China stopped taking our plastic waste. Now America is drowning in it.
Below we present an April 24th article from Business Insider that supplements other articles that we have posted here about the ongoing problem of far more plastic being produced than can be recycled.
The opening paragraph of the article sums up what was done in this country for years. Make great quantities of new plastic such as single-use plastic products, dump most of that waste in landfills, and make the rest of it someone else’s problem by exporting it to other countries. For example, one year of plastic waste (40 million tons) is roughly enough to smother all of Manhattan over 3 feet deep. But of course, no one wants that to happen. Therefore, after putting much of the plastic waste in landfills, the US regularly exported 7 million tons a year to China where some of it was melted into other plastic and then the rest was incinerated or just burned. However, in 2018 China stopped taking imports of plastic.
Since then our country has started to come to terms with the truth that there is no profitable way to recycle 91% of it! Also the environmental impact of its existence has been disastrous. The annual global production of about 430 million tons of plastic accounts for 14% of global oil demand. Its refinement emits up to 235 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. Then as we have already learned most of that plastic breaks down into the air, water and some of it ultimately enters our bodies. Yet, the oil industry and the petrochemical industry continue to try to sell us that recycling can work, since they realize that oil consumption for fossil fuels is declining and that ever increasing plastic production may be their long term cash cow.
We encourage you to read the article to learn more about the efforts of the oil industry and others to make plastic recycling look viable while simultaneously resisting efforts to limit the growth of plastic production.
Here is the link to the article:
China stopped taking our plastic waste. Now America is drowning in it.
