Europe’s plastic waste piles up

Oslo – Europe has sent just over half the plastic waste it used to ship to China to other parts of Asia since Beijing’s environmental crackdown closed the world’s biggest recycling market in January. The problem is what to do with the rest.

Some of the surplus is piled up in building sites and ports, waiting for new markets to open up. Recycling closer to home is held back by the fact that the plastic is often dirty and unsorted, the same reasons China turned it away. Countries led by Malaysia and Vietnam and India imported far more of Europe’s plastic waste in early 2018 than before, European Union data showed, but unless they or others take more, the only options will be to bury or burn it.

In Europe where landfills are more restricted, burning is the obvious option to help generate electricity or heat from hundreds of thousands of tons of surplus waste. But more radical ideas, such as putting oil derived plastic back underground to “mine” back when recycling becomes more sophisticated, are being aired as Europe tries to work out what to do.

European waste policies “need to become much more nuanced, because some landfill might actually be quite good,” professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific advisor for the British government’s department of environment, food and rural affairs, said. “I’m putting out a challenge to the current system,” he said, referring to the fact that waste policies in Europe either ban or limit landfill but do little to restrict what has been dubbed “skyfill” – the release of pollutants into the air.

Europe has favoured power plants that burn waste for electricity or heat because land is scarce and landfills produce toxins and greenhouse gases as organic waste rots. Waste-to-power plants produce greenhouse gas emissions too, but in most of Europe they are exempt from carbon taxes. Boyd said buried plastic could become a valuable resource only if the penalties for emitting greenhouse gases, in making plastics and burning them, were far higher than today.

The Confederation of European Waste-to-Energy Plants, a group of some 400 plants using 90 million tons of municipal waste to provide heat and electricity, said burying and then mining back plastic was a fantasy.

“Digging waste into landfills and then waiting until a magic technology pops up in the future is not a responsible option,” its managing director, Ellen Stengler, said. Just cleaning plastic before burial would be hugely expensive and there would be fire risks, she said.

The latest major UN assessment of climate change in 2014 also floated the idea that cities might sort and bury waste metals, paper and plastics to create “a material reservoir that can be mined” in future. Plastic pollution is surging and could, according to the UN, exceed the weight of fish in the oceans by 2050. – Reuters