Plastic piling up in wake of China ban
China’s decision to stop accepting plastic waste from other countries is causing plastic to pile up around the globe, and wealthy countries must find a way to slow the accumulation of one of the most ubiquitous materials on the planet, a group of scientists says.
The scientists sought to quantify the impact of the Chinese import ban on the worldwide trade in plastic waste, and found that other nations might need to find a home for more than 110 million tonnes of plastic by 2030.
The ban went into effect on December 31, 2017, and the stockpiling trend is set to worsen, the scientists say.
Wealthy countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany have long sent their plastic recyclables to China, but the country doesn’t want to be the world’s dumping ground for plastic any more. The study found that China has taken more than 105m tonnes of the material since 1992, the equivalent of the weight of more than 300 Empire State Buildings.
The change is forcing countries to rethink how they deal with plastic waste.
Countries needed to be more selective about what they chose to recycle, and more fastidious about reusing plastics, said Amy Brooks, first author on the study and a doctoral student in engineering at the University of Georgia. In the meantime, Brooks said, more plastic waste was likely to be incinerated or sent to landfills.
‘‘This is a wakeup call. Historically, we’ve been depending on China to take in this recycled waste, and now they are saying no. That waste has to be managed, and we have to manage it properly.’’
The study was published yesterday in the journal Science Advances. Using United Nations data, it found that China has dwarfed all other plastics importers, accounting for about 45 per cent of the world’s plastic waste since 1992.
The ban is part of a larger crackdown on foreign garbage, which is viewed as a threat to health and the environment.
Some countries that have seen an increase in plastic waste imports since China’s ban – such as Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia – were already looking to enforce bans of their own because they were quickly becoming overburdened, Brooks said.
The study illustrated that plastic, with its wide array of uses and formulations, was more difficult to recycle than other materials, such as glass and aluminium, said Sherri Mason, who was not involved in the study and is the chair of the geology and environmental sciences department at the State University of New York at Fredonia.
Many consumers attempted to recycle plastic products that could not ultimately be recycled, Mason said. One solution could be to simplify the variety of plastics used to make products.
‘‘We have to confront this material and our use of it, because so much of it is single-use disposable plastic, and this is a material that doesn’t go away,’’ Mason said.
The plastics import ban has attracted the attention of the US recycling industry. The National Recycling Coalition said in May that it must ‘‘fundamentally shift how we speak to the public’’ and ‘‘how we collect and process’’ recyclables. –AP