Personally, I am a very avid recycler. In the past couple years, the process of recycling and disposal of waste, has been highlighted with some major emphasis on the great Pacific garbage patch and how it affects the health of our oceans. Many of us are asking “Who is to blame? What was our role in this? What about other countries developing more recently and contributing lots of waste like China?” With even fewer of us wondering what we can do about the problem now that it is here. Before we look at some of the numbers, we should highlight how this came to be and why China has been our world wastebasket for the past couple decades. If you did not already know, the U.S. and other countries have been sending our recyclables to China so that they can be made into shoes, bags, and new plastics among other things. Some reports say that in 2016, the U.S. exported 16 million tons of recyclable plastic, paper, and metals worth over $5 billion. The problem is that all of these other countries have been doing this too, and China became so oversaturated with waste products that a ban was instituted limiting the types of plastics and materials that would be accepted so that they can make their post-consumer products more efficiently. The Chinese ban has created a domino effect on other countries and all of the industries that rely on these recycled materials. With Chinese exports of post-consumer paper and plastic goods down 25% for paper and nearly 80% for plastics, there is need for new markets to emerge, but at what cost.
The problem is an incredibly sharp, incredibly sad double edged sword. China set the ban so that they could get a grip on their own excess waste problem and reduce the rate at which other countries treat China like their personal landfill. However, in doing so they have reduced production and thus the supply of materials needed all over the world, therefore raising prices and even hurting their own industries that also rely on such materials. There is nothing to say that A is the solution, or B might be the correct next step. We know that our consumption is a huge problem and our current recycling and disposal techniques will only aggravate the issue here and for the rest of the world.
There is so much that could be said, and yet it is very difficult to decide what should be done locally and globally. Below are some scary/cool facts with major future repercussions that hopefully encourage you to reduce your consumption, recycle, or compost if you do not already.
- Landfills are the biggest contributor of soil pollution
- Nearly 80% of materials buried in the bottoms of landfills are recyclable
- The U.S. throws away over $11.5 billion of recyclable materials each year
- The plastic water bottle you throw away instead of recycling takes around 500 years to decompose
- Less than 10% of the plastic we consume is actually recycled
- Over 8 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year— the equivalent of 5 grocery bags of plastic waste for each foot of coastline around the entire world