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America's Chinese Recycling Conundrum

After relentless ad campaigns by politicians, interest groups, and corporations, years of incremental exposure, and a pinch of public scrutiny, Americans were finally beginning to recycle. Sorting bins have appeared in airports, malls, and schools. Many cities even have ordinances mandating recycling. We were doing so well.

Most people recognize China as a major manufacturing hub. How could they forget with U.S. politicians screaming their heads off about them stealing blue-collar jobs from American factories. Every little plastic trinket you find at a toy store these days has a “Made in China” stamp on it. However it might surprise you that a lot of things you don’t inspect every day, like electrical machinery and furniture, have the same stamp. Their massive manufacturing infrastructure and workforce simply out competed America’s. For decades our country has been loosely sorting and processing the things our people throw in recycling and shipping it over to China, where it’s made into everything from microchips to Nerf guns. They were even paying America around 6 dollars a ton to take our trash, and we were shipping over thousands of tons a day.

But on one dark October day in 2017, China decided they had enough of their own trash and cut off any importations of unprocessed recycled plastic and mixed paper.

So, the U.S.A. is in a bit of a predicament. We are caught between a rock and millions of tons of plastic and paper recyclables. Some factories in the U.S. are willing to take recycled materials, but at a cost. It is still cheaper for American manufacturers to use newly made plastic and paper than to buy recycled. What once was a sweet-tasting 6 dollar per ton payday for most American cities has turned into a sour 125-dollar payment to U.S. transfer stations to take and recycle. Our small number of recycling centers simply can not keep up with the rate China was taking our waste, resulting in backups of thousands of bales of material. Consequently, many of these bales of plastics and papers are ending up in landfills.

Fortunately, there is still hope for a solution.

One idea is to get Americans to start consuming less. We throw away 262.4 million tons of waste a year, a 60 percent increase from 1985. Within the same time span, the population has increased by only 36 percent. Our job is to convince the nation that although it’s cheaper and convenient in the short run, buying over-packaged single-use garbage at the grocery store is untenable. If we are going to evade a Pixar-Disney movie Wall-E type hellscape in our country, activists, politicians, and corporations need to move with greater ferocity. They were the ones who got America to start recycling, and they can be the driving force leading them to use less and buy in bulk. If the country starts using less, we might have time to build more recycling centers and get manufacturers on board with using domestically reconstituted plastics and paper.

Another thing that can assuage the situation is to get better at recycling. Right now, we are comically bad at it. A lot of what Americans recycle is thrown into the blue bin completely ignorant of whether the waste is recyclable or not. In fact, according to academic studies by the American Marketing Association much of the public reports they recycle things to feel better about themselves, rather than ensuring the plastic grocery bags they are tossing can be processed (they can’t). Workers at transfer stations are spending hours every day on shift pulling contaminated and wrongfully recycled trash out of machinery. This increases the cost of recycling and recycled products. When we could send our contaminated garbage…ahem… “recycled material” to China, they had low-paid workers who would meticulously sift through it all for what was salvageable. America does not have such a workforce on nearly the same scale.

Our country needs to get smart about its waste before it consumes the consumers. We can’t continue our attitude of out of sight out of mind. If that means price hikes and inconvenience today, then at least we will have a sustainable future. Buy less packaged goods, recycle better. That should be our modern waste management motto.


 
 
 

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