Recycling isn’t the silver bullet. To save the planet, stop producing too much plastic.
According to a new report by the guardian, when you drop your plastic waste into the recycling bin, chances are it will make its way around the world, where it can pose a health and security risk to developing countries.
Day by day, our planet is getting buried under plastic: sea life is choking on it, beaches are littered with it. A new report records that we are even drinking a credit-card-size amount of plastic every week from our drinking water. Pointless to say, recycling is a good idea.
Like Myra Wood, a Waste Management Expert at a University in Canada puts it, “Recycling works very well for the recycling industry because it makes a huge profit. Environmentally, recycling isn’t a good idea.”
Until it is done wrong. That plastic bottle that you drop into a recycling bin on the streets is not always broken down and fashioned into a brand-new product. Many at times, it ends up across the world in someone's backyard, taking its place among snack pouches and scores of supermarket bags.
Several studies records that United States alone ships nearly 1 million tons of plastic waste overseas every year. Much of that plastic used to end up in China, where it was recycled that is, until the country abruptly stopped most of the plastic waste imports in 2017.
A good chunk of U.S. plastic waste is shipped to the world's poorest countries for recycling, like Senegal, Lagos, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia.
The plastic industry sells the public that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled, an idea it know cannot work, while racking in billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.
In a 1974 speech, one industry insider wrote that there is serious doubt that recycling plastic can ever be made viable on an economic basis. The question is; why does industry spent millions selling the recycling idea, yet they are aware it cannot solve the plastic problem?
The basic problem is that plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice. The bottle you see may look empty, yet it's anything but trash.
It is simple, very little of your plastic recycling actually gets recycled. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, less than 9 percent of the plastic produced in the past four decades has been recycled; the rest has wound up in landfills or been incinerated.
There are some pathway problems with recycling. If plastic bags or containers covered with food waste get into recycling bins, they can contaminate other items and make sorting and reuse more difficult.
Unless we reduce plastic production, there will continue to be plastic waste to dump, and profiteering schemes, such as triangular shipping and mislabeling, to dump it in developing countries.
There are instances where 3rd party verification companies are hired by traders and waste brokers to verify container content. But the surveyor companies commonly mislabel useless shipments of mixed waste as “recycling,” which not only falsely drives up recycling import rates but serves as a conduit for dirty dumping.
The only safe way to address the overflow of plastic waste is to stop producing too much plastic.
Adopting the new Basel rule will help countries, especially developing to reject foreign waste at ports and adopt plastic import bans to prevent illegal or hidden waste shipments from getting through.
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