‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports
First read the article and then tell me we aren’t China now.
At first these recyclables that are now being landfilled and burned in the US went to China. What you don’t know is that more than 60% of what we sent over to them they could not process and so it went to their landfills or the ocean.
What you don’t know is that until China decided to reject your recycling, they never collected their own.
What you don’t know is that China and SE Asian nations only manage to collect 40%of their populations waste. China and SE Asian countries use rivers and oceans for the remaining 60%.
What you don’t know is that China and SE Asian landfills were already overflowing and unruly with them collecting 40% of their populations waste.
What you don’t know is that before January 1st, 2018 — China never made it a priority to collect it’s own people’s recycling to offset or reduce their landfills so they did the unthinkable incinerate or ocean dump.
What you don’t know is that recycling was never about the environment for America, it was about reducng landfill without incineration and/or ocean dumping.
What you don’t know, is that ocean dumping might not have been a first resort for Chinese landfill reduction — but, in fact, since recycling wasn’t iniaited at scale their only other option was to waste burn(incinerate) the waste.
What you don’t know is that even though ocean dumping is treacherous… option 2 which is waste-burning (especially plastics) which also has it’s own HORRIFIC reprecussions.
What you don’t know is that China has a healtcare crisis on it’s hands because of waste burning.
What you don’t know is that China has public healthcare for all billion people who live there, but they still have a health care crisis due to a spike in cancer. A specific kind of cancer.
What you don’t know is that come sunrise, sunset, 7,500+ die from cancer PER DAY in China.
75% (5,625) of these cancer deaths are thanks to air pollution.
Of air pollution-related, 1/3rd (1,856) deaths are caused by incinération (waste burning).
Incineration(waste-burning) causes 667,531 deaths annually for China — so NOW instead of ocean dumping and waste incinerating China has opted to prioritize their own countries recycling collection to reduce landfill waste.
Only God knows how overflowing their landfills would be IF they actually succeeded in collecting even 90–95% of their populations waste.
What you don’t know is that the US(and many nations) relied heavily on Chinese facilities to process the majority of our recycling.
What you don’t know is that for almost all of 2018 they’ve either been landfilling, stock-piling or finding illegal places to ship it to in Malaysia and any place they can shove it.
What you don’t know is that most recycling has zero value without China creating a market for it.
What you don’t know is that the next resort after waste-burning is ocean dumping — well, unless you are China. China who is busy helping the whole rest of the world look like their shit doesn’t stink and they don’t over-consume by taking on the motherload of their recycling waste.
How would you feel if I told you that foreign waste/recycling imports (US and other nations recycling) was so dirty that almost 60% of it didn’t make it to be processed into recycling.
In fact, China has proven that foreign waste imports added an additional 10–14% to their already overflowing landfills.
Those are the same landfills that largely contribute to our 5-plastic waste gyres.
What if I told you that the reason our recycling was so dirty and unprocessable once it got to China was because of the way that we collect it with curbside collection programs.
What if I told you that we have scaled curbside collection systems across multiple countries with the same poor results in quality.
What if I told you it wasn’t just the US whose recycling was dirty.
What if I told you that China was threatening to raise their contamination threshold since 2013 and that this year was the first time the EPA ever held what was called a Recycling Summit — in which everyone in the supply chain (minus China) — including brands, camaigners of recycling, recycling sorting and sales, waste management, municipality and the EPA sat down.
What if I told you that they never sat down like that before?
What if I told you that all recycling industry knew that most of the stuff was too dirty.
What if I told you that most of the recycling industry knew that China ocean-dumps.
What if I told you that most of the recycling industry knew that not only did China ocean dump — but so did the countries who would get bales of recycling that were semi-processable. As in, they had a chance to be further sorted.
What if I told you that the people sorting through that stuff were basically homeless people — not some kind of salaried professional — sorting through a mound of trash to pick out the things that have value and then they try to sell it back to China for .50 cents a day.
What if I told you that those nations also don’t collect 60% of their waste and that what didn’t have value MOST likely aso went into the oceans. That’s where they get rid of 60% of their waste?
What if I told you that curbside collection does not and has never come close to the objective of bettering the planet.
What if I told you that curbside collection did create 1000’s of jobs to drive trucks, caused us to pay millions in oil for those trucks, sold 1000’s of recycling pick-up trucks, sold 1000’s of recycling sorting machinery, created 1000’s of recycling sorting center jobs….
BUT EFFECTIVELY — — none of that ensures that the goal of getting the item to be processed in China.
The sale of these trucks.
The wages of these truck drivers.
The sale of that gas.
The wages of recycling center folks.
The profits from recycling machinery.
None of that achieved clean waste at scale to a standard that China could actually process it. For example, there are 45 types of waste to process.
We don’t have 45 bins, we have ONE bin and a bunch of wishful recyclers.
What if I told you, there is NO law in the US that says recycling exports has to be XX percentage clean.
What if I told you that the US and all other nations didn’t initiate their own standards until China basically made them at .05% — which is unachievable with curbside collection programs.
What if I told you that direct deposit machines could avoid all of the above. The ocean dumping. The poor, dirty, unsorted product.
What if I told you that we have been recycling in the most expensive, environmentally damaging way possible.
What if I told you that municipalities and private recycling institutions split the profits of recycling sold while you pay to have recycling.
In some cases, you pay a premium for recycling to be collected and recycled.
What if I told you there nodody that oversee’s how each city and state allocates it’s budgets towards recycling.
Each city and state comes up with it’s own acceptable budget to spend on cleaning and sorting.
If the cost is set to $75 per ton, what happens when that doesn’t cover the cost to actually ensure the bale of recycling is clean enough to be guaranteed to be recycled?
That’s rigtht, it means that it doesn’t get sorted to the point of being clean enough.
That’s how you know that recycling is a scam. It’s nothing but a job creator and was a profit house for the cities.
Direct deposit in turn actually obliterates the need for trucks to come to your house and pick it up — because you bring that shit to a machine for money back.
Direct deposit obliterates the need for sorting centers, sorting machinery, cleaning machinery, sorting jobs, land for sorting centers — — essentially, direct deposit machines never allow the wrong or dirty item into the machine in the first place. So, we don’t need people to sort it. We don’t need machines to do anything — we just need someone to bale it and put it onto a freight ship to China.
So, now — we lost our biggest buyer of goods: China.
Now, instead of stopping this trainwreck in a gradual way that works — we are going to be inhaling plastic toxins.
Bravo.
