The inconvenient truth about recycling

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DrHenley

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At the beginning of the year China imposed a ban on importing plastic items to be "recycled" unless they were 99.5% pure Well, it seems that a large chunk of those things you put in the recycle bin actually got shipped to China. Because *cough* *cough* China is able to more efficiently "process" recyclable plastics than anyone else. It's cheaper to ship it to China than to recycle it ourselves.

Here is a little fact...China leads the world in plastic pollution. To the tune of 8.5 million tons of plastic flowing down the rivers into the Pacific every year.

Jeez, can somebody help me connect those dots???

I mean, which department do you go to in China to verify that the plastics they import for "recycling" don't end up in the Pacific?

Well, anyhow, now they are only allowing in the plastics that are actually economical to recycle, so less plastics will be going into the ocean. Ya Think?

Now that they can't be sent to China...


wait for it...


They are being incinerated. Yup, the contents of those blue bins are going to be burned, not "recycled."

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...nta-incinerator-recyclables-china-ban-imports
 
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Yep. The West has just been shipping their recycling waste out and they have just been dumping it. Same goes here in Europe with cars. The governments offer discounts on buying new "greener" cars (although they lied about that part) and you scrap the old one. Except they actually don't seem the scrap them. If you go to Africa all you see is cars driving about with the old eu country stickers on the back. Most of the other recycling waste they don't ship off gets burnt to produce electricity. Only yesterday I had to take a trailer of junk to the scrapyard. There was metal, plastic, glass and fabrics. I spent all morning arranging it in to nice neat sections in the trailer to make it easier to recycle. When I got there only the metal went to the recycling pile and the fabrics in the incinerated pile. The guy dumped the rest in the landfill pile.
 
We don't use a lot of disposable plastic, we have 3 blue bins here, about every 4~6 months we take them to the house near town and have the recyclers pick them up. We have a trailer for items we can't re-use or recycle, that goes to the dump once a year so for actual waste, we don't have much. Scrappers have a trailer here with a 5 yard box we through all our metal in, we call when it needs dump (free) The total cost of getting rid of garbage and recycles counting the house near town is $280 a year.
 

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