China has stopped buying 82% of the recycled plastic waste from North America compared to a year ago. China wasn't doing anything useful lately with the plastic anyway, just burning all the carefully washed plastic containers that you put out in your recycling bin and thinking that you were helping the environment, when in reality all that carbon was going back into the atmosphere. We were better off the way that we were, sending plastic waste to the landfill and burying, sometimes creating parkland on top of re-claimed landfill. And the carbon was left buried in the ground.
Recycling
- Thread starter licks2nite
- Start date
In a time long ago, when at first you had to pay for pick-up of recyclables at the end of your lane, my mother said, "it's a scam, I'm not paying someone to haul it to the dump anyways".
Welcome to the internet, where you can vomit whatever you and your three brain cells are thinking about, without any SOURCES or common sense.
At best, China has a terrible environmental history but please ask yourself, why would anyone buy plastic, ship it all the way to China, only to burn it? Doesn't that seem to be a BLOODY STUPID investment?
Hey! Maybe think about anything before you go "HURR DURR" and post, please and thank you.
Who peed in your Corn Flakes?Welcome to the internet, where you can vomit whatever you and your three brain cells are thinking about, without any SOURCES or common sense.
At best, China has a terrible environmental history but please ask yourself, why would anyone buy plastic, ship it all the way to China, only to burn it? Doesn't that seem to be a BLOODY STUPID investment?
Hey! Maybe think about anything before you go "HURR DURR" and post, please and thank you.
licks is partially right.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/should-we-burn-plastic-waste/
Merci jgg. If you pissed in my cornflakes, I would happily eat it.
I have experience working in the Tar Sands, Teck in Trail and even garbage burners, so I know a thing or two on this subject.
My beef is the making a post about a controversial topic only because they can. See Philip DeFranco's- "Why be informed? When you can use feelings as your facts."
Also called "truthiness", sounds like what you want to hear but may be totally wrong.
In a private web forum like this I don't like to provide links that can more often than not contain "tracking cookies". You can set search parameters as well as anyone else for Google if you need further information, and you'd still have to browse most of the article yourself whether I give a link or not. Try "China burning plastic"
Some excerpts:
Large plants do generate enough electricity to supply tens of thousands of houses. But studies have shown that recycling plastic waste saves more energy—by reducing the need to extract fossil fuel and process it into new plastic—than burning it, along with other household waste, can generate.
The dilemma with what to do with items earmarked for recycling is playing out across the U.S. The country generates more than 250 million tons of waste a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, with about a third of this recycled and composted. Until recently, China had been taking about 40 percent of US paper, plastics, and other recyclables, but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste.
Some excerpts:
Large plants do generate enough electricity to supply tens of thousands of houses. But studies have shown that recycling plastic waste saves more energy—by reducing the need to extract fossil fuel and process it into new plastic—than burning it, along with other household waste, can generate.
The dilemma with what to do with items earmarked for recycling is playing out across the U.S. The country generates more than 250 million tons of waste a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, with about a third of this recycled and composted. Until recently, China had been taking about 40 percent of US paper, plastics, and other recyclables, but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste.
Recycling plastics is hard, to transport, the plastic is crushed together or it is melted together. Once together, it is difficult to separate the different plastics.
In Canada, we should recycle our own waste, but nobody in bussiness wants to deal with the waste-age and the smell.....
In Canada, we should recycle our own waste, but nobody in bussiness wants to deal with the waste-age and the smell.....
North Americans waste so much time on deposits since recycling was instituted in what seems like multi-decades ago. The Europeans don't pay deposit on anything. Everything goes straight into recycling either way and North Americans drive up the cost of merchants re-handling products. A cost that has to be passed onto consumers.
