There are stockpiles throughout New Zealand due to China restricting imports of waste products, Waikato District Council Service Delivery general manager Ian Cathcart says. “It’s had a tremendous impact. China updated its standards. ... China just threw another curveball at the global recycling industry. Cleaning up recycling means employing people to slowly go through materials, which is expensive. The move was an effort to stop a burden of soiled and contaminated pollutants that overcame Chinese processing facilities and left the country with yet another environmental problem, and that was not made by the country itself. In the year since, China’s plastics imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. Product stewardship (including container deposit systems), an increase in waste levies or the number of landfills being levied currently, a ban on single use plastics and the operation of hand sorting rather than mechanical sorting were all viable options, he said. Read more about what will happen if we didn’t stop plastic pollution. You also agree to our Terms of Service. The Age of Megafires: The World Hits a Climate Tipping Point. "We are looking for markets in the Philippines, Malaysia and India.". Even so, in 2016, China produced half of the world’s chemicals, ink, and metals. Hamilton didn't have any stockpiles, Hamilton City Council Waste Minimisation Advisor Charlotte Catmur said. And while many incineration facilities bill themselves as “waste to energy” plants, studies have found that they release more harmful chemicals, such as mercury and lead, into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants. Contamination (sometimes called “residuals”) is anything that is collected in the recycling bins, but cannot actually be recycled. China’s action came after many recycling programs had transitioned from requiring consumers to separate paper, plastics, cans, and bottles to today’s more common “single stream,” where it all goes into the same blue bin. It would either be a challenge for councils or recycling companies - whoever was responsible for the materials. Midcoast Maine’s top stories to your inbox. "It's a shock like this that I believe could prompt us into some positive action.". The rest were buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. "There's only so long you can stockpile them for and ... we have to make sure they are safe. We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. Legal measures, such as California’s prohibition on single-use plastic bags, reduced the amount of waste that can be recycled. While most continue to operate, rising costs and falling incomes are forcing some, like Kingsport, Tennessee to shut down. Several U.S. materials recovery facilities are expanding operations, upgrading equipment, and adding workers to improve sorting and reduce contamination so that the materials are acceptable to more discerning buyers. He doesn’t want to tell his story, but thinks it might help. window.MSPAN = { Britain is planning to tax manufacturers of plastic packaging with less than 30 percent recycled materials. Globally more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. Sage said the markets for glass, cardboard and PET/HDPE plastics were holding up "reasonably well" at this point. A lot of waste is being stockpiled, in the U.S now. A former newspaper reporter, she has reported from Iceland to Africa on topics ranging from new geothermal technology to rapidly warming lakes. ", There were stockpiles throughout New Zealand due to China restricting imports of waste products, Waikato District Council Service Delivery general manager Ian Cathcart said. “We wish it was that easy.” Collection there resumed in November after a public education campaign on how households should clean and sort their recyclables. But that’s a hard sell in the United States, where consumer spending accounts for 68 percent of the GDP. So, there are still some recycling markets there, but we in the U.S. have generally not been able to meet the newer, stricter standards for contamination. Some dumps are raising costs to deal with all this extra waste; according to one estimate, along the West Coast, landfill fees increased by $8 a ton from 2017 to 2018. Then the big bomb was blasted when China’s “National Sword” scheme, implemented in January 2018, banned imports of the bulk of plastics and other products intended for the nation’s recycling plants, which had processed almost half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter-century. Check your inbox to confirm your subscription. China will stop importing dozens more types of recyclable materials, including steel waste, used auto parts and old ships. var cookieString2 = "MSPAN_Paywall_user=0; domain="+document.location.host+"; path=/; expires=" + date.toGMTString(); Some of the plastic and paper waste that was once sold to China was being diverted to other processing plants in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, she said. That trend, coupled with a rise in single-stream processing, has brought issues with contamination to … Akron, Ohio, is just one of many cities that have ended glass recycling since the China policy changes. “We’re producing a lot of waste ourselves, and we should take care of it ourselves.”. "+document.location.host.replace(/^\w+\./, '')+"; path=/; expires=" + date.toGMTString(); "We need to shift away from using nature to make stuff, using it briefly then disposing of it, either by sending it to landfill or exporting overseas ... "This is the right course of action. Here are some more alternatives: The first and most successful way to deal with the collapsing supply of bottles, caps, and cans is to avoid using so many Plastic products, etc. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. China banned plastic waste from the U.S and other countries, in 2018 because of the illegal transfer of waste and increased pollution levels. The average American spent 7 percent more on food and 8 percent more on personal-care products and services in 2017 than in 2016, according to government data. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste, up 4.5 percent from 2010 and 60 percent from 1985. Evans said most people expected the current ban to be similar. Workers wearing masks and helmets grabbed laundry baskets off a fast-moving conveyor belt of cardboard as some non-cardboard items escaped their gloved hands. It seems to be getting worse, Gillies said. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. government started cutting back on shipments of plastic trash. But the costs of all this garbage are growing, especially now that bottles and papers that were once recycled are now ending up in the trash. Items made of different types of plastic nearly always end up in the trash, because recyclers can’t separate the plastics from one another—Reed equates it with trying to get the sugar and eggs out of a cake after you’ve baked it. In Philadelphia last year, when the city’s waste contractor demanded higher fees for collecting and processing recycled materials, the city sent half its recyclables to a waste-to-energy plant, where they were burned to generate electricity; the rest went to an interim contractor. No doubt, we need to invest more in improving our waste management system. "China was effectively being used as a dumping ground." Now, that has fallen to near zero. Around five years ago, the Chinese government started to worry about all the garbage pouring in the country and polluting it. Learn More{{/message}}, As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases, Last update on 2020-10-06 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API. The viability of recycling varies tremendously by locale; San Francisco can recycle its glass back into bottles in six weeks, according to Recology, while many other cities are finding that glass is so heavy and breaks so easily that it is nearly impossible to truck it to a place that will recycle it. var mediaContent = "media\\:content,content"; Determined to … For a while, China, as the hub of global recycled activity, has made it work. Americans are going to have to come to terms with a new reality: All those toothpaste tubes and shopping bags and water bottles that didn’t exist 50 years ago need to go somewhere, and creating this much waste has a price we haven’t had to pay so far. Eventually, I threw them in the trash. But because companies don’t bear the costs of disposal, they have no incentive to manufacture products out of material that will be easier to recycle. In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors discover that you haven’t recycled appropriately. As a result, contamination from food and waste has risen, leaving significant amounts unusable. The United States still has a fair amount of landfill space left, but it’s getting expensive to ship waste hundreds of miles to those landfills. The "big clamp down" happened because the world was sending non-recyclable waste to China, Gibson said. As a result, contamination from food and waste has risen, leaving significant amounts unusable. The glut of material had pushed prices down, making the economics "really challenging", Evans said. “The plastic is now getting diverted to countries with a high risk of improper management and high leakage rates,” says Roland Geyer, an industrial ecology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and lead author of a recent study on the ultimate fate of disposed plastics. Burning plastic may create some energy, but it also produces carbon emissions.