent report: ‘Towards a pollution-free planet’.

As noted by Baher Kamal in his commentary on this study: ‘Though some forms of pollution have been reduced as technologies and management strategies have advanced, approximately 19 million premature deaths are estimated to occur annually as a result of the way societies use natural resources and impact the environment to support production and consumption.’ See ‘Desperate Need to Halt “World’s Largest Killer” – Pollution’ and ‘Once Upon a Time a Planet… First part. Pollution, the world’s largest killer’.

And that is just the cost in human lives.

So what are the main types of pollution and where do they end up?

Atmospheric Pollution

The garbage, otherwise labelled ‘pollution’, that we dump into our atmosphere obviously includes the waste products from our burning of fossil fuels and our farming of animals. Primarily this means carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide generated by driving motor vehicles and burning coal, oil and gas to generate electricity, and agriculture based on the exploitation of animals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Canadians piling up more garbage than ever before as disposables rule

September 30, 2015

Canadians piling up more garbage than ever before as disposables rule

There’s a high price to pay for our love affair with products of convenience

We like to think we’re behaving like model citizens, hauling our recycling to the curb and composting our banana peels. But the sad truth is, Canadians are piling up more household garbage than ever before. It appears that even in an era of environmental awareness, we just can’t quit our love affair with convenient, disposable products.

Unfortunately, all that convenience is costing us both environmentally and financially.

According to Statistics Canada’s latest data, the total amount of trash that Canadian households tossed increased by almost seven per cent since 2004 to 9.6 million tonnes in 2012. Although the population rose at a slightly faster rate over that period, the growing trash output is still startling considering the significant ramping up of the country’s many recycling and composting programs over those years.

“I’m not totally surprised but I am disappointed,” says Emily Alfred, waste campaigner with Toronto Environmental Alliance. She says a big culprit is the rapid pace of disposable products piling up in the marketplace.

“The rate of product design and new things being put on the market is faster than most municipalities’ [recycling systems] can keep up with,” she says.

Can’t get enough of convenience

recycling frozen vegetables

Frozen vegetables in stand-up plastic bags on display in a store freezer. The City of Toronto cannot recycle these bags. (CBC)

One good example — those convenient resealable plastic bags often containing frozen fruit or vegetables that stand upright in a grocery store’s freezer. “It’s great for advertisers because you can now see their products,” says Alfred.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Local Governments Increasingly Poking Through Your Garbage

July 29, 2015

Local Governments Increasingly Poking Through Your Garbage

Civil libertarians are worried about an increasingly common form of domestic surveillance that has nothing to do with listening to your phone calls or reading your emails; it has to do with looking through your garbage.

Municipalities across the United States are implementing intrusive methods of monitoring the stuff people throw away as part of a push to increase efficiency and conformity to recycling rules. But the end result is that some garbage trucks now have the ability to record the contents of your trash cans on video to inspect each object.

“This kind of automated garbage monitoring raises very serious privacy concerns,” the American Civil Liberties Union warned in a press release on Friday. “While encouraging residents to recycle is commendable, any program involving the government’s systematic monitoring of citizens crosses a line. The contents of your trash can be surprisingly revealing.”

Residents in several Wisconsin cities are already subject to the new video monitoring practice. In Seattle, where garbage men can visually inspect garbage and levy fines on bad recyclers, residents are suing the city for violating their privacy.

There are also digital methods of tracking people’s garbage. In some cities, trash cans are monitored with RFID devices (Radio-Frequency Identification); the chips are attached to the bins, so that computers inside trash trucks can determine and record their movements. In Charlotte, N. C., collectors monitor the chips to “track and manage cart inventory,” and determine who is actually putting their recycling bin out on the curb. Dayton, Ohio, has been tracking trash can locations since 2010, and residents who recycle are eligible for a cash prize. In Cleveland, if the chip shows a recyclable cart hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor can sort through the trash and impose a $100 fine if the regular trash has more than 10 percent recyclable material — although no fines have yet been levvied.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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