While reading this I think it's worth taking into account that not all the plastic waste originates in these countries, some of it is western trash sent there for recycling. At one point China was importing more than half of the World's plastic waste.
And though China has now stopped accepting the West's waste it still house mountains to deal with plus the problem has just shifted to Southeast Asia instead
I don't understand how this diminishes the fault of the countries. They took the garbage, got paid for it or profited from the valuable recyclables, then dumped the refuse into the rivers. 50% of the garbage comes from a single river that flows entirely within China.
I understand you can't put the blame on a people as a whole and there are bad actors there, but a sovereign country needs to take responsibility.
Plastic use has to be curtailed at source. If developed countries with lower populations are using many times more plastic than developing countries with larger populations, it is time to look in the mirror.
It is not fair to allow some countries to make decisions based on economics but expect others to be ecologically responsible. Let's see how the US handles its own trash now, since China has stopped importing it.
Let's see how the US handles its own trash now, since China has stopped importing it.
Well, there was a New York Times article a few weeks ago about how the cardboard that used to be shipped to China for recycling is now being recycled domestically into Amazon boxes, and paper mills in Wisconsin are reopening, being retrofitted to handle recycled cardboard, and bringing workers back to run them.
Why don't we put our plastic in landfills then instead of trying to send it out of country?
Serious question. I mean people are acting like the fact that the Chinese government is stamping out the business of exporting trash is a crisis. Is it possible we can just dump it in a landfill?
If so, why not just do that?
If not, ok, then I understand why everyone is up in arms.
Because everyone recycles these days and it's politically unacceptable to see recyclable materials in the landfill - even if it's cheaper to produce new ones.
In honesty, burying undigestible plastics seems like a great way for carbon sequestration.
That's actually where most of the curbside recycling ends up now though - in the landfill. People can still feel good that the plastic container they carefully washed out and placed in the recycle bin like a good citizen is being recycled, but generally it's just going straight into the dump and buried with the rest of the trash, and they wasted even more resources (water) cleaning it out thinking they were doing something good.
That's just it though, isn't it? They don't, really.
My understanding of the "crisis" is that all those well-intentioned recyclers were duly sorting their plastics, which was then picked up by their municipality for "recycling" and then shipped straight to a developing country where it was just dropped on the ground. And everyone felt good about themselves, and nothing was done.
Had recycling not been turned into an "out of sight, out of mind" problem, this whole thing could have been averted and some kind of actual clean disposal or reduction implemented.
In addition, recall that due to some US areas' mandate of "clean garbage" occupying some proportion of landfills, some of the clean recyclables also get dumped in landfills.
I've wondered for quite some time exactly why we don't sequester carbon in this way. Is it really just "we should recycle"? Or is there another (I hate the term but perhaps more "steelmanned") argument for it?
I'm not claiming you're caricaturing the argument, to be clear--I'm just curious if there's another angle to consider.
Why would you do that, releasing carbon into the air? A PVC or PET container is about half carbon by weight and won't decompose in the next thousand years or so we're told.
Right. So its already sequestered as plastic whether its in the ocean or a landfill. Creating new plastic from oil and then reburying it doesn't sequestrate any more carbon.
But if oil resources are nearing depletion, plastic production diverts crude from being burned as fuel, and pushes it's price up since plastics have a much higher economic value.
Why don't we put our plastic in landfills then instead of trying to send it out of country?
Because some countries take a lot less money to - supposedly and according to their word - do that job cleanly for us.
We know that in fact they are probably lying, but it is quite difficult to do business like that. If we refused to make business with those countries on that basis, we would be accused of discrimination.
Every meal eaten at most lunch restaurants generates a bunch of plastic that sticks around for a thousand years.
Other animals live on this planet too. Is it fair for us to refuse to make even a small change but expect land and sea animals to deal with our plastic waste?
The landfill solution is another way of saying "put it somewhere I can't see." Would we like plastic storms around own our homes?
We could probably stand to draw down our use of a lot of this plastic stuff around here.
Less single use plastic containers. In fact, less plastic containers period. More metal containers, more glass containers, and yes, you will have to reuse them. More recycled paper, etc etc etc.
Oh yeah, and our kids don't really need all these plastic toys we buy them. Maybe it wouldn't be a terrible thing for them to have to go outside and play like we did?
Just those two right there would probably make a small bu meaningful dent. Probably a lot of other places we could draw down as well.
Based on your first link, I'd re-interpret the bar chart titled "What are plastics used for?" to imply that consumer products actually make up a much higher percentage of plastics.
My assumptions are that packaging for consumer products ends up in the "packaging" bar and not the "consumer products" bar, and that plastic-based consumer textiles similarly end up under "textiles" and not "consumer products", and probably something similar happening with stuff hiding inside the "other" bar.
And yeah, I do think that we as consumers should take some responsibility. I would like to some regulatory action or excise taxes, sure. But, even without that, I can still at least try and put some demand-side pressure on things by, for example, preferentially choosing products that aren't in plastic packaging. Or even avoiding making a purchase altogether when it's not necessary to do so and my only options come in disposable plastic containers.
Oh yeah, and our kids don't really need all these plastic toys we buy them. Maybe it wouldn't be a terrible thing for them to have to go outside and play like we did?
Sure, I played outside a lot as a kid, but I also had plenty of plastic toys, too.
what does it mean to be poor? Economic output of an entire country? Or per capita. When measured by the latter, I can ensure you, China has a shit ton of poor people... greater than the population of the U.S.
Even measured per capita, they're about a third of a way from the top of the list. They have lots of high tech industry, nuclear weapons, etc. They can definitely afford to keep the rivers clean, it's a policy choice not an economic one. They are not poor in any meaningful sense of the word, being taken advantage of by the US and EU to dump our trash on.
What would you propose that is better? In any measure they're above the median in wealth. Poorer than the most advanced Western nations, yes. Too poor to keep their rivers clean? Hardly.
Depending on what you are actually trying to find out, you may also need to look into how that wealth is distributed. GDP doesn't mean much for most if 99.9% of that wealth is just owned by .01% of the population. Cost of living is also significant. Plus there are other externalities. How much use is it being rich if you can't step outside because the air is so polluted? Does the population have to work on average 80 hours a week to achieve that GDP? How much corruption is there? etc..
After a few decades of exported plastic trash ending up in the oceans being common knowledge it doesn't matter whether the handling was initially misrepresented. At best it's willful ignorance, but let's not pretend people have been sending plastic trash to China under the assumption that it would be dealt with responsibly.
What do you propose, that we stop doing any business with a poorer nation if we suspect they will somehow behave badly - according to our standards - while carrying out the task?
You don't get to throw your dog's shit on the neighbour yard and complain when he throws it on the sidewalk.
edit: so what do you do when a contract is breached for years ? Find a solution or point the finger while closing your eyes on the issue because you know there is no other cost effective way to take care of the problem ?
That's going to depend on the details of the contract. Which is the problem. Fine print is exactly the reason environmentalists were staunchly opposed to any nation exporting trash for any reason, to any other nation in the first place.
But still, for me, the mere fact that the neighbor said I could throw it on his lawn means that the dog shit shouldn't be in the street. But that's just me, other people may see it different.
if your neighbor said you could throw it on his lawn?
Yes, it's your fault too. I don't think anyone is saying that it's not the fault of the West for example. But come on man? If you say I can dump my dog's shit on your lawn, then yeah, of course that's where I'm going to dump it.
Except if you run the actual numbers on that, you'll realize that it's still blatently wrong:
2010 total plastic marine debris[0]: 4,800k - 12,700k metric tons
2010 EU plastic marine debris[0]: 50k-120k metric tons (Higher than the US by ~1k)
2010 EU plastic marine debris percentage[0]: 1%
2016 EU export of nontoxic garbage to a country in top 10 plastic marine waste[2]: 269,000 tonnes (a lot missing statistics so wide error bars here)
2015 percent of nontoxic garbage export that is plastic/mixed[1]: ~9%
Probable amount of EU plastic that gets exported to top 10 country: 26.9k - 53.8k tonnes
Crude adjusted EU ranking if 100% of the doubled amount makes it into the ocean: ~10th
Incredibly crude adjusted EU plastic marine debris percentage: 2%
Netherlands & Germany end up importing most of the EU's garbage [3]
It depends a lot on the kind of material being recycled. Paper has been getting recycled very effectively for decades. Metals are pretty recyclable. Plastic is notoriously hard, especially the thin plastic from bags, apparently.
Whatever the case, it shouldn't be dumped in rivers.
The export of waste is not the real problem. Your reference says it adds "12 percent to the plastic waste China generates domestically every year". Clearly China has the logistics to put it's own waste into properly designed landfills.
Recycling / waste management companies have a lot to ask for; they're being paid by local governments (and people) with the idea that they will handle the waste properly and safely - as opposed to dumping it in the river - and they just export it and turn it into someone else's problem?
Of course it's someone else's problem. That's why you're paying someone for the service. We all do that. As you partly recognize, if you legally contract with a company for a service (waste disposal for instance) you don't expect to be liable morally or legally for mis-conduct or failures by the service provider. Why should an exported service be an exception?
Doesn't this assume all service providers are morally and legally good? I would restate the principle as, "you're morally and legally liable for the misdeeds of a service provider with which you've contracted in accordance with the extent to which you can reasonably expected to be aware of their moral and legal practices." But if you assume all companies are legal (else they wouldn't be companies) and that legality implies morality (an absurd belief), then your justification would be spot on. It's a gray area, in my uninformed opinion, and a key question whether Western states could reasonably expected to accurately assess what China would do with their trash
Well knowledge is also a component to it and morality and legality.
To give a black comedy example if you have a friend who is a real fan of Tony Soprano and you ask a look alike to hold a surprise party for you and he is a hitman with a front company instead of an impressionist who takes it as a euphemism to murder them their death - even if you were a negligent idiot is vastly different than you straight up hiring a hitman to kill them.
Comments
While reading this I think it's worth taking into account that not all the plastic waste originates in these countries, some of it is western trash sent there for recycling. At one point China was importing more than half of the World's plastic waste.
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
And though China has now stopped accepting the West's waste it still house mountains to deal with plus the problem has just shifted to Southeast Asia instead
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/china...
I don't understand how this diminishes the fault of the countries. They took the garbage, got paid for it or profited from the valuable recyclables, then dumped the refuse into the rivers. 50% of the garbage comes from a single river that flows entirely within China.
I understand you can't put the blame on a people as a whole and there are bad actors there, but a sovereign country needs to take responsibility.
Plastic use has to be curtailed at source. If developed countries with lower populations are using many times more plastic than developing countries with larger populations, it is time to look in the mirror.
It is not fair to allow some countries to make decisions based on economics but expect others to be ecologically responsible. Let's see how the US handles its own trash now, since China has stopped importing it.
Let's see how the US handles its own trash now, since China has stopped importing it.
Well, there was a New York Times article a few weeks ago about how the cardboard that used to be shipped to China for recycling is now being recycled domestically into Amazon boxes, and paper mills in Wisconsin are reopening, being retrofitted to handle recycled cardboard, and bringing workers back to run them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/business/cardboard.html
Plastic does not need to be curtailed at source. As long as it ends up in well engineered landfills, there's no problem.
Why don't we put our plastic in landfills then instead of trying to send it out of country?
Serious question. I mean people are acting like the fact that the Chinese government is stamping out the business of exporting trash is a crisis. Is it possible we can just dump it in a landfill?
If so, why not just do that?
If not, ok, then I understand why everyone is up in arms.
Because everyone recycles these days and it's politically unacceptable to see recyclable materials in the landfill - even if it's cheaper to produce new ones.
In honesty, burying undigestible plastics seems like a great way for carbon sequestration.
That's actually where most of the curbside recycling ends up now though - in the landfill. People can still feel good that the plastic container they carefully washed out and placed in the recycle bin like a good citizen is being recycled, but generally it's just going straight into the dump and buried with the rest of the trash, and they wasted even more resources (water) cleaning it out thinking they were doing something good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...
That's just it though, isn't it? They don't, really.
My understanding of the "crisis" is that all those well-intentioned recyclers were duly sorting their plastics, which was then picked up by their municipality for "recycling" and then shipped straight to a developing country where it was just dropped on the ground. And everyone felt good about themselves, and nothing was done.
Had recycling not been turned into an "out of sight, out of mind" problem, this whole thing could have been averted and some kind of actual clean disposal or reduction implemented.
In addition, recall that due to some US areas' mandate of "clean garbage" occupying some proportion of landfills, some of the clean recyclables also get dumped in landfills.
I've wondered for quite some time exactly why we don't sequester carbon in this way. Is it really just "we should recycle"? Or is there another (I hate the term but perhaps more "steelmanned") argument for it?
I'm not claiming you're caricaturing the argument, to be clear--I'm just curious if there's another angle to consider.
That's not how sequestration works unless they were burning the plastic before.
Why would you do that, releasing carbon into the air? A PVC or PET container is about half carbon by weight and won't decompose in the next thousand years or so we're told.
Right. So its already sequestered as plastic whether its in the ocean or a landfill. Creating new plastic from oil and then reburying it doesn't sequestrate any more carbon.
But if oil resources are nearing depletion, plastic production diverts crude from being burned as fuel, and pushes it's price up since plastics have a much higher economic value.
Because some countries take a lot less money to - supposedly and according to their word - do that job cleanly for us.
We know that in fact they are probably lying, but it is quite difficult to do business like that. If we refused to make business with those countries on that basis, we would be accused of discrimination.
But what countries are taking this trash?
I mean, isn't the entire crisis that China does not take the trash anymore?
So if we have all this trash, why can't we just put it in a landfill?
Because people make money moving it.
At some point in the past, someone proposed that we send plastic overseas for recycling. Win win right?
If any one counter-proposed that it be buried they'd be considered a bad person.
Every meal eaten at most lunch restaurants generates a bunch of plastic that sticks around for a thousand years.
Other animals live on this planet too. Is it fair for us to refuse to make even a small change but expect land and sea animals to deal with our plastic waste?
The landfill solution is another way of saying "put it somewhere I can't see." Would we like plastic storms around own our homes?
Not just China. Now that plastic is part of the Basel convention, it's going to be more difficult for the US to export its plastic waste anywhere.
We could probably stand to draw down our use of a lot of this plastic stuff around here.
Less single use plastic containers. In fact, less plastic containers period. More metal containers, more glass containers, and yes, you will have to reuse them. More recycled paper, etc etc etc.
Oh yeah, and our kids don't really need all these plastic toys we buy them. Maybe it wouldn't be a terrible thing for them to have to go outside and play like we did?
Just those two right there would probably make a small bu meaningful dent. Probably a lot of other places we could draw down as well.
Stop trying to blame consumers--consumer products only make up ~10% of plastics[1].
[1] http://theconversation.com/the-world-of-plastics-in-numbers-..., https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/7/e1700782/tab-fig...
Based on your first link, I'd re-interpret the bar chart titled "What are plastics used for?" to imply that consumer products actually make up a much higher percentage of plastics.
My assumptions are that packaging for consumer products ends up in the "packaging" bar and not the "consumer products" bar, and that plastic-based consumer textiles similarly end up under "textiles" and not "consumer products", and probably something similar happening with stuff hiding inside the "other" bar.
And yeah, I do think that we as consumers should take some responsibility. I would like to some regulatory action or excise taxes, sure. But, even without that, I can still at least try and put some demand-side pressure on things by, for example, preferentially choosing products that aren't in plastic packaging. Or even avoiding making a purchase altogether when it's not necessary to do so and my only options come in disposable plastic containers.
Oh yeah, and our kids don't really need all these plastic toys we buy them. Maybe it wouldn't be a terrible thing for them to have to go outside and play like we did?
Sure, I played outside a lot as a kid, but I also had plenty of plastic toys, too.
(Note: born in the early 1970s)
I guess I gave away my age there didn't I?
Exactly. All the plastic shit made in China can end up back in China.
So, does selling their externalities to poorer nations absolve a rich nation of their responsibility?
China has the second largest GDP of any nation in the world. I think it's safe to say they are not poor.
China presents itself as a rich nation when it suits its purposes.
China presents itself as a poor nation when it suits its purposes.
what does it mean to be poor? Economic output of an entire country? Or per capita. When measured by the latter, I can ensure you, China has a shit ton of poor people... greater than the population of the U.S.
Even measured per capita, they're about a third of a way from the top of the list. They have lots of high tech industry, nuclear weapons, etc. They can definitely afford to keep the rivers clean, it's a policy choice not an economic one. They are not poor in any meaningful sense of the word, being taken advantage of by the US and EU to dump our trash on.
I don't know where you heard that at man, but China is not poor. At all. I mean that place is the opposite of poor.
I've been to poor countries. Cuba is poor for instance. Or Guinea. China? Not so much.
China is spending trillions in foreign aid.
Why do you think GDP is a good measure of wealth?
What would you propose that is better? In any measure they're above the median in wealth. Poorer than the most advanced Western nations, yes. Too poor to keep their rivers clean? Hardly.
Depending on what you are actually trying to find out, you may also need to look into how that wealth is distributed. GDP doesn't mean much for most if 99.9% of that wealth is just owned by .01% of the population. Cost of living is also significant. Plus there are other externalities. How much use is it being rich if you can't step outside because the air is so polluted? Does the population have to work on average 80 hours a week to achieve that GDP? How much corruption is there? etc..
But of course, if you are trying to find out if they can afford to clean up their rivers, GDP is probably a fairly good measure..
GDP tells you precisely nothing about where a country's wealth is going, who it is going to or even anything about the well-being of its people.
GDP may as well be simply a measure of how much richer the rich are getting.
It depends on whether the poorer nation misrepresented what it would do with the trash.
After a few decades of exported plastic trash ending up in the oceans being common knowledge it doesn't matter whether the handling was initially misrepresented. At best it's willful ignorance, but let's not pretend people have been sending plastic trash to China under the assumption that it would be dealt with responsibly.
A poorer nation probably will misrepresent what they do with the trash.
The sellers can't in all honestly claim they didn't know this would be the result.
was there ever any illusion what poorer nations would do with the trash?
This is the "How was I supposed to know the guns I sold would kill people?" defense
Or the "How was I supposed to know the car I sold would be used to run over a crowd of people?" defence
What do you propose, that we stop doing any business with a poorer nation if we suspect they will somehow behave badly - according to our standards - while carrying out the task?
Are you looking at this from a western perspective? Is China really poor? I would question that.
don't buy it if you don't want it
Who said it does?
You don't get to throw your dog's shit on the neighbour yard and complain when he throws it on the sidewalk.
edit: so what do you do when a contract is breached for years ? Find a solution or point the finger while closing your eyes on the issue because you know there is no other cost effective way to take care of the problem ?
If you paid your neighbor to dispose of your dog's shit and he throws it on the sidewalk you have a pretty good basis for complaining.
That's going to depend on the details of the contract. Which is the problem. Fine print is exactly the reason environmentalists were staunchly opposed to any nation exporting trash for any reason, to any other nation in the first place.
But still, for me, the mere fact that the neighbor said I could throw it on his lawn means that the dog shit shouldn't be in the street. But that's just me, other people may see it different.
Well...
I mean...
if your neighbor said you could throw it on his lawn?
Yes, it's your fault too. I don't think anyone is saying that it's not the fault of the West for example. But come on man? If you say I can dump my dog's shit on your lawn, then yeah, of course that's where I'm going to dump it.
Not if I'm paying my neighbor to take care of it.
Except if you run the actual numbers on that, you'll realize that it's still blatently wrong:
Netherlands & Germany end up importing most of the EU's garbage [3][0]: https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_... (the footnote of table 1 specifically)
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[2]: http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do (You'll have to screw with the customizations to get useful statistics)
[3]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/waste/transboundary-waste-...
Can we not use code formatting for non code? It makes comments tedious to read on mobile.
Blame HN for not including a block quote formatting option (which basically every other comment system on the internet has).
I don't see how that makes it any better. Recycled waste certainly shouldn't be ending up in rivers.
We need to reduce our waste, but we should also handle our waste better. Dumping it in rivers is not acceptable.
Recycling is a pipe dream. In fact it means shipping tones of garbage to 3rd world country and let them do the grunt work. Out of sight out of mind.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/electronic-was...
It depends a lot on the kind of material being recycled. Paper has been getting recycled very effectively for decades. Metals are pretty recyclable. Plastic is notoriously hard, especially the thin plastic from bags, apparently.
Whatever the case, it shouldn't be dumped in rivers.
The export of waste is not the real problem. Your reference says it adds "12 percent to the plastic waste China generates domestically every year". Clearly China has the logistics to put it's own waste into properly designed landfills.
Why doesn't this happen ?
It's cheaper and easier to just dump it into the river.
Recycling / waste management companies have a lot to ask for; they're being paid by local governments (and people) with the idea that they will handle the waste properly and safely - as opposed to dumping it in the river - and they just export it and turn it into someone else's problem?
Of course it's someone else's problem. That's why you're paying someone for the service. We all do that. As you partly recognize, if you legally contract with a company for a service (waste disposal for instance) you don't expect to be liable morally or legally for mis-conduct or failures by the service provider. Why should an exported service be an exception?
Doesn't this assume all service providers are morally and legally good? I would restate the principle as, "you're morally and legally liable for the misdeeds of a service provider with which you've contracted in accordance with the extent to which you can reasonably expected to be aware of their moral and legal practices." But if you assume all companies are legal (else they wouldn't be companies) and that legality implies morality (an absurd belief), then your justification would be spot on. It's a gray area, in my uninformed opinion, and a key question whether Western states could reasonably expected to accurately assess what China would do with their trash
Well knowledge is also a component to it and morality and legality.
To give a black comedy example if you have a friend who is a real fan of Tony Soprano and you ask a look alike to hold a surprise party for you and he is a hitman with a front company instead of an impressionist who takes it as a euphemism to murder them their death - even if you were a negligent idiot is vastly different than you straight up hiring a hitman to kill them.