Since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can,
Since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste…
(Ivan Couronne, AFP) Washington – For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China.
Beijing is no longer buying, claiming the recycled materials are “contaminated.”
For sure, the 900 tons of trash dumped at all hours of the day and night, five days a week, on the conveyor belts at the plant in Elkridge, Maryland — an hour’s drive from the US capital — are not clean.
Amid the nerve-shattering din and clouds of brown dust, dozens of workers in gloves and masks — most of them women — nimbly pluck a diverse array of objects from the piles that could count as “contaminants.”
That could be anything from…
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The Most Revolutionary Act 
If we in America don’t learn to clean up our own mess, we’ll find ourselves living in our own waste. As always, it will be the poor and marginalized among us who will suffer the consequences.
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Rosaliene, Tubularsock always puts his used Chinese take-out containers in the recycle basket. Show leadership, yes?
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Rosaliene, I’m also really concerned about the energy and resource side of the equation. When we recycle are stuff, we reduce (or eliminate) the need to mine and process increasingly scarce resources.
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Tube, I guess it all depends how you’re recycling the take out containers. They need to go to the compost bin unless you have scrubbed them squeaky clean. The Chinese claim this is why they stopped accepting American recycling – the dirty paper wasn’t getting separated out.
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