RECYCLING ‘TO BE BURNED OR BURIED’
Councils may be forced into drastic action as China stops taking plastic
BRITAIN may soon have to burn or bury mountains of plastic waste because China has stopped accepting our recycling.
Experts said tubs, pots and bottles collected in recycling bins might now have to be sent to incinerators.
China, which disposes of much of the rich world’s plastic, has said it wants no more ‘loathsome foreign waste’. The ban starting this month means we can no longer ship millions of tons of household plastics there.
Simon Ellin of the Recycling Association warned waste plastic might get out of hand.
He said it was already starting to mount up at all stages of the recycling chain – at reprocessing yards run by big waste companies and at smaller private processors.
Options to deal with the crisis include exporting the waste to other developing countries such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam.
And there were calls for the Government to pressure China to accept more responsibility because some of the plastic would have come from its factories. In 2016, around a quarter of the 790,000 tons of plastic scrap exported from the UK went to China, according to recycling charity Wrap.
Mr Ellin said: ‘As time goes on we could be facing a huge problem this year. Plastic is beginning to build up. We simply don’t know what’s going to happen.
‘The short term measures we are discussing now include going to storage and waste-to-energy incineration. But longer term – this is where government policy comes in to play – we need to stop producing the amount of lowgrade mixed plastic.’
He said storing hundreds of thousands of tons of additional plastic would pose a headache for waste management firms.
The Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee said sending plastic to landfill would be a ‘route of last resort’.
Spokesman Lee Marshall said: ‘If there are effects coming from the ban by China it may take a few weeks to filter back to the households. Hopefully recyclers will be able to find alternative markets. We are hopeful the system can cope with any stockpiling.’
Will McCallum of Greenpeace UK said some of the cost of recycling should be moved from the taxpayer to manufacturers.
He added: ‘Once they’re paying a fairer share of the costs of system failure, they’ll be a lot more enthusiastic about helping the system succeed.’
Julian Kirby of Friends of the Earth said most of the responsibility for cutting plastic pollution lay with the companies that made and marketed it. ‘It’s up to governments to use regulations, incentives and their role in providing collection infrastructure and markets to encourage companies to play their part in ending the scourge of plastics pollution,’ he said. David Palmer- Jones, of Suez recycling which serves 12million UK households, backed the idea of a plastic bottle deposit scheme.
Only 7.5billion of the 13billion plastic bottles used in the UK each year are recycled – the rest are incinerated, become litter or go to landfill.
Mr Palmer-Jones said: ‘The UK is a net exporter of many recyclable
materials because there simply isn’t a large enough reprocessing market in the uK, or even within Europe, to sustain the volume of recyclable materials we produce.
‘Suez, along with some of the other larger operators in our sector, acted early in 2017 to secure alternative offtake markets in Europe and the wider Asian region for grades of material previously purchased in China.’ But Shlomo Dowen, of the united Kingdom Without Incineration Network, an environmental pressure group, said more plastic would be burnt in the coming months.
‘From an environmental point of view, plastic is less damaging in landfill than it is in incineration,’ he said.
‘If you put it in the ground it doesn’t rot, whereas if you put it in an incinerator, all the carbon and plastic is burnt and released into the atmosphere.’
The Daily Mail has campaigned to ‘turn the tide’ on plastic – and is also calling for a deposit scheme on plastic bottles.