U.S. Recyclers in 'Mounting Crisis' After China's Plastic Waste Ban

After China's crackdown on foreign waste earlier this year, the United States has turned to poorer countries mostly in Southeast Asia to send its used plastics, according to a new report.
This research, authored by Greenpeace's investigative team Unearthed, is the first comprehensive analysis of where U.S. recyclers are sending its trash since China introduced the ban, which took effect on Jan. 1.
Citing data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the researchers found a year-on-year drop of 92 percent in the amount of plastic sent to China and Hong Kong. That corresponded to a dramatic increase of scraps being sent instead to Thailand (1,985 percent), Malaysia (273 percent) and Vietnam (46 percent).
"It is an embarrassment that the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world feels it must depend on others to take out our trash," said Greenpeace Oceans campaign director John Hocevar in a press release emailed to EcoWatch. "This is a wake up call for corporations, and the governments that allow this practice, to stop producing packaging and products that no one is willing to properly dispose of. It makes no sense to keep making products that we use once and throw away out of material that lasts forever."
"In the first six months of this year, 81% of plastic waste exports from the US went to Asia, a 7% drop on 2017."—UnearthedGreenpeace
Due to this massive influx of trash, the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam have recently implemented their own policies to restrict the world's waste.
Roughly 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into the world's oceans every year, with the majority of this waste coming from Asian countries, a 2015 study found.
As China and Southeast Asian countries focus on their own pollution problems, exporting countries are
scrambling for solutions for their growing stockpiles of trash.
"With these Southeast Asian countries moving to impose import restrictions and plastic scrap piling up from California to Florida, the U.S. recycling industry is talking about a mounting crisis in the country," the Unearthed report says.
The researchers found that plastic waste exports in the U.S. dropped by almost a third, from 949,789 metric tons in 2017 to 666,760 metric tons in 2018. That means about 280,000 metric tons of plastic is no longer being exported by the U.S., and has not been accounted for, Greenpeace said.
The pile-up has resulted in various schemes, including recyclables being directly sent to landfills, as Unearthed wrote:
In towns and cities across the U.S., firms have been taking a variety of steps to deal with the backlog. Some have suspended their recycling schemes, begun education campaigns or refused to accept certain types of plastic waste. Others have refused to pick up rubbish from outside houses, sent recycling to landfill or burned it.
By 2030, an estimated 111 million metric tons of single-use drink bottles, food containers and other plastic junk will be displaced around the globe due to China's ban on other countries' trash, according to a paper from University of Georgia researchers.
Environmentalists are calling on a significant reduction on the use and production of nonrecyclable materials.
"We know that our waste ends up in countries that lack the infrastructure to process foreign waste, or gets dumped in U.S. landfills," Greenpeace plastics campaigner Kate Melges said in the press release. "As cities and states around the country increasingly suspend or reduce their recycling programs, it's time to stop churning out so much plastic to begin with."
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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